When I take longer or harder hikes now, I have to leave my senior dog, Otto, at home. It’s for his own good; he just gets too sore on the day after – or even later that day – following the longer walks that my younger dog and his even younger friends need to tire them out. Knowing that I’m preventing him from getting too sore to get up easily doesn’t make it any easier for me, though: As soon as Otto sees the signs that a walk is impending (leashes gathered, treat bag getting filled, sneakers getting put on) he will station himself in front of the door. If he’s outside, he will stand behind my car, with a determined “I’m coming with you!” look on his face. And he knows the difference between me getting ready to go for a walk and me getting ready to go grocery shopping; he doesn’t stand in the way of my departure for the store!

Otto is still very capable of joining me and my friends for a walk of a mile or two in cool weather. This last interminable, hot, dry summer was hard on him, as he doesn’t tolerate the heat well; I’d take him only for very short walks where there was water available for wading and swimming.

The catch-22: He needs to keep moving to stay fit; he just can’t go as far or as fast as the younger dogs. So I’ve taken to taking him for his own walks, just him and me. And I have to say that it’s a delight.

The places where I usually walk with my dogs are all off-leash areas. I almost never see anyone else on my local trails, and when I do, I can easily call my dogs to me and leash them for the minute or two it will take to pass by whomever else might be out there. So I don’t often have to walk my dogs on leash, but for Otto’s safety, when we walk around our own rural neighborhood, he has to be on leash – especially because he can no longer hear oncoming cars well, or me calling him back to me. But around here, as we walk alongside our country roads, walking Otto on leash is a pure pleasure; he’s got amazing on-leash skills.

When I adopted Otto, way back in the summer of 2008, I hadn’t yet discovered the wonderful off-leash areas and trails that I drive to for most of my longer walks; I mostly walked Otto in and around my small town. And I’m not bragging, but we walked so much that first summer (as I was trying to get him tired enough to not stay awake all night barking at the stars), that we really perfected Otto’s polite leash-walking skills. He doesn’t pull and he doesn’t lag. He might walk a little bit ahead of me – but so what? I don’t need him to stay right at my side, and I don’t mind if he wants to stop and sniff something every so often. His hearing has gotten very bad, but his vision is still very good, and he often spots a squirrel going up a tree or a stray cat crossing the road ahead of us before I do. He’ll raise his tail and prick his ears, and then look back at me with shining eyes: “Mom, did you see that?” Though he “checks in” with me occasionally when we are on an off-leash walk with other dogs, when it’s him and me, connected by a leash, he stays much more tuned into me, communicating more with me about what he’s seeing and smelling.

It’s a hassle to find the time to take two walks on our dog-walking days, and to make extra food-stuffed Kongs to bribe Otto into not looking sad when I’m loading up Woody for the drive to one of our off-leash trails for a long walk, but the extra time alone with Otto is sweet – and absolutely worth it. 

What with all the foster puppies around, and trying to get all of their adoption interviews scheduled, I haven’t managed to find the time to properly announce an incredibly cool thing that subscribers to WDJ magazine now have at their disposal. (As of this past weekend, all the pups are placed, hurray! As soon as I receive a nice photo of each pup with their new families, I am going to post them on the WDJ Instagram page, dogsofwholedogjournal.) Now I can concentrate fully on work again.

What’s the cool new tool? It’s a searchable database of ALL of the foods on our “approved canned foods list,” which is published in our October issue.

Previously, when we published a review of a category of foods, we would catalog each of the foods made by each company on our list, but publish only a summary for each company – and, by necessity, this is still what will be published in our print version. For each company, we list how to reach them (city, state, phone, website), how many varieties they offer, what the range of fat and protein levels are in their products (lowest amounts, highest amounts) and then a few comments about the company.

But now, on our website, for the online version of the approved foods lists, we have included every single variety made by the companies on our “approved foods list” – and expanded the details about each variety. Now, you can see the name of each variety, its complete ingredients list, and the amount of fat and protein each food contains. (If you’d prefer the summary for each manufacturer, you can still access the list in its old form, both in the print version and by downloading the PDF of the complete issue from your account online.)

And here’s the best part: You can use filters on the list to search for foods for your dog’s unique needs. Looking for a beef-based food? Easy: Just type “beef” into the search box and click “enter” and you will get a list of all the foods on our approved canned foods list that contain beef.

But wait, what if you need a beef-based food with less than 6% fat? And you want to make sure that it doesn’t contain peas? Just apply the filters.

In this case, you’d click on “add filter.” In the first box, where it says “where” you’d click on the drop-down menu and choose “ingredients,” make the second box say “contains,” and in the third box you’d type “beef.” Then you’d click “add filter” again, select “and” in the first box, “minimum fat content” in the second box, “is lower than” in the third box, and type in “6%” in the fourth box. Finally, click on “add filter” again, “and” in the first box, “ingredients” in the second box, “does not contain” in the third,” and type in “peas” in the fourth box. Then you click on “submit” and voila! A list of 66 foods that all meet your unique criteria – and ours!

It’s taken quite a bit of tinkering to make this happen, but I’m absolutely thrilled that we’ve pulled it off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been shopping for a few candidate foods for a dog with some dietary allergy or other restrictions and spent hours trying to find ones that contained – or didn’t contain – some ingredient or another.

We’ve used the “approved canned food” list as the guinea pig for our upcoming “approved dry dog foods list,” which runs annually in the February issue, which is generally much larger. We usually collect even more information about the dry foods than the canned foods. For example, we add information about how many of their products are formulated for “adult maintenance only” and how many are “for dogs of all life stages.” We indicate how many of each company’s products are made with fresh or frozen meat, meat meal, or both. We indicate how many varieties are grain-free and how many contain grain. For the next review in February, we expect to be able to offer you searchable details on every single one of the individual varieties on our “approved dry foods” list, too.

I invite you to play with the database, try some custom searches, and tell us what you think! If you have any problems, we’d love to hear about them so we can fix them in advance of the dry food review.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to visit a former coworker/friend I hadn’t seen for a decade or more. He had invited me to a party he throws annually – one that I had declined with regret every year, because he lives in Kansas and I live in California. But what with the sudden loss of a beloved family member, vaccination against COVID, and the opening up of restrictions on gatherings, I decided that life is too short to turn down invitations like that. I flew to Kansas, went to the party and stayed for a couple nights with my friend and another of our coworkers from 25 years ago. It was wonderful to catch up with both friends and to compare notes about our lives, a quarter-century down the road.

When I booked the trip, I gave myself a couple of unscheduled days to decompress and do whatever I felt like. After I said goodbye to my friends, I spent a day driving through the tallgrass prairie range in east-central Kansas. The endless green grass, the matchless blue sky, the billowing white clouds … it was so healing (especially since, back at home, our sky was smoky from wildfires and the drought has everything looking very brown).

Eventually (like, after half a day, lol) I started feeling too self-indulgent; I should do some work while I was out there. I ended up touring through a town where there are several dog-food manufacturing plants (Emporia), and visiting the animal shelter there. As a long-time shelter volunteer, I love visiting other shelters; folks who do the same things in different places do them in different ways and I always see something interesting to try back at home.

I also called a friend, Dr. Greg Aldrich, a professor at Kansas State University and founder of that school’s Pet Food Program, to ask him what other dog-food-related tourism I ought to take in. He tried to pull a few strings to see if he could get me into any production facilities where he had connections, but the COVID restrictions were still limiting visits at each place he tried. However, in a generous act, he invited me to K-State and said he’d give me a tour of the Pet Food Program’s facilities.

I headed to Manhattan, Kansas, and had just enough time to spend an hour visiting that town’s animal shelter before it closed. What I loved most at that shelter: The friendly, humorous, and encouraging signage in the shelter, which showed their commitment to giving each ward some individual attention, and invited visitors to engage with the shelter in any way possible; and the HUGE wooded play yard that was directly outside the dog kennel’s back doors. Staff and volunteers can (and did, while I was there) just open a dog’s run, open the back door to that room, and allow the eager dog to ZOOM out the door and run and romp up and down a hill and among trees and grass to their heart’s content. What fun! No struggling to get a leash on a crazily over-eager dog so you can be dragged through corridors to get outside – just opening the kennel gate and then the door, and “Here you go!” I loved that setup.

After playing with some dogs, I found a hotel and settled in for the night. The next day, I met Dr. Aldrich (and his enormous silver Lab, Lucre, who gets to go to work with his dad) at K-State. He took me on a tour of the Pet Food Program’s school facilities, where undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students conduct hands-on research into pet food formulation and production. What an amazing program! Students who are interested in a career in pet food production can conduct research into formulation and manufacturing; the university has facilities for everything from grain-milling, meat-processing, freeze-drying, baking, canning, and extruding. Multiple laboratories exist for biological and chemistry tests. The students actually manufacture pet food under various conditions and with various ingredients and evaluate the nutrition in the resulting products.

Good For K-State, a K-State alumni magazine, describes the program this way:

“This program draws talent from many areas within the College of Agriculture such as grain science, agricultural economics, animal science and food science. Engineering and veterinary medicine faculty and students also collaborate with the pet food program, along with foods, nutrition, dietetics and health in the College of Health and Human Sciences.”

Dr. Aldrich ordered a stack of pizzas and hosted an impromptu lunch for me and the graduate students who were around campus on this summer day. He invited them to introduce themselves to me and describe their goal in the pet food industry. I was so impressed with their interest and passion for pets and pet food, and fascinated with the projects they were working on for their various Masters and PhD projects.

While I met only graduate students, the K-State program also has offerings for undergrads, including a pet food minor and an option within feed science and management.

Dr. Aldrich says the one thing the program could use is more students. “Kansas has declining enrollment numbers for students of college age, yet the industry is asking us for more and more young people to come work for their companies,” he told me.

According to Good For K-State, the U.S. is the largest market in the world for pet food, a $33 billion business annually.

Dr. Aldrich had another meeting and the students had to get back to their projects. I thanked them all and hit the road again. I had a few more hours to kill before I headed back to Kansas City to catch my flight home. I thought, I’ll go visit some pet supply stores! This is another habit I like to indulge when I travel. I love seeing the different products that are stocked by stores in different areas of the country; the food, toys, and even training gear are quite different!

Here was something else that was quite different: What I call “pet supply stores” in California are truly “pet stores” in Kansas; at least, the two I visited were. They actually sell puppies. Like, lots of puppies. One store had over 70 puppies; the other had nearly 50.

The only way that there could be this many puppies in the same age range and of so many different sizes and breeds (and breed-mixes; they were not all purebreds) in stores in this many numbers: puppy mills, which are apparently thriving in some parts of the country.

I don’t know the answer. How can we produce enough dogs to satisfy demand without having to breed and sell them in this way? I can’t imagine how harmful it is to their development to have to live for any length of time in those tiny wire-bottomed enclosures, drinking from those horrible ball-bearing rabbit-waterers. And what happens to the pups who “age out” in the stores? Do they return to the puppy mills to be forced into a life of endless reproducing themselves? Ugh! I hated everything about these stores, and wish that no one bought pups this way.

My current fostering project is a little different from what I usually take on. Ordinarily, my local shelter will contact me if they have a large litter of puppies that need some TLC. I will keep them until they are healthy and old enough, in the shelter’s judgment, to undergo spay/neuter surgery and go up for adoption at the shelter.

This time, for the first time, it’s me who has dragged the shelter (as well as my closest friend here in town) into a fostering project.

I follow a few Facebook groups for lost and found pets in my local area. More than once, I’ve been able to reunite a found dog with his owner by searching through these group posts. But in mid-August, I saw a post for a “found” dog who looked like she had a litter of puppies somewhere, and a looong string of comments from concerned people in our community. Dozens of people suggested that the finder take the dog to the shelter; this was countered by dozens of other people saying, “Don’t do it! Wherever her puppies are, they will starve without her!”

Then there was a comment from a woman saying she was a friend of the owner. She said that the owner was homeless, that the dog had eight puppies, and the owner was struggling to keep the dog fed and contained.

Without really thinking it through, I left a comment on the post: “I would be happy to foster this mother and her puppies, if the owner would agree to turning over all the pups to (my local shelter) and let me get her spayed.” The offer was genuine, but I thought the likelihood of the owner agreeing to this was low.

To my surprise, the very next day I received a message from the woman who said she knew the owner. She told me that she had discussed my offer with the owner, and that he agreed to my terms. She also mentioned that he was a drug addict and that his family was trying to get him into treatment – so if his dog could be cared for somewhere safe for a while, it would be a blessing. And she asked if I could meet her that day to pick up the dog and her pups.

She also mentioned that the people who were currently hosting the homeless guy, the mama dog, and her puppies had no dog food on hand. And that she herself was out of food for her own dogs, having given what she had to this homeless crew days before.

Yikes! At that point I realized I had better check with the shelter, to see if they were on board with all of this; otherwise, I was going to need to do some fundraising! Fortunately, the shelter manager saw the wisdom of getting ahead of this problem. By spaying the mama dog and preventing the puppies from being given away or sold, intact, in our town, we were likely preventing many more puppies from entering the shelter down the road.

I asked my friend Leonora if she would come with me to meet the woman and pick up the dog and pups. But first, we went to a pet supply store and bought dog food – for the woman, for the mother dog, and a bunch of canned food for the puppies.

It turned out that the owner of the dog was living in someone’s backyard. When we got to that house, I immediately recognized the mother dog I had seen in the photos on Facebook; her name is Luna, and she has a distinctive ridge pattern on her back. She approached us immediately in a very friendly fashion and hopped right into my car. People were rushing around the property, trying to locate all the puppies, as I handed over a bag of dog food to the woman who had brokered this whole deal, for her dogs. She told me thanks, and then asked, “Do you have more? These people have other dogs here, too – including one of Luna’s puppies from last year…” As she said this, I saw another dog who looked just like Luna, complete with the crazy, intricate swirling ridge on her back, running around the yard. I opened the large bag of food I had bought to feed to Luna, and scooped about half of it into a grocery bag to give to these people.

At this point, seven puppies had been put into the back of my car; Leonora was keeping track. We asked, “Where is the eighth pup?” The woman waved her hands around and said, “I’ll…I’ll tell you later.” I was left assuming that something awful had happened to it, or that they couldn’t find it, or something. It seemed like it was best to get out of there.

Settling in

Leonora and I got Luna and the puppies situated in a 10-foot by 10-foot kennel with shadecloth over it, with a big doorless crate serving as a doghouse. We opened a can of food for the pups, who appeared to be about four weeks old – walking around, though not well or that quickly. They scarfed up the can of food like they were starving; I could believe the people had been out of food. I opened a second can of food, which quickly disappeared. They only slowed down into the third can. I fed the rest of that can and a fourth can to Luna, along with a heaping helping of dry food. Though it appeared that she had plenty of milk still, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about feeding the pups.

The next day, I exchanged a few messages with the woman who brokered our foster arrangement. She asked if I could send her some pictures of Luna and the babies, and I complied. I asked about the eighth puppy – and that’s when she confessed that the owner had already given one of them away! At 4 weeks old! I was a little angry about this development; I had been trying to prevent any of the pups from having an opportunity to add to the pet overpopulation problem. As it was, I think we snatched the litter away in the nick of time; the rest of those pups would likely have been sold or given away within days, otherwise.

A couple days later, while the pups were sleeping, I took Luna to the shelter so she could be scanned. She was excited and happy to enter the shelter and greet everyone there. It turns out that she had been picked up as a stray several times before; on a former stay at the shelter, the staff had implanted her with a microchip that was registered with Luna’s owner’s name and the woman’s name and phone number.

When I first got the pups, the weather in my area was still quite hot – over 100° F. most days. Though they were in the shade, the pups would grow visibly uncomfortable and whiny as the day heated up. I started bringing them into my office at about 11 a.m. each day, so they could hang out in a cooled environment until the day’s temperatures dropped to a more tolerable range and they could go outside and play on the dampened lawn. Of course, that meant taking them outside for frequent potty breaks – and cleaning up more than a few “accidents” between their giant crate (a Great Dane-sized crate someone gave me years ago for the Great Dane foster pups I was raising then) and the door to my office. With seven puppies to wrangle, there is always at least one who stops and pees while you are trying to hustle the rest outside.

A couple weeks later, I brought Luna and her pups to the shelter. She received a dewormer and a flea treatment; they received dewormer and their first vaccinations. They had their weights and temperatures recorded and their first little “mugshots” taken.

Fostering at two addresses

Soon enough, the pups were starting to explore my yard when they weren’t in the 10-foot-square kennel I used to contain them when I couldn’t supervise their wandering. And it was time to separate Luna from them; her milk needed to dry up entirely before she could have spay surgery. Thank goodness for my friend Leonora; she has a much larger fenced enclosure where the pups could be more safely contained, even as they had a ton of space to play in. And she lives just over a mile from me! I kept Luna at my house, and the puppies (and the lion’s share of caring for them) moved to Leonora’s house. For the first week or so, I went to Leonora’s house in the middle of her work day, to check that the pups were ok and to do a noon feeding, until it was clear that they could make it through Leonora’s work day on their own.

Fostering pups is a lot of work. Keeping them safely contained takes a ton of attention to the infrastructure. They are sure to find every possible hazard they can get into. They stick their heads into gaps in their enclosures and panic when they can’t pull their heads out immediately. There is a LOT of poop to be picked up – and in the first few weeks of getting weaned, much of the poop is a runny mess that requires a lot of hosing. At this time of year, “meat bees” (wasps) appear from out of nowhere any time we bring out the puppy food, and flies are drawn to the aroma of the hosed-down poop areas. Both Leonora and I have wasp and fly traps hanging all around the puppy enclosures – and we started serving the puppies’ meals to them in a child’s tent that had the zippered door unzipped just enough for the puppies to push their way in; only a few wasps got into the food that way. We were both constantly fussing with moving shade sails around, innovating pools of water for them to wade into and drink from, and spraying down the grass and sand in their enclosures in an effort to keep them cool.

Though Luna is a very sweet dog, and is house-trained and has reasonably good manners, she’s a mother, and like most mama dogs, thinks she ought to run the show around here. In her first few weeks here, though my younger dog Woody made numerous overtures to introduce himself, she would run toward him with enough ferocity to make the much-larger dog turn tail and run. My senior dog, Otto, just avoided her like the plague; he had no interest in kindling any sort of relationship with her. But to protect his rights to freedom from tyranny in his own home, I made Luna sleep in my office; I invited her into my house only when my dogs were outside.

Once the pups started staying at Leonora’s house, though, Luna started to be much friendlier to my dogs. She and Woody have turned into great buddies, enjoying similar “run, crash, and bash” play styles – though she takes every toy away from him and won’t let him fetch in her presence. She is a very funny little dog.

Our work is nearly done – or is it?

Last week, Luna was finally “dry” enough to undergo spay surgery, which was performed by the shelter’s veterinarian. She has recovered and healed nicely.

Over the past week, I have been talking to and meeting with prospective adopters and getting appropriate homes lined up for all the pups – active homes for the high-octane pups, and more quiet families for the mellower fellows. They should all be placed by the end of next week, and I feel terrific about all the families they are going to.

Here’s the tough part: As I write this, I’m supposed to meet Luna’s owner to return her to him tomorrow. I’m going to make sure he knows that if he ever wants Luna to have a permanent home at a fixed address, I can find a family for her. And I already bought a big bag of food to send with her – for her and (probably) all the other dogs living at the home where her owner was camping in the yard. (When I asked the woman who has been acting as our intermediary whether Luna’s owner would have food ready to feed her, she told me, “Well, we’re pretty low… and I sure could use help getting my three dogs spayed…” Ay yi yi!)

I know that, all things considered, Leonora and the shelter and I have done a lot of good here – but at the moment, it just doesn’t feel that great.