pet connection

My friend Sue was the first person I knew to have backyard chickens. That was almost 10 years ago, and I know she did it because she grew up in a rural area and missed having chickens around.

Her two hens, Maude and Roxie, were the first chickens I’d ever met, or at least had seen as individuals with their feathers on. They were gorgeous and friendly, their eggs delicious, and at that point I have to say, the bug bit.

I wanted chickens, though it would be a while before I’d pull everything together enough to get them.

About the same time as Sue got her chickens, my mom clipped an article for me from Martha Stewart’s magazine, about Ms. Stewart’s chickens, especially the “easter-eggers” who lay green- or blue-shelled eggs.

Looking back now, I suspect it was Martha Stewart who got interest in backyard chicken-keeping going. (Although it’s not new to Ms. Stewart: Check out this picture, from 1976!)

The Martha-ness of chicken-keeping continues, and in fact I laughed out loud at a story in the New York Times over the weekend tying chicken-keeping to the our endless media fascination with  well-educated urban women who married well and opted to stay home to raise a family in a home ever-so-full of “Good Things” like Martha’s.

The dateline, predictably, was Berkeley (media shorthand for “silly liberals live here” just as “San Francisco” is shorthand for “Teh Gays, they so crazy!” and any dateline  in the Deep South is  meant to cue the banjo music — even though all that is just the laziest of stereotyping), and the picture with the story was beyond parody: A woman just over the line into middle age, her hair pulled back except for a few wispy escapees. She is dressed in a simple aubergine frock with a no doubt fair-trade shawl thrown artfully around her shoulders. Posed in front of a weathered structure accented with lovely old-fashioned rose vines, she holds in her arms a red hen, perhaps (and I’m guessing here), a New Hampshire Red. (Oh, and note in the background, pretty blue sheets on a clothesline.)

The woman is, the story said,  one of a new breed: The Femivore. Bored with the drudgery of common child-raising and house-work, she has claimed the higher ground. No Wal-Mart eggs for her brood. Why, that would be as bad as getting the little ones into the wrong preschool.

And so is a social movement that is so much broader in scope and significance neatly categorized, mocked and dismissed. In the word of the NYT contributor, it’s all so very “precious.”

After I finished laughing, the whole thing pissed me off. Because increasingly, I find that the renewed interest in where our food comes from, what’s in it and the treatment of the animals we eat is being pushed — and I don’t think it’s an accident, by the way — into the frame of what silly liberals in precious places like Berkeley do.

Because real Americans, you see, can’t afford such silliness.

About the only thing I have with in common that Times-mocked “femivore” is a New Hampshire Red hen. I don’t trip merrily past organic cotton sheets fluttering in a pool of sunlight to an artfully weathered coop to feed my chickens — I tromp in my feed-store rubber boots and an oversized men’s shirt, a WSU College of Vet Med coat thrown on for warmth on cool mornings.  My chickens live in a second-hand plastic storage unit, and they lay their eggs in plastic cat carriers picked up on Freecycle.

If the author of “The Femivore’s Dilemma” had looked beyond her circle of Berkeley friends — say, by visiting the discussion forums at BackyardChickens.com instead of just reading a little about non-Berkeleyites in a book — she’d have found the real story more wide-reaching. The new (and not-so-new) chicken-keepers are both men and women, young and old, rural and urban poor to the affluent,  politically liberal to conservative religious home-schoolers — all involved in learning more about the food we eat, growing and saving what we can ourselves and re-learning the virtues of thrift (not “cheap” imported  goods, but self-denial and value) and self-determination.

This is not about elite “foodies” with too much time and money — although I gotta tell you, real food tastes a lot better than the crap that gets extruded through the processors of Food Inc. — but about more people realizing that it’s healthy and flat-out satisfying  to grow and to know your food. To trade veggies, chickens and eggs with friends and family, to put away good food for the winter,  to support honest-to-God family farmers who respect their land and their animals, and who welcome you for a visit on their property or shake your hand in greeting at the farmers market.

And by the way:  The Slow Food movement’s motto isn’t “expensive food for rich people,” but rather: “Good, clean and fair food.” For everyone.

My food expenditure is actually lower with gardening, chickens and buying local, regional and sustainable product from people I can get on the phone, or visit in person. That’s not because my food is “cheaper” — it’s certainly not, item by item — but because my diet now relies far more on vegetables, little on meat and not at all on “snacks.”  Also lower is my weight,  my blood sugar and my blood pressure. (That last might be because I no longer worry about melamine in anything I eat, or if any other crap put in my food legally or illegally is toxic.)

When gardening, chicken-keeping and buying food you can recognize from people you can talk to yourself is framed as something only rich liberals from Berkeley or Santa Monica or maybe the hippest parts of the new Brooklyn urban paradise would do, it pushes people who could most use real food — rural and urban poor — away from empowering themselves by growing and raising food themselves and changing their diets to match. Where do they go? Towards continuing to choose crap off the “value” menu at the fast-food chain, where the higher costs are paid in a lifetime of the fallout of poor nutrition.

That’s the true story of chickens, not aubergine frocks and bored Berkeley housewives.

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Meanwhile, back on the microfarm …

My neighbor Judy and I “balanced” our flocks last week, trading chickens back and forth to better get the flocks we each preferred, and making our overall flocks smaller by selling some of our extras. We aren’t raising any chicks this year, since all our hens are young and laying like crazy, but next year, who knows?

We were  both getting three dozen or more eggs a week, and that’s a lot. So I decided to part with my Plymouth Rock and Black Australorp, and Judy pulled three of her Red Stars — all five steady layers, and all about a year old. We sold them to a couple in the county east of us, who had a coop ready but were looking for healthy young layers to get them a jump-start on eggs.

After a week, the report back is rosy: The five hens are happy and laying like mad in their beautiful new digs, and their new family is hooked on chickens.

That just makes me happy, I gotta say.

Images, from the top:

Martha Stewart and her eggs. The green and blue eggs — and the chickens who produce them — are so identified with Ms. Stewart now than they’re often just called “Marthas.”

An incredible find — and a more incredible gift! — from regular reader Susan Fox, who included one of her own gorgeous chicken cards, which I’m framing for the office. I’m going through the publication she sent me page by page now, and wow, fascinating.

New digs for the hens Judy and I sold. Lucky chickens!

Spring is when houses traditionally start hitting the real estate market, so that families can move during the summer months, before the kids have to start a new school year. In this week’s Pet Connection newspaper feature, Gina Spadafori has some tips to make moving with pets easier:

But moving is tough on families, pets included. Animals always know when something’s amiss, even if they can’t understand exactly what’s changing, or why.

The key to moving pets is to keep them secure before and during the move, and to settle them safely and quickly into a routine afterward.

Cats are a particular worry at moving time because they form a bond not only with the people in a home, but also with the home itself. Because of their mobility, cats can be difficult to keep around the new home long enough for them to realize that this is where the people they love will now stay.

The family dog is a bit easier to deal with: Put his leash on and drive him to his new address. Show him his new, warm home and the securely fenced back yard. Unless the dog is a high-jumper of Olympic caliber, he’ll stay put while he adjusts.

Not so with free-roaming cats. The cases of cats returning to their previous homes are common for people who move short distances, and the instances of cats disappearing forever are just as common for families moving a great distance.

Find out how to keep everyone safe here.

And from Dr. Marty Becker, the scoop on dogs and broken teeth:

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim and dogs gotta chew. But sometimes, that chewing can prompt a painful problem.

Broken teeth are a common problem with dogs. Aggressive chewing on hard objects such as rocks or fencing, or on hard treats such as cow hooves, bones or hard nylon toys, are the primary cause. (Veterinarian’s rule of thumb: Don’t give your pet any chew toy that’s hard enough that you wouldn’t want it to hit you in the knee.)

To prevent broken teeth, dental experts recommend regular exercise of your pet to help prevent destructive chewing and having several veterinarian-recommended toys to chew so as to distract them from the bad ones. For extremely aggressive chewers, get a large toy the pet can’t get his mouth around, or offer softer chews.

A broken tooth exposes the delicate pulp and nerve endings, making life extremely painful for the pet. Food and other debris can get impacted in the fracture and attract bacteria, leading to infection, the loss of a tooth or worse.

The most common signs of dental problems are: excessive drooling (especially in a pet who doesn’t normally salivate much), not eating, or favoring one side of the mouth.

Just as the human family gets regular dental examinations and cleanings, you should take your pet to the veterinarian at least yearly for a comprehensive physical examination that will include a look at your pet’s entire mouth. If your pet is having problems sooner, don’t wait for the well-pet exam — dental problems really hurt!

Dental cleanings under anesthesia are a regular part of a preventive-care regimen for many dogs, as is at-home care such as brushing. Ask your veterinarian what’s best for your pet’s teeth and gums, both to prevent problems and to fix them.

Want more? Read the entire Pet Connection for this week!

It has been three years since the world changed for pet owners. That was when we first heard about the Menu pet food recall, which ended up being the largest consumer recall in U.S. history, as well as the tip of the iceberg on a food safety crisis that continues to this day.

Could it happen again? Absolutely. There have been no systemic changes that would prevent contaminated food ingredients from entering this country undetected once again.

Would the response be different? I think so. Pet owners have become more aware. The blogger network that kept news of recalled pet foods flowing without the controlling hand and influence of industry or government has not only survived but grown, and technology is even more adapted to the rapid and wide dissemination of information than it was then. (And we didn’t do a bad job of it then, although I can’t say the same for industry or government.)

Somewhat ironically, I spent the last week in Austin at the South by Southwest internet conference. I hung out with Therese Kopiwoda of PetSitUSA.com and Ben Huh of Itchmo, two bloggers who, along with Gina and me here at Pet Connection, lived and breathed the pet food recall three years ago.

We reminisced about those days, talked about whether things have changed — hardly at all, was the consensus — and found it hard to believe it has really been three years.

One thing is certain: The pets who died are still dead. The pets whose kidneys were damaged are still at risk of serious disease and a potentially shortened lifespan. And their owners’ hearts are still broken.

Will Congress finally pass serious food safety legislation? Will the rumblings of change at the FDA turn into full-fledged reform?

Let’s hope that when we check in a year from now the answer to both of those questions is “yes.”

Sometimes I feel guilty when I tell a pet owner to give medication to a cat or dog. I know that only a small percentage of pet owners actually give that medication to their pets, and chances are those pills will sit in the refrigerator or cupboard and never find their way into the animal at all.

The reason for this epidemic of non-compliance is simple: it’s hard to give medication to a pet who absolutely doesn’t want it.

There are two problems with this reality. One, of course, is that the pet needs the medication, in the dosage and at the intervals the veterinarian has prescribed. Two, by letting our pets sense that we’re reluctant to give them medication, and then rewarding them for resisting, we are teaching them that medication is bad, scary or otherwise unpleasant.

Fortunately, for many medications, help is available in the form of compounded drugs. Compounding pharmacies can make big pills tiny, bitter pills sweet, and turn your cat’s worst nightmare into his favorite tasty treat. How? By mixing the medication into savory liquids or pastes that pets will lap up eagerly.

Compounded medications are prescription only, and you’ll need to ask your veterinarian for them. The good news is that there are compounding pharmacies all over the country that will fill your veterinarian’s prescription. The bad news is that you need to be a little careful about the use of compounded drugs, as last year’s tragic deaths of 21 polo ponies should remind us all.

At the recent Western Veterinary Conference, Ron Johnson DVM, PhD, a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology, gave some tips on how both pet owners and veterinarians can make sure that compounded medications are safe and effective.

Some owners and even a few veterinarians think that compounding is legally questionable, but Dr. Johnson (no relation to our own Dr. Tony!) assured us that’s not the case. “The Animal Medicinal Drug Use Clarification Act (AMDUCA) was passed in 1994 and become effective in 1996,” he said. “Compounding is legal under AMDUCA, as long as guidelines are followed.”

That means only your pet’s veterinarian — the health care provider like me who has actually seen and examined and made some kind of diagnosis of plan for that pet’s treatment — can prescribe compounded drugs.

We also need to be available to monitor that treatment and change it if things go wrong, or if the pet’s condition changes.

That part’s simple. But Dr. Johnson next launched into a long list of other legal, regulatory and medical issues related to compounding, all of which would make most pet owners and even some veterinarians run just as fast as your cat ran the last time you tried to give her a pill. Fortunately, he also threw us a lifeline in the form of this piece of advice:

Veterinarians wanting to create or prescribe compounded products should seek the advice of a reputable pharmacist.

Those would be members of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, the Professional Compounding Center of America, or the American College of Veterinary Pharmacists.

The compounding pharmacists should “also be willing to provide product and ingredient information when requested by the veterinarian, including a certificate of analysis and the background of the drugs.” He warned particularly about drugs originating in China, and said that if the pharmacist is reluctant to provide that information, it’s a big red flag that there’s a problem.

What does that mean for you and your pets, especially those notoriously unpillable cats?

As long as you work with your veterinarian and a reputable compounding pharmacy, there’s a very good chance that your pet’s icky medicine can turn into something tasty and appealing, and you can get your pet well without making both your lives miserable in the process.

And that’s just plain good medicine.

Image: Getting pills into pets can be such a problem many owners just give up. A compounding pharmacy can help, by turning “treatment” into “treat.”

I don’t know what you guys do when you can’t sleep, but I pick up my iPhone in bed and take a picture of the cat on my tummy, then play with the iPhone Photoshop ap until I get something arty.

Ilario was very tolerant. Deh Red Kitteh is one big ol’ lump o’purr, and that’s the truth.

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