I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how different the experience of dog ownership is today than it was in my youth.

In the April issue, I wrote an article about the various flea preventatives (oral and topical, prescription and over-the-counter) that are available to dog owners. I mentioned in that article that many young pet owners have never even seen a severely flea-infested dog, whereas when I was a teenaged and then a young adult dog owner (in the late 1970s / early 1980s), pretty much all the dogs I was familiar with had at least some fleas. The preventatives that we have available to us today are so much safer and more available today than they were back then.

That article also mentioned how these parasite control treatments have made it so much more appealing to live with dogs in our homes, on our sofas, and on (or in!) our beds. My parents loved dogs and we had a lot of them when I was growing up in the 1960s and’70s, but only a couple of our dogs (an intact purebred Cocker Spaniel and an intact purebred Miniature Poodle) were largely kept in the house – and this was probably more about keeping them from getting bred by random intact male dogs (though that happened more than once). But, as a child who wanted all the dogs to sleep in my room, I recall my mom citing everything from the possibility of fleas and worms to ringworm and mange as reasons the dogs could NOT sleep with me. Today, many (if not most) family dogs sleep in the rooms or on the beds of the dog-loving kids in the family, if not the parents’ room or bed!

Obviously, spaying/neutering was highly uncommon before the 1970s. Euthanasia rates at what are now called shelters (then commonly referred to as “dog pounds”) were very high – as much as 10 times higher than they are today. We can thank nearly ubiquitous spay/neuter – and of course, much more responsible and enlightened social attitudes about managing our dogs’ reproduction – for the reduction in the euthanasia of unwanted dogs.

I love the fact that dog-friendly, positive-reinforcement-based training is so common now. It was absolutely not the norm when I was growing up. If a dog was formally trained at all, it was with yanks on a choke chain, with no exceptions.

But I’m sad about the fact that canine separation anxiety is so common today. I never heard of a dog who panicked when left alone before I was 30! I don’t know why so many dogs seem to suffer from some amount of this anxious behavior now.

Dog-dog aggression also seems more common. Though it seems insane now, 50 years ago, most suburban dogs, some urban dogs, and nearly all rural dogs were uncontained most of the time. They wandered at will and worked out their own relationships with other dogs. I remember a few dog fights between neighborhood dogs, but I don’t recall any of the participants being labeled as incorrigible or repeat offenders.

About that “wandering at will” – getting hit by cars was so common when I was a kid, that veterinarians used an acronym (HBC) for the cause of a dog’s injury or death. My family alone lost at least a half-dozen dogs to traffic on the rural road we lived on from when I was about 6 years old until I was about 12. Today I think, how stupid and avoidable was that? But at the time, every family we knew had lost a dog by HBC. That’s so nuts!

Healthcare for our dogs when I was growing up was strictly limited to vaccinations and treatment for injuries or illness – and the diagnostic tools and treatments that were available seem rudimentary compared to today. If a dog survived being HBC, the vet was likely to x-ray him or her. Ultrasounds, CT scans, MRIs – these are all commonly employed with great frequency today, but those tools only started to be made available to dog owners in non-university based veterinary hospitals in the past 20 years or so. Today, dogs are undergoing cataract surgery and liver transplants and treatment for every type of cancer imaginable!

This is both amazing and wonderful – and a guilt-inducing phenomenon for dog owners who can’t afford extensive treatments or high veterinary bills. “Economic euthanasia” is an evergreen problem that causes trauma and stress to owners and veterinary staff alike.

What are the most remarkable changes you’ve seen in your dog-owning lifetime?

I’ve been doing a lot of fostering and co-fostering and rescuing lately, and I’ve written about it here and on the WDJ Instagram page, and a bunch of the dogs have been placed now, so I’m going to update all their stories here:

In mid-January, my friend Leonora and I went to our local shelter to look at a few older puppies that were there – and we ended up bringing home a super shut-down Great Pyrenees who had come into the shelter as a stray and had been adopted and returned twice. We felt so sorry for her; she was just terrified at being back at the shelter. Leonora has a large section of her property fenced with a six-foot chain link fence, so we brought the dog to her house to hang out for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., three-day weekend – and this dog has turned into a larger project than either of us imagined she might.

Leonora has a tiny dog named Samson, so we started calling the Pyrenees Delilah, just for fun. Delilah started out afraid of everything – we had to push and pull her through doorways to get her into and then out of the house, and she slept in Leonora’s bathroom at first. Sometimes she would run right to us for affection and petting – and other times, especially if she sensed you wanted to put her on a leash (whether to take a walk or get in the car), she would run away and refuse to come even for the nicest treats, pacing just out of our reach. Once she learned Leonora’s schedule, and anticipating being locked up either in the house or the very large outdoor yard (with shelter) so Leonora could go to work, she started running away (within the fenced acre) as soon as she would be taken outside to go potty. Leonora had to leash her on work mornings so she couldn’t delay Leonora’s departure. This annoying habit aside, she very slowly started to reveal more and more of her anxious but sweet disposition, and so Leonora kept her on for some weeks, allowing her to decompress from her past and apparently traumatic experiences.

At the same time, I was fostering a Maltese/Poodle-mix that a friend had adopted and then had second thoughts about. Sophie had been adopted from a home where she was neglected and insufficiently trained or supervised; she had lots of unpleasant behaviors when I first brought her home. She would get distracted and tense outdoors and not go potty, waiting until I brought her back in the house; then she would sneak off into a back bedroom and go. (Obviously, once I realized that was her pattern, I made sure to wait outside with her until she “went,” and only then would bring her back in.) She was prone to screaming when put in a crate, and had some separation anxiety. She would also bark and scream in the car, and let out a piercing BARK when anything startled her (which would startle a statue, I swear). I committed to keeping her for a month of training and then started looking for a good home for her.

I started her behavior-modification plan with TONS of exercise. We went for off-leash walks daily and played fetch several times daily, for a total of at least an hour a day. With her exercise needs finally met, her behavior improved by the day.

In early February, Leonora and I were taking our dogs (my old Otto and middle-aged Woody, and her middle-aged tiny Samson, plus our fosters Delilah and Sophie) for an off-leash (except for Delilah) walk in our local wildlife area near the Feather River, when we found a young dog who had been apparently dumped (or perhaps just lost) out there. He was adorable, and desperate to come with us, so we loaded him (somehow) into Leonora’s car and took him to our local shelter. I returned the next day and put up fliers in that area, and I checked the shelter website weekly, hoping someone would come to claim him, but no luck. The shelter named him River and he spent weeks and weeks on the adoption row.

The challenge of re-homing Sophie was that she looked like a gorgeous little lap dog for an older person – but behaved like a field-bred Labrador who wanted nothing more than to run for hours every day, preferably chasing a ball. I knew that if she were rehomed with someone who didn’t give her enough exercise, all of her not-very-enjoyable traits would come back.

I started promoting her through my personal Facebook page, with no takers. Another friend who has a nonprofit rescue offered to promote her through her group’s Petfinder account – and almost immediately we were inundated with emails and calls from older people. We had stated in the post that this was an active, barky dog who needed miles and miles of exercise daily, so almost every inquiry started, “I’m an active older person…” The problem was, all of these people went on to say they walk a mile a day, or they could walk her three miles a day and throw a ball in their backyard – and since I was walking her about 4 miles off leash every day (where she probably walked 6 miles) and throwing the ball all the way across my two acres with a Chuckit for about an hour day, none of those options sounded like enough. I didn’t want to set up Sophie for failure again, so I stuck to my guns (even though it was really hard, people were so nice!). But I felt strongly we needed someone younger and more active.

In mid-February, I was at the shelter, training a new volunteer, when some people came in with a big plastic Rubbermaid storage tub. We dread seeing tubs like this; they are always full of puppies and this was no exception. ELEVEN puppies, to be exact. Of course, the people said they “found” the puppies, who looked to be about five weeks old. The shelter staffers and I were dubious about this – I pick up strays all the time but have never found a litter of puppies! – but the shelter would rather have people bring unwanted puppies into the shelter than abandon them or sell them, unfixed. But given that we already had three litters of puppies at the shelter, and since I already had a foster dog keeping me mostly at home, I said I could foster the litter until they were old enough to get adopted. The staff took the pups into the treatment room to deworm them and get “weights, temps, and pics” of each pup. I kept working with the volunteer.

About an hour later, someone else brought another, older puppy into the shelter, saying they found him sitting in the middle of a street. A staffer came to find me, where I was still working with the volunteer. “Look,” she said, “It’s a baby Otto!” And indeed, the scruffy-faced youngster, perhaps about 8 weeks old, did look like Otto. “Could you take him home, too? What’s the difference between 11 and 12 puppies?” she asked. I said, “Sure, ok, but I better get out of here before any more puppies get brought in!”

Thank goodness for a mild spring. I was able to set up all the puppies in a large covered pen outdoors, with a special heating pad for dogs at the bottom of the dog house for cooler nighttime temperatures. I put down a thick layer of wood shavings on the bottom of the pen, and let them out to eat morning to eat from the puppy “donut” pans while I pick up all the poop in the pen. Every few days I remove all the shavings and hose the pen and let it dry completely before bedding it again.

My son was born in early March, and he turned 30 this year – astonishing because he was just five when I was hired to edit the inaugural issue of Whole Dog Journal. His fiancée threw him a surprise party, and I hired a young person I know, who used to rent a room from me at my office/house, to look after the puppies for a night so my husband and I could go to the Bay Area and attend the surprise party and see some friends. The adult dogs got split between my sister’s house and Leonora’s house. My husband had fun telling everyone, “Well, we have to get home. You know Nancy has 15 dogs at home, don’t you?” Shoot, he was right: Otto and Woody, the Maltipoo, and 12 puppies. Oy!

In mid-March, I received an application for the Maltipoo from a couple who lived about four hours from me. They appeared to be in their late 40s, no kids. They worked at home. They lived on acreage. They walk a lot – and had owned hunting dogs in the past, as well as little dogs in the very recent past. To make a long story short, I ended up driving to their house and meeting them and their other little dog, and was satisfied that they were home enough, committed enough, active enough, and knowledgeable enough to take on Sophie and all her crazy behaviors. They loved her at first sight and I left her with them that day. They love and appreciate her sweetness and activity level and interest in playing and learning tricks. It was a perfect adoption, and I’m grateful to my friend for sharing her post.

Then another friend who runs a small rescue group contacted me about the litter of 11, offering to take some of them for her group to adopt. I contacted the shelter and asked if they’d like to transfer some of the pups to this other group. This would make things much easier when it came time to adopt them all; we wouldn’t have such a glut of very similar-looking puppies. My friend’s group took four of the pups – and I couldn’t believe how much easier it was to feed and clean up after eight puppies than 12 of them.

I started keeping the unrelated, older puppy with me and my adult dogs for much of the day. The age difference between him and the smaller, younger pups meant that they were starting to whine and run from him when he bounded toward them. I let him work that out with fun Uncle Woody, who was happy to roll the chunky pup over and let him blow off some steam by chewing more-or-less gently on each other’s limbs.

By this time, my friend Leonora had been fostering Delilah for two months. The beautiful dog was completely out of her shell now, racing in and out of the house with ease. She had finally become comfortable with every room in the house, would enter the living room and sleep on the couch, get in and out of the car with ease, and was getting a little better at meeting new people without running or freezing. We started promoting her on the shelter’s social media, emphasizing that she needed a soft landing due to her past failed placements.

The shelter took a call from one person who sounded great, who had a very securely fenced property of more than five acres; if she could live with horses, goats, chickens, barn cats, and other dogs, she could live there! Leonora and I drove her for an interview, to see how she would do, and it appeared as if she would be happy to live peacefully with all of those other species. We warned the adopter that with yet another change of home, she might be anxious again for a while. We begged her to give the big dog some time to adjust, but the adopter struggled with Delilah’s unpredictable, on-and-off habit of being hard to catch and difficult to convince to, alternately, come into the house or go out of the house. After not quite two weeks, she pulled the plug and returned the dog. This time, she came back to my house to stay here for a while.

But by now, the puppies were old enough and big enough for spay/neuter and adoption. The shelter had me send three puppies a week to the shelter, starting with the biggest ones, and they got snapped up as quickly as they got altered, with the last ones (except for the scruffy guy) going to their new families this week.

And get this! I went by the shelter on Monday evening, the one day they are open late, to bring in the last pup who was going to get neutered – just in time to see a young couple walking out the door with a dog they just adopted: It was River, the stray Leonora and I rescued from where he had been (presumably) dumped out in the wildlife area! A happy ending for that guy, too.

So what about the scruffy guy, who has been big enough and old enough, really, to go back to the shelter for adoption ever since his “stray dog hold” expired, a week into his stay with me? He’s got a predictable hold on my heart – predictable because dang, he looks so much like a baby Otto. I sent out his DNA to Wisdom Panel, and he even has some similarities in his VERY mixed mix.

Otto’s Mix (according to Wisdom Panel)

12.5% American Staffordshire Terrier
12.5% Australian Cattle Dog
12.5% Border Collie
12.5% Chow Chow
12.5 German Shepherd Dog
37.5% Breed Groups: Asian Terrier, Sporting, Guard

Scruffy’s Mix (according to Wisdom Panel)

36% American Staffordshire Terrier
29% American Pit Bull Terrier
6% Boxer
6% German Wirehaired Pointer
5% American Bulldog
4% Great Dane
3% Australian Cattle Dog
2% Chow Chow

I’ve been wrestling all this time with the decision: To adopt, or not to adopt? If Otto had already passed on, there would be no question; I’d love to keep him. He’s an extraordinarily calm, even-tempered pup, smart and confident without being at all cocky. He’s affectionate and playful – everything I’d want in a puppy!

But as Otto slows down and the puppy grows, there have been more moments where the puppy has annoyed Otto, or made him have to stop or turn suddenly. Otto hasn’t particularly enjoyed puppies since he was a very young dog, and in the past few years, he’s been openly impatient and intolerant of them. When they get within 10 feet of him, he starts growling; within four feet and he starts snarling and grrrrRUFFing at them. It’s been easy to keep the little puppies mostly away from him; they’ve come into close contact only outside, where there are plenty of more fun things for them to do and plenty of places where he can escape them. But obviously, if I keep the scruffy guy, the pup will be integrated into the household, where Otto can’t help but cross paths with him many times a day. I don’t want to see Otto unhappy.

I can’t say I’ve made a decision yet, but I’m starting to promote the scruffy pup to people I know, and asking them to promote him to dog-savvy people they know. In the meantime, he and Delilah have been spending nights together in my office; during the day, my office door is open and all the dogs – just four now! – can roam my two acres or snooze in my office with me while I work. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring.

I just used WDJ’s new searchable dry dog food database to look for potential new foods to feed my 14-year-old dog, Otto. One goal when feeding most senior dogs is to find a food with a moderate amount of high-quality protein. I used the “minimum protein content” column to help me zero in on the foods that contain the amount of protein I want to feed Otto, and then looked at the ingredients of each of the candidate foods. All of that information, organized for you (and me!) in one handy place!

But allow me to explain those italicized terms a bit.

Protein levels in Dog Food: Low, high, moderate

The minimum requirement for crude protein in an adult dog maintenance diet is 18% on a dry matter basis, which (assuming an average moisture content of 10%) is 16.2% “as fed” (as it is in the package). The minimum requirement for crude protein for dogs in a “growth/reproduction” phase (or “all life stages,” which includes puppies and moms) is 22.5% dry matter, which is 20.25% “as fed” (assuming 10% moisture).

The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) does not state a maximum level for protein.

We’d define “moderate” as something near the midpoint between the legal minimum and the highest amount of protein you can find in any dry dog food on the market.

Using the WDJ searchable database of approved dry dog foods, you can click on the top of the “minimum % protein content” column to make all the 1,100-plus foods appear in order by protein content. When ordered so that the foods with the lowest amount of protein appear at the top, you’ll see just a few products with just 17% and 18% protein – and these are mostly “weight control” foods. (However, a few of them are labeled as being appropriate for senior dogs, which, in our opinion, is sad. Senior dogs definitely need more protein than the minimum allowed.)

By clicking on the top of that column again, so that the foods with the highest amount of protein appear at the top, we can find products with very high amounts of protein in them, with numbers in the low 40s (43%, 42%, 41%).

The exact midpoint, in this case, is 30%. We think this is a good, moderate amount of protein for most senior dogs.

Note that there are more opinions about protein levels in dog food than there are veterinary nutritionists. This shouldn’t be a surprise; there is little consensus among experts in human nutrition about ideal protein levels, too.

Older veterinarians tend to regard foods with even moderate protein levels as potentially dangerous, or, at a minimum, a waste of money. When you feed a lower-protein diet to a dog, you decrease the amount of nitrogenous waste delivered to the kidneys for excretion in the urine; it was speculated that one could preserve the dwindling kidney function of dogs with chronic kidney disease by giving their kidneys less work to do (by feeding a lower-protein food to the dog).

However, according to veterinary nutritionists Andrea Fascetti and Sean Delaney, “the effect of protein restriction on the progression of renal damage in dogs and cats remains controversial and no definitive study exists on this matter.” (Quoted from “Nutritional Management of Chronic Renal Disease” on the website for the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.)

While it’s been demonstrated that some dogs with chronic kidney disease improve when their dietary protein is moderately restricted, this has frequently (and tragically, in our opinion) been extended to all older dogs, whether or not they have any kidney problems at all. Today, it’s well-accepted that most older dogs actually benefit from diets that contain more protein – as long as it’s a high-quality protein – than young adult dogs.

However, there is newer evidence, based on newer criteria, very high protein dog food diets is potentially harmful for dogs to eat. (See this post by Linda Case, MS, Canine/Feline Nutrition, for details.) This give us even more confidence in our advice to look for foods with moderate protein levels.

SUBSCRIBERS ONLY: Whole Dog Journal’s 2022 Approved Dry Dog Foods

What constitutes a high-quality protein?

Broadly speaking, the quality of a protein depends on its digestibility and its amino acid profile – that is, whether it contains adequate amounts of the amino acids that dogs require. In general, animal-sourced proteins contain more of the amino acids that are essential to dogs (and they are supplied in proper ratios for benefitting dogs) than do plant-sourced proteins.

The digestibility of ingredients depends on a number of factors, too numerous to explain here. (If you’re especially curious, read Linda Case’s 2017 piece for WDJ about digestibility here.) The bottom line: Pet food companies typically conduct digestibility studies on their finished products; they should know how digestible their products are, and they should be able to furnish consumers with that information. We should all be asking for this information!

A final thing to keep in mind

The amount of protein listed on a dog food label is the guaranteed minimum present in the food. It may contain much more! To be certain, ask the company for the amount of protein in their products – a number from an actual nutrient analysis.