pet connection

I’m going to catch all kinds of ribbing for being too wimpy to want to slog through mud and rain today. So I’m falling on my back-up excuse: I have work to do!

OK, so I always have work to do, but … it’s still true!

I have in fact actually done some work. I’ve just posted the free samplers of the new books, exclusive to our Pet Connection readers. They’re really cute, too.

Go get ‘em! Free!

And remember: If we blog a pic of you posed with one or both of the books, Dr. Becker will record the message on your answering machine or voicemail. And I bet he will also answer a pet-health question or two just for you before he gets off the line. So send in those pictures!

Wanna skip the samples and buy the books? Click over to our bookstore, here.

Update: Been raining here all night, and still raining. Going to be a miserable day to be slogging through the mud. I’m going to wimp out today and work around the home. We’ll try tomorrow, when the weather is better.

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Although it may seem odd for a pet-writer, I spent a rather large part of the week writing about the economy. You just never know when 20-odd years of reading the Wall Street Journal and a few more as a copy editor on the business desk of a metro daily will come in handy.

No, the writing wasn’t pet-related, but had to do with the day job, the credit market meltdown, the intricacies of municipal financing, and so on.  Which is my lame excuse for why I didn’t get in hardly any training this week, but we’re going to try again anyway tomorrow and Sunday at the hunt tests. We’re just going to consider THOSE as training runs, and if we pass, we’ll jump for joy. Like, uh, this, although honestly McKenzie does this 20 times a day, just because she’s a happy girl:

UPDATE!!!

If you send us a picture of yourself posed with one of the books, Dr. Becker has offered to record the message on your answering machine or voicemail!

Get the books, send us your pics!

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Next week is the official launch of “The Ultimate Cat Lover” and “The Ultimate Dog Lover,” starting with Dr. Becker’s appearance on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday and continuing with more TV, more interviews and more more more. (The books have really been for sale for about three weeks now, although the publishing date was Oct. 1)

I’m really delighted with how the books (”The Ultimate Horse Lover” will be out in three weeks) turned out. The stories are incredibly well-written, and many left me either laughing or crying, depending on the subject matter. The “Must-Know” information is something I’ve never done before: Instead of interviewing experts and writing up what they told us, we went to a top expert in every subject, and asked them to tell us what they know, directly. That means our collection of advice is expert, and then some, and all-start line-up of the best you can get.

And the pictures! Troy Snow, formerly of Best Friends and now free-lancing, was the lead photographer for the dog and cat books, and Sarah Andrew took the lead on horses. But we also invited images from everyone, amateurs and pros alike, and the pictures are gor-geous.

Dr. Becker and I asked the publisher to put together a little sample r– two stories, two “must knows” and two pictures — for each book, FREE and EXCLUSIVE for our Pet Connection readers, online and in our client newspapers. We’ll have them ready for downloading on Monday.  The links will be in the free Pet Connection electronic newsletter first, so be sure you’re signed up.

In the meantime … do you have the books? Take a picture with them — just one is great, too! — and send it to me for posting in the blog. I’d just love to see what you, our regular readers, look like, to put faces with the names.

Now, the people below I’ve already met: Russell and Nadine Long. That’s because they put together my first-ever book reading last April, at the Del Norte County Library in Crescent City, Calif. Russell is the librarian there, and you can tell they’re both working to get me to choose to relocate to extreme Northern Coastal California with this picture:

The Longs are up first, but who’s next? Take a picture with the books in your hometown, with your pets if you can, and we’ll post it!

And if you like the books, do us a favor and post a review on Amazon.com (click on the links above to get to the right page).

Downtown Seattle is not very crowded on weekends, so on several Saturdays and Sundays, we got up early and loaded Bella into one of the strollers I was test-driving for DogCars.com (review up soon), leashed Harper and Twyla, and set out for our a.m. caffeine fix and some good people-watching.

Invariably, murmurs of “There’s a dog in that stroller” followed us as we made our way down to Pike Place Market and the waterfront. Not surprisingly, it was an excellent conversation starter, with most people wanting to know why Bella deserved to ride while Harper and Twyla had to hoof it. The “age before youth” explanation satisfied everyone, with a few people exclaiming that they’d like to do the same for their older dogs. I like to think that a few more older dogs will get outings on wheels as a result of her example.

Although Bella rode quietly, it was pretty evident that she’d prefer to be walking. This was especially obvious last weekend in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. After wheeling her for some distance around the sea wall, we let her out to do a little walking on her own. She set off at a rapid pace, apparently determined to prove that she could still move faster than those two young whippersnappers. I was afraid she’d wear herself out, but she didn’t seem any the worse for wear that evening or the next day when we all explored the Kitsilano and Commercial Street neighborhoods on foot.

Today, I’m hoping to get them out to Magnuson Park for one last off-leash romp, sans stroller–and ideally without the ginormous round burrs that attached themselves to Bella and Twyla’s fur when we did a little hike on Whidbey Island Tuesday. Tomorrow afternoon, it’s back to the OC.

Open your cat’s mouth. See those sharp, pointy things? They’re very much like the sharp, pointy things your cat uses to shred the sofa. Nature endowed your cat with them because she is a hunter, a predator, a carnivore, not to use as extremely sharp tools for the gathering and milling of wheat.

I say this because all too often I hear from people who decide to share the glories of their vegan lifestyle with their cats. Like this guy, who seems to believe that because so much cat food is bad and full of nasty contaminants and fillers that we should make it even worse by, you know, taking out the part that’s of the greatest nutritional benefit to the cat in the first place, the meat:

Any pet food containing meat based meals, digests, or by-products are literally poisons. The rendering process, from which these products are formulated, contains a mixture of dead, dying, diseased, and disabled animals from the slaughter industry, along with road kill, spoiled supermarket meats (including the styrofoam packaging), euthanized animals (including flea collars), insecticides, toxins, cross- species hormones, antibiotics and other disgusting debris that gets swept up in the processing operations.

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Considering that the vast majority of the commercial pet foods are filled with poisons that come from the rendering industry as well as the latest risk of contaminated vegetable products like gluten, the advantages of a properly formulated vegan cat food are enormous. Vegan cats can be extremely healthy because they are no longer being fed poisonous materials that build up over time to create unique diseases that we have never seen before in cats.

He has, of course, the solution. And no, it has nothing to do with choosing only wholesome, nutritious foods and feeding them to your cats, the choice I’ve made and never regretted after nearly 23 years of homefeeding my pets. Nope, his solution is Vegan Feline Roast, a product he will soon be making available:

This semi-moist product has what we consider an ideal blend of ingredients that equate to about 50% protein, 30% fat, and 20% carbohydrates along with a moisture content of about 40%-60%. Natural cat food like a mouse, lizard, bird, mole or other such prey would have approximately the same nutritional values. We are in the process of marketing this product in a ready to make dry form that can be shipped easily to anywhere in the world.

A ready to eat frozen product may become available in the future. We would warn people against trying to formulate their own vegan cat food. The nutritional require-ments for cats are quite precise and without the proper formulation, the feline parent risks doing great harm to the health of their feline companions. Cardiac, kidney, urinary, and hepatic diseases are common from people who have attempted to feed cats vegan without the proper nutritional study and background.

Yeah, no kidding, considering cats are (as he himself admits) obligate carnivores. And doesn’t it just sound like the same old, same old we’ve been hearing — and he’s so irate about — from the pet food industry all these years? Don’t try this at home. Your cat will die.

I was puzzled in particular by his claim that his about-to-be-marketed recipe had the nutrient ratio of a cat’s prey diet in the wild. Twenty percent carbohydrate? Really?

So I dug out my copy of “Nutrient Composition of Whole Vertebrate Prey” (PDF) and checked on the usual diet of wild cats: rodents. This paper doesn’t even list carbohydrate content (probably because cats big and small — along with dogs and pretty much all the carnivores — have no dietary requirement for carbohydrate at all, so it doesn’t actually matter), but you can calculate it by adding up the other components of the prey and seeing what’s left over.

On a dry matter basis (meaning water is excluded), the mouse has just 9.3 percent left over for everything other than protein, fat, and minerals. The rat has nothing… no carbohydrate at all. Rabbit has 0.8 percent left after protein, fat, and minerals are added up. So no clue where he got that 20 percent carb value.

But that’s someone you’d trust to figure out what your cat needs to eat, right? The cat, who has one of the most specific set of nutritional needs of any domesticated animal.

I have some advice for vegans: if you want a vegan pet, get a rabbit. They’re fluffy and sweet and can be litterbox trained, and Mother Nature made them veggie-eaters. There are lots of them in shelters, too, or adopt one from a rescue group — check out the House Rabbit Society for more info. If you already have a cat, suck it up and feed her what she needs for optimum health, and when she goes to the Big Scratching Post in the Sky, get a rabbit as your next pet.

But please stop trying to take your carnivorous cats and turn them into vegans. Nature already made her what she is, and it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.