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Over the past few months, I've read more than 30 books on homemade diets for dogs. Many offered recipes that were dangerously incomplete; a smaller number provided acceptable guidelines but were confusing, unduly restrictive, overly complicated, or had other issues that made me recommend them only with reservations. A few were good enough to recommend without reservation. This review is about the cream of the crop: three relatively new books (one is a new edition of an older book) whose authors have taken the time to analyze their recipes to ensure that they meet the latest nutritional guidelines established by the National Research Council (NRC).

When someone becomes interested in feeding their dog a homemade diet, I always advise them to read at least one book on the subject before getting started. But which one should you choose? Guidelines run the gamut from diets that have been analyzed to ensure they are complete and balanced, to those that are dangerously inadequate. How do you tell the difference? I decided to check out the homemade diet books that are currently available. Some of them I’d read before, but wanted to take a fresh look at; others were new to me. It’s been an eye-opening experience.

When Ella, a five-year-old Norwich Terrier, first came to live with me a few months ago, she weighed a svelte 10.8 pounds. But within two months her weight had ballooned by almost a full pound, and there was no way you could call her anything but plump. How could this happen? How could I have let my new dog get fat – me, the one who perpetually preaches the benefits of keeping dogs lean? And what the heck was I going to do about it? The answer is that it happened because I’d never owned such a small dog before, and it turned out I was massively overfeeding her, particularly when I counted all the treats she was getting. And I would do whatever it takes to get her back to the weight she should be, and keep her there. Here is what I learned during my struggle to help Ella lose weight.

At some point in our lives, some of us find ourselves living with a difficult dog, one whose behavior challenges our patience, and exhausts our training knowledge – and opens our hearts and eyes to a new, better way of training. This is the story of one such dog and her very knowledgeable dog owner. Together, they reached an entirely new and higher level of dog training skills, thanks to the owner’s life-altering experiences with a reactive dog who wasn’t fit to compete in the career intended for her: Flyball. Flyball is not the sport for everyone. It is a relay team event, which means you have to commit to training and competing with your dog and other dogs and dog owners as a team, and you have to have an appreciation for over-the-top dogs and the resulting cacophony of sounds. In flyball, a team of four dogs race, one after the other, leaping a series of hurdles, throwing their bodies against a spring-loaded box that ejects a tennis ball, snatching the ball, and hurtling their bodies back down the row of jumps to where their next teammates strain to be released for their turns. The fastest team wins.

Voss kept her dogs supplied with fresh tripe

itchy skin: in a clean jar

We call it the spark of life for good reason. From birth to death, all living creatures generate and transmit energy. Entire healing therapies, some of them thousands of years old, have been built around energy. Once dismissed by Western science as impossible or ridiculous – and still viewed with suspicion by conventional physicians and veterinarians – energy medicine is slowly gaining acceptance in the United States. Several energy therapies are taught in American universities or are used by a growing number of healthcare practitioners. Can energy therapies help your dog? The descriptions and resources provided here may help you decide.

You've no doubt heard the phrase fighting like cats and dogs." The media likes to play up stories about personality differences between "cat lovers" and "dog lovers

including ground meat

Our culture’s ambivalence about death is no secret and no surprise. Leaving this mortal coil can be messy and exhausting, both physically and emotionally. So with our companion animals, we oftentimes beat death to the punch, scheduling it on our own terms by taking that teary-eyed ride to the vet’s office and saying a final goodbye on a tiled floor or steel table.

What could be better than curing your dog's cancer? That's easy! How about avoiding the illness in the first place? No one has done any clinical trials or statistical studies that prove you can prevent cancer in at-risk dogs. But common sense and clinical experience make a strong case for avoiding anything that exposes an animal to known carcinogens or weakens the immune system

Aging is a natural process of all animals, and of all cells, tissues, and organs within the animal. Every individual animal ages at a different rate, and each type of tissue or organ system has its normal rate of proceeding through the aging process.