I asked the question on Sunday: Why can’t you vary your dog’s diet — so long as you keep it healthy — or switch it quickly? As it turns out, my question conflated two issues. You often can and should vary your dog’s diet (but not always; more on which in a minute). It’s only…
Really shameless nomination request
It’s bad enough to request that people nominate you for a blogging award. It’s even more shameless when the idea to make the request on your blog comes from a competing blogger, my pal Roxanne Hawn. But it’s all for a good cause: The “Petties” (pet blogger awards), presented by DogTime, are all about helping animals,…
Road Trip: San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter
Frankie and I are headed over today to DogJaunt.com, where we explore San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, which we recently visited. There are many reasons I wanted to write about this dog-friendly neighborhood of one of my favorite cities for one of my favorite blogs — as opposed to, say, for this one. I owe Dog…
Training Tuesday: Batboy Continues
Forgive me. I needed to get this video out of my system and since I don’t have any serious footage to accompany this week’s post on Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) it seemed like the perfect fit. *** BAT was created by Grisha Stewart, and is being discussed here by her fellow trainer and BAT expert…
Friday Focus: Switching your dog’s diet
Occasionally something I’ve accepted as a given — and which has been confirmed in respected places, including my own extremely well-researched book — strikes me as odd. That’s what happened when I contemplated changing Frankie over from one type of kibble to another. I remembered the so-called truism: You have to shift your dog’s diet…
Your Dog Won’t Hate You. This I Know.
When you have a blog with a name like mine, you get a lot of hits from dog owners doing a Google search for “dog hates me” or similar terms. Naturally, it’s only people who care about their dogs who worry about such things. Last week, I got this email from a woman named Dawn:…
Training Tuesday: Batboy begins
As I mentioned last week, my trainer Crystal suggested that Frankie and I try Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) — not only because it’s a good technique but because it’s a good fit with Frankie’s diabetes. That is, although the technique can include food rewards, it doesn’t rely on them. I wanted to learn more about…
Revisiting the choir: You never know who’ll join
It’s a little ironic for me to be posting about preaching to the choir because: I’m a nonbeliever I grew up attending a synagogue, not a church, and synagogues don’t have choirs It’s a tired cliche, and I try to avoid those But the topic came up when Karen Friesecke, DIY queen and blogger at…
Friday Focus: Making Rescue Less Necessary (or How to Avoid Internet Puppy Mills)
The question this week was How do you define rescue? Plenty of people provided excellent definitions in the comments section. And others admitted to having fallen short of the ideal. So the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how defining the term isn’t useful. This site is about education, not recrimination.…
Blog the Change
So I’m sitting here obsessing how I spaced out on this event and haven’t written anything and then decided to just shut up — I’m talking to you, oh accusatory voices in my head — and write something. This is, after all, a guilt-free zone and the point of this day is to raise awareness…