Tiger Tails

The video shoot for the Princeton Alumni Weekly on Monday went very well. My dogs were appropriately attired --see above--and behaved very well, chowing down on everything Chef Eileen Watkin made them, right on cue. Trust me, you would too, and we did since everything was absolutely delicious!

Stay tuned for a link when it is posted. There will be no living with Phoebe when she becomes an unofficial member of the Ivy League!

An App for Doggie Gourmands

A reprint from the Bark magazine blog, because sometimes good ideas just need to be shared.

Can My Dog Eat This?
There’s an app for that
Florence Ion | March 2, 2012

Om Nom? displays everything in alphabetical order.
Dogs may be our best friends but that doesn’t mean we can always share our lunch with them. There are plenty of foods that are safe for us but toxic for dogs—so many, in fact, they can be hard to remember.

Fortunately, there’s a new app called Om Nom? to help us keep track of what foods—and, in some cases parts of foods—should be avoided. For instance, apples are a good source of Vitamin A for your dog, but the stems, leaves and seeds contain substances that can cause vomiting, diarrhea, decreased heart rate, and, if large amounts are ingested, respiratory failure.

The app also provides instruction on what to do if your dog accidentally eats something he wasn’t supposed to. While it’s not a substitute for a veterinarian, it is a guide that can be used preemptively to prevent feeding your dog something that could cause him harm. All of the information featured in the app comes from the developer’s own research based on published papers on toxicology and veterinary medicine from the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Chris Morrell, the brains behind the Om Nom? app, was inspired by his own cluelessness about his new friend, a now three-year-old Havanese named Scottie Pippen. “Once we actually adopted Pip, we quickly realized that neither of us knew the first thing about how to care for him,” Morrell says.

After his vet ran through the list of foods to avoid, Morrell became concerned about what else might be on the “do not eat“ list. Pip had a strong urge to snap up remnants left on the cutting board, which meant Morrell and his wife were constantly Googling ingredients.

“Each website had a slightly different list, so I figured I’d do everyone a favor and compile the most comprehensive resource available.” Morrell also had a researcher interview Pip’s vet about specific foods when he couldn’t find the information anywhere else.

Om Nom? also includes a Chocolate Toxicity calculator, which pops up when you hit the “chocolate” entry. “The type of chocolate and the weight of the dog are both important factors in how dangerous chocolate is, so I thought an interactive tool would be particularly useful for that entry,” Morrell says. In addition, users can submit requests for missing ingredients or foods to Morrell from the app itself.

And what about the peculiar name? Om Nom refers to the sound that people make when they’re eating something tasty. (Think: Cookie Monster on Sesame Street).

Om Nom? is a neat utility app for new and veteran dog owners alike, and at 99 cents it doesn’t cost much to ensure your dog is eating right. Currently, available for iPhone and iPad.

Martha Stewart's Stance n Factory Farming

We applaud Martha Stewart, a true animal lover, for her stance on factory farming and feel privileged to have had The Culinary Canine featured on her show.

We Made the Top Ten!

A great endorsement from our wonderful vet who wrote the intro!! Check out #8 on her list of Top Ten Animal tales!
Thanks Patty!

A Vet's Top 10 List of Must-Read Animal Tales
BY DR. PATTY KHULY | MARCH 2, 2012

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m an obsessive reader. This is probably why I always get asked which animal books are my favorites — and I love to evangelize on the subject. To that end, here are my top 10 favorite animal reads — in no particular order.

Homer’s Odyssey
Someone brought me this little 3-week-old kitten whose eyes were so infected that I had to remove them and hope for the best. The best couldn’t have been any better than Homer, a wonderfully inspirational cat and the eventual subject of this book, written by my good friend, Gwen Cooper. Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword, which highlights Homer’s impressive displays of feline resilience and the parallels to our comparatively lowly human lives.

Speaking for Spot
Vetstreet contributor Dr. Nancy Kay has written a primer for any owner who wants to learn how to become the best advocate for a pet in any health-care setting. Indispensable reading.

Perfect Puppy in 7 Days: How to Start Your Puppy Off Right
I’ll confess that I have a thing for books that claim to give you a perfect anything in any number of days. Dr. Sophia Yin has written a readable, entertaining, accurate, complete, up-to-date and effective book. It explains how puppies develop physically and behaviorally, while also serving as a nuts-and-bolts training manual for puppies. I love the color pics and the clear instructions on how to make training as simple and as painless as possible. You can even get it as an e-book!

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Temple Grandin works her inimitable magic yet again with a discussion of what our animals need — this time, it’s more to do with their emotional cravings than their physical requirements. Don't miss reading.

Black Beauty
What can I say? It’s a classic. This book by Anna Sewell is so well written and so pitch perfect — not too saccharine and never cynical. Although it does bring on the tears, it’s still the best example of equine fiction that I can think of.

Eating Animals
This one is a clear winner from an animal-politics standpoint. Jonathan Safran Foer's prose is perfect. It's too bad that I ultimately don't buy the author's arguments in favor of vegetarianism. But I still found it to be a great read, and I feel that anyone who's interested in vegetarianism or veganism and the politics of eating animals should devour it.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma
If you’re sick of hearing everyone talk about this Michael Pollan book, don’t you think it’s about time you bought the thing already? Although it’s undeniably a book about food, it’s one that’s already affected animal agriculture so profoundly that I can’t help but consider it more an animal book than anything else. Then again, that’s a foodie vet’s point of view for you.

The Culinary Canine
Perhaps this is another seemingly shameless plug, since I also wrote the forward to this book. This time, it’s all about food –– pet food, to be exact. With recipes supplied by celebrity chefs nationwide, this book by Kathryn Levy Feldman has lots of dishes that can be shared by humans and their dogs.

Complications
Here’s another book that few seem to take me up on. It's not exactly an animal book, but it's very much a book for those who are fascinated by medicine. I recommend it to devotees of vet medicine. Written by Dr. Atul Gawande, it's all about how human docs learn and come to make mistakes –– and how they handle it. Although it appeals mostly to medical providers — human and animal alike — I’d think that anyone with a strong interest in a pet's health care would absolutely eat up this relatively short read.

The Life of Pi
This may be the best not-necessarily-about-animals animal book I've ever read. It starts off at a simmer, but gets going like gangbusters after 50 or so pages. A tiger, hyena, orangutan and a boy in a lifeboat? Who can resist the lure of such fantastical fiction? Yann Martel's ending is especially magical.

Bad Taste

Speaking of eating, which we always seem to be doing, McDonalds is busy chowing down on its foot which it recently put in its mouth with the release of the above ad.

As you can see (if you can read the fine print), Pit bull owners launched a massive campaign to have the ad banned and they were successful in getting McDonalds to pull it.

The major question remains: who authorized it in the first place? Talk about bad taste.

Time to Roll

Bo, the Easter Dog, invites you to submit your name to the White House Easter Egg Roll lottery which closes on March 5. There is still time, so get rolling.

What can we say? The chance of meeting the adorable Bo should be enough inspiration. Plus we hear there will be cooking demos!

Volume II

This should be the book trailer for Volume II: The Culinary Canine Lightens Up. The inspiration here is chasing the car, but we think fitting through that doggy door works just as well!

This is actually the extended version of the Volkswagen Superbowl ad, continuing the Star War theme that the dogs bark. But it works for us.

What do You think?