Feeding the four-leggeds

In the face of the expanding pet food crisis, it’s a great time to look at better ways to feed our critter friends. I added a link today (under “Animals”) to the FDA’s regularly-updating site, as more and more commercial foods are found to be dangerously if not fatally toxic, and to an article by Carol Lea Benjamin that’s really quite sensible about preparing your dog’s food more or less as you do your own. Benjamin, an award-winning writer and respected real-life dog behaviorist, provides some common-sense encouragement to dog lovers on this matter. Check out the rest of her site as well, because her “Rachel Alexander and Dash” mystery novel series is so true in its depiction of the woman-dog relationship between the private eye and her rescued-from-abuse pit bull. These books are at times very dark, at times very moving, and, just as often, as goofy as any ongoing human-canine communication gets. As a bonus, they give even your jaded-New-Yorker reviewer a vividly-realized downtown Manhattan.

I started feeding my li’l pup, a seven-year-old Japanese Chin, homemade food last September. His coat is shiny and faster-growing, he has more crazy-puppy energy with which to enjoy our new home in the Philly ‘burbs (I just know he’s thinking, “I have my own entire dog park!”), and his notoriously finicky appetite’s frequently given way to something approximating gustatory eagerness. Homemade food’s also been far more economical than a good canned food, even though I get organic ingredients.

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