Dog Tidbits

Cat Poop Coffee Beans — Photo by Klaus Polak through wikipedia.org

In an earlier post, I talked about why dogs — including my dog Mac — like eating cat poop. Now, it turns out, not only dogs like cat poop, but people do as well. But, unlike Mac, they don’t actually eat the poop. Instead they drink coffee made from coffee beans that cats have eaten and then pooped. As a result, the coffee is called “cat poop coffee,” “cat coffee,” or just plain “poop coffee.”

To be fair, the cats that eat and poop the coffee beans aren’t household cats like yours and mine… Continue reading

Photo by Nhandler through wikimedia.org

First came Hurricane Katrina, which turned dogs and cats into disaster victims. Then came the recession, which produced more four-footed victims as people simply left their household pets to be on their own when they walked away from homes they couldn’t afford or because they couldn’t take their dogs and cats with them when they moved into rental apartments.

Now, for weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we’ve heard a lot about innocent sea life such as pelicans and turtles that have been killed and the huge effort to save the ones found covered with oil. But the oil spill also created another group of… Continue reading

Salmonella contamination in pet food — the food our dogs and cats eat — remains a problem.

On July 1st, Feline’s Pride issued a nationwide recall of its All Natural Raw Chicken Cat Food (with Ground Bone) for cats and kittens. The food recalled was the packages weighing 2.5 pounds (1.13 kg., 40 oz.) that the company produced on June 10, 2010.

The reason? Because the food might be contaminated with Salmonella.

Just two weeks later, on July 15th, Feline Pride extended the recall to include similar size packaged produced on June 21, 2010 because they, too, might be contaminated with Salmonella.

Here’s their press release as it appears on the FDA’s web site:

July 15, 2010 – Buffalo, NY… Continue reading

Oscar the Bionic Cat and His $2,996 Paws

Everyone’s talking about Oscar the bionic cat. I’m sure you’ve heard about him. He’s the two-and-a-half-year-old black cat who had his rear paws mangled by a combine harvester in October, 2009 while he was lounging around on the farm where he lived in the British Channel Isles.

Oscar’s guardians rushed him to the local vet who, in turn, sent them to a neuro-orthopedic surgeon. In the end, the surgeon couldn’t save Oscar’s paws, but — with the help of biomedical engineers — did make Oscar into allegedly the world’s first bionic cat by giving him a set of artificial paws.

The artificial paws, which… Continue reading

Is This Treat Contaminated with Salmonella?

Over the past month, the number of pet food recalls has been increasing. Just yesterday Dancing Dog Blog reported the latest: On July 2nd Merrick Pet Care recalled its Beef Fillet Squares — for the second time in six months. The problem is that the FDA hasn’t reported the recall yet and Merrick buried the information on its website.

I’ve always liked Merrick’s dog food. But I find it disturbing — and disillusioning — that Merrick didn’t publicize the recall better. I also find it disturbing that this is the second recall of the same food in half a year… Continue reading | 1 Comment