Toothpaste for your Furbaby

We do our best to brush Gren’s teeth almost every day.  Granted, it’s a two-person operation: one person has to put the dog in a headlock and the other risks getting covered in paste and dog saliva on “scrubby duty,” but we do it because we love our little fiend.

I finally came to the end of the supply of dog toothpaste (vanilla flavoured, if you must know) that came with the latest doggy toothbrush (which I have since abandoned for a soft people toothbrush).  As I was about to go out and get some more, I chanced to look at the “all-natural” ingredients list.   Sorbitol?  I don’t even know what that is, but it’s the second ingredient.  And why does it need to be sweetened with stevia?  Since when do dogs need sugar?

So I’m going to make my own.  And there’s a ton of recipes on the internet.  Many of them require you to use glycerin, which I guess is the sticky-togethery ingredient that actually makes the paste into a pasty substance.  But that sounds like a pain in the ass, so I’m going to go with a version that uses coconut oil instead (used in small quantities coconut oil is beneficial to your pet’s health), and modify it a wee bit.

Start with a bouillon cube, and dissolve that in 1 tablespoon water.  Or, in my case, use this gel-like one instead.  This is mostly for flavour, so use something your dog will like.  Gren has issues with chicken and beef so I would use pork or vegetable.

Add in 2 tablespoons baking soda (a deodorizing abrasive), and 1 teaspoon cinnamon (a fragrant abrasive).

I also ground up about 1 teaspoon dried parsley (for fresh breath) and added a pinch of ground cloves (an anti-parasitic).

A drop or two of tea tree oil (for fresh breath and as an anti-bacterial agent) won’t go amiss, either.

Looks tasty!  Actually it didn’t smell as awful as I thought it might: just like vegetable soup with too much cinnamon added.  Not bad in the end.

Then you need to work in about 1/2 cup coconut oil.  If you have trouble mixing everything up you can soften the oil or melt it, but you want it to be solid in the end.

You can store this mixture at room temperature in a sealed container for several weeks.  Brush often!

Many sites actually recommend using your finger and a clean washcloth instead of a toothbrush for maximum efficacy, so we might try that at some point.  Fortunately, Gren seems to like the taste of this stuff better than what we were using before, so he struggles a lot less.

Immediately after we brush his teeth Grenadier goes and gets his Tricky Treat Ball, which we fill with the other half of his dinner.  Trundling around with the ball, he will snarf up the kibble that falls out of the hole, and in gulping it down he will produce more saliva to further aid in cleaning his teeth.  When he’s done he usually drinks a whole whack of water too, to wash everything down. And then he goes to sleep.

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Dog Treats

This is the last pumpkin post, I swear.  We’re finally rid of it.  Fortunately, there is one member of our family who will never tire of pumpkin, and that is The Short and Spoiled One.

Have we met?

This is a quick recipe that I put together with inspiration from Betty Crocker and Simply Sugar and Gluten-Free.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together 4 cups brown rice flour with 2 tablespoons ground flax meal (optional) and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.  It occurs to me after the fact that you could also use a mixture of brown rice flour and quinoa flour, seeing as quinoa is the new superfood for dogs these days.  Very trendy of you.

In another bowl, whisk together 2 large eggs with 1 3/4 cups (or 1 14 oz can) of pure pumpkin purée (not the pie filling) and 1/4 cup peanut butter (all natural, with no added salt or sugar, please).

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until a shaggy dough forms — you may need to use your hands.

Sprinkle with more flour and stir that in if it’s still tacky.

Take the dough and form it into a small ball with your palms.  Flatten it into a patty and place it on the baking sheet.  Angle your thumb sideways on one side of the cookie and press it into the dough.  Use the point of one of your fingers to make four indentations along the curve of your thumbprint.   So it looks like a wee paw print.  Cute, eh?

Bake for about 25 minutes, depending on the thickness of your cookie.  A finished cookie is crisp and dried out.

Allow them to cool completely on a rack and store them in the fridge to keep them fresh for a couple weeks.  At room temperature in an airtight container they’ll keep for about a week.

Gren obviously enjoyed testing them.  Here he is waiting for my okay.

Scarfing down the first piece.

Discovering the second.

Scarfing that one too.

Are there no more?

Gren was nice enough to share with some of my coworkers’ dogs, and this was the review:

Photo credit: E. Wright

Corgi Fun Time

I don’t have a DIY post for you today.  But I think that corgis make every Friday a bit better.

Traveler has been a friend of ours for over a decade.  He went to high school with the Pie, and then I met him when I met Stef back in our first year of university in 2001.  And he’s probably wanted a dog since then.  But with school and work and his jet-setting lifestyle, having a pet wasn’t feasible.  Until now.

Recently, Traveler began his search for a pet in earnest.  He was looking for an adult dog, so he could skip the puppy stage that would require him to be a helicopter parent.  And, having met Grenadier and fallen in love with him (because no one is immune to Gren’s charm — NO ONE), he wanted a corgi.  I put him in touch with the man who bred Gren, thinking that he might know a retired breeding bitch in need of a home.

It was serendipity, really.  The breeder wrote back that the one girl from Gren’s litter, Bahkita, was available.

The pups at 6 weeks. Bahkita is on the left, Gren is the big lug next to her. Photo by Ben Lobo.

Every dog in that litter had come out with huge ears (you’ve seen Gren’s, right?), and Bahkita’s were a little on the floppy side, so he couldn’t in good conscience breed her knowing her pups might not conform to the champion standard.  And as much as he would have liked to keep her, city by-laws prevented him from having more than three dogs at any given time, so she needed a home.

Gren’s ears at six months.

On the Friday night after I arrived in Ottawa last week, Traveler and I (and Gren) drove out to the breeder’s house for a meet and greet.  In-residence were Patty (Gren and Bahkita’s sire), Bahkita (Gren’s sister), and a three-month-old puppy.  Add Gren to the mix and there was a party in the making.  I apologize in advance for the blurriness of these photos.  It’s hard to take decent shots of animals who will not sit still.

Ganging up on Gren.

It was shocking to see how large Gren had turned out.  We had always known he’d be big for a corgi, and at his last weigh-in at the vet’s he clocked in at 34.4lb, which is at the extreme high end of the corgi weight scale.  I had thought that Patty, his dad, would be the same size but I was so very wrong.

This is Patty. He likes to climb people to get kisses.

All the other dogs present were pretty much half his size, with shorter coats and narrower shoulders.  Patty, whom I’d always thought was big, weighs about 26lb.  Bahkita weighs about 22lb.  These are normal ranges for Pembroke corgis.  Turns out I just have a gigantor corgi on my hands.

Don’t be fooled by the puppy on the ground. She was in control the whole time.

Despite being the biggest in the bunch, Gren’s natural submissiveness meant that he was dominated at every turn, even by the puppy.  It was pretty cute to see him getting beaten up time and time again.  He needs a blow to his ego every once in a while, the spoiled jerk.

More ganging up on Gren.

After playing like mad with three other dogs for an hour and a half, Gren came home and promptly fell asleep on my brother’s feet.

And outright refused to get out of bed the next day.

Traveler ended up taking Bahkita home on Saturday morning, and on Sunday night, after she’d had a chance to settle in and get to know her new family, Traveler brought her over for a short playtime with her big brother.  My pictures here are a little better, because they were both tired and therefore slower.

Already very attached to her new dad.

We look forward to having many more play dates like this in the future.  Stay tuned for Christmas when we will be featuring Corgis in the Snow!

The Empty Ocean Spray Bottle

Like a good little girl who suffers from frequent UTIs, I consume some form of cranberry juice on a daily basis.  In my experience, Ocean Spray has the right amount of cranberry goodness in their juice to make me feel all right.

As a result, I end up with a lot of empty Ocean Spray bottles.

So as a result of THAT, I recycle a lot of empty Ocean Spray bottles.

But you can do more than that.  The lovely squareness of the Ocean Spray bottle makes it a good fit for many things.

Currently, there is one, filled with water, inside the tank of my toilet.  It tricks my ancient toilet into thinking that it’s fuller sooner and so I don’t waste as much water every time I flush.

You can use them as  cooling packs as well.  Fill one about 2/3 full of water (because water expands when it freezes) and chuck it in the freezer.  Not only will it help you to keep your freezer full and thus working at peak efficiency (this is not a problem I have) but it will also make a handy cooler addition for picnics and camping.  The squareness of the bottle means it will fit anywhere, and as the water melts, it will keep your food fresh and provide a nice refreshing drink at the end.

Let’s not forget that you can re-use them for their original purpose, and put more juice, like the stuff you make from powder or concentrate, back in them.  They’re also a good way to store iced tea that you’ve brewed, or to flavour water.  I like to have an extra container of filtered water in the fridge for dinner parties, because we tend to get thirsty with all that talking and eating and my Brita pitcher just can’t keep up.

The squareness, again, lends itself to storage just as nicely.  Small pastas, like macaroni, or rice or any other small nodule-like dry good (jelly beans?), will be easy to find and compactly stored in your pantry — just make sure the bottle is fully dried out before you pour in your foodstuffs.

And if you want to get really creative, you can turn the empty bottle into a bird feeder to help out your avian friends over the winter.  Make it into a giant spare change holder.  Or  drum.  Or use it as a float (filled with air) or a weight (filled with sand) for keeping track of your dock moorings at the cottage.

Cut off the bottom and use the top as a funnel for birdseed, cat litter, sand … whatever you need to funnel.  Fill it with water and bury it in your garden to keep your tomatoes watered.

Use the square bottoms as drawer organizers that you can move around at your whimsy and fill with all your odds and ends.  Decorate them and keep them on your desk, in plain sight.  Make them hold pencils or buttons.

Many years ago I had a client who was a bit of a hoarder, and he had kept all his bottles, filled with water, and lining the shelves that ran near the ceiling in every room.  He was preparing for the apocalypse, I suppose.

That’s about all I can think of.  If you have any other uses, please feel free to add them in the comments section.  I would love to have more things to do with all my empty bottles!

Fast, Fun, Free “Fine” Art

This is probably the most awesome thing you can do with a printer in five minutes, for free.

Do you know what this is?  Probably not.  But don’t worry, you will soon figure it out.

I found out about this through Creature Comforts, and I loved it.

So you go to this site and you can use their online application, called The Rasterbator (gross, I know), or you can download it and use it on your computer.

Just follow their instructions to upload a photo of yours or to link to another photo on the internet.  Select the size you want and how you want to crop it, then get the program to rasterize the image.  Your computer will download a multi-page PDF document that you can then print out and assemble.

Of course the pages are in order, but they’re not as easy as you think to put together.  But you can figure it out.

Use a paper cutter or scissors to carefully cut out the excess border and then stick them all together.

Is this … ?

Yes, it’s Grenadier!

I used this photo here:

Now, it’s not a perfect job by any means — you can see the tape and the edges of the paper.  But for something this simple, it’s hella cool.

And now it’s up in our kitchen, the only place with any free wall space.

I can see these shellacked to a board for more permanence, or used as decoration at a party — the picture is the guest of honour, perhaps.  Or you could print one and give it, unassembled, to a friend for them to put together.  What a lovely surprise!

Does your dog eat too fast?

Gren, being a typical corgi, is a total food hound.  He’s obsessed with those two most important times in the day: breakfast and dinner.  Everything else is small potatoes in his little world.

When he was very small, before I taught him how to wait, I used to have to physically hold him back until I  had put his food on the floor.  Exhausted with his struggles, he would then eat sitting down.  Lazy bum.

Nowadays, he knows to lie down and wait until we give him the okay to start eating.  But when we do so, he leaps forward and swallows his food in less than thirty seconds.  I’m not sure if you can swallow 3/4 cup of kibble in thirty seconds, but he can.  And we really don’t think it’s very good for him.  I’m afraid he might get indigestion.

Luckily, he’s a pretty small dog, so we don’t need to worry too much about bloat or any of the other more serious medical conditions that can arise from eating too fast; nonetheless, the food we buy him is pretty expensive, so it would be nice if he savoured it a little before shoving it down his gullet.

There are solutions you can purchase for this problem.  There are food bowls with built-in obstacles that the dog has to work around to get to his food.  And you can also buy large stainless-steel balls that you can just plop on the food, which the dog then has to negotiate to get to his food.  Both of these options are fine, and they are proven to work.  But why spend the money when you might have the solution lying around your own house?

The Pie is huge into baseball, and has played both hardball and softball over the years, so we have a lot of spare balls lying around.  This softball is synthetic, so won’t degrade through exposure to doggy saliva.  It’s also too large for Gren to pick up in his mouth and remove from his bowl.  So he has to work around it, bringing his eating time up from 30 seconds to around 2-3 minutes, a marked improvement.  We just plop it on top of the kibble after we’ve measured it into the bowl.  It works great and it was free, whereas that stainless steel ball was $18 at PetSmart.

Don’t have a ball?  Maybe try a can of corn or beans, or, in larger food bowls, several smaller cans, say, for tomato paste, all stuck in together.  Whatever works for you.

Gren Learns to Swim

We didn’t have much of a summer in Newfoundland, so when the Pie and I were visiting family in Ottawa we took advantage of the proximity to our cousin’s cottage and decided to teach Grenadier how to swim.

Now, some dogs, like labs, goldens, duck tollers, and PWDs, are born swimmers.  Other dogs, especially those whose front ends are significantly heavier than their back ends, like pugs, bulldogs, daschunds, and yes, corgis, are not.

Even so, it was something we wanted to get Gren used to doing, just so he would have some options on a hot summer day.  Aside from some wading about and a briefly traumatic fall into a turtle pond, Gren was a land-lubber.

For safety’s sake, and because corgis are not natural swimmers, we got Gren a dog’s life jacket.  Make sure when you are looking for a life jacket that the seams are tightly sewn and the workmanship looks good.  Ensure that the fit is correct for your dog’s weight, as well as his length.

You should be able to comfortably lift the dog up by the handle of the jacket when the jacket is properly secured. This handle is especially useful when your dog falls off your boat and you can just haul him back on.

This Outward Hound version is widely available and nicely affordable at around thirty bucks retail.  I like the additional flotation under the chin, which helps keep the dog’s head above the water — this is a plus (and a must) with brachiocephalic dogs like pugs and bulldogs, who don’t have the long snouts of other dogs.  And remember that even with a life jacket, you should never leave your dogs unsupervised in the water!

Gren likes to paddle in the water, but he’ll never be a big swimmer.  Whenever we had him out over his head his first move was to head for shore.

He did swim out to “rescue” the Pie at one point, because he was too far away, but that was the only time he left the shore of his own will.

He was really not a big fan.

Related articles

• Can Your Dog Swim? (dogsden.wordpress.com)

Private Screening

As you may have seen from previous posts (like when our toilet exploded), life here at Elizabeth is more often than not fraught with peril.  And now, with two small boys and a wee dog running around, the grown-ups here have to be extra vigilant.

And of course, being boys, they like to get themselves into trouble.  One of their favourite things to do is attempt to climb under the back porch, which is full of rubble and sharp bits of re-bar and all sorts of nasty things.   Once they’re under there, it’s a job getting them back out.

As a solution, I am going to staple a plastic screen around the whole thing.  Subtle and yet effective.  I found a roll of plastic chicken wire at Canadian Tire for $11.

If I have any left, I’m going to go around the railings as well.  Both Gren and IP have a disturbing tendency to hang off the edge.  I hope the screen will act as a deterrent.  And I found some extra in the shed the other day.  BONUS.

So here I go.  I only used two tools here: a staple gun (with staples, of course), and a sharp knife for cutting through the screen.  You could even use scissors on this stuff.

Our staple gun isn’t particularly powerful, and my hands are quite small, so I had to grip the gun near the top and therefore didn’t get as much stapling *oomph* as I wanted.  There are certain drawbacks to being a woman with tiny hands.

Basically I just tried to get the screen as tight as possible and then stapled the crap out of it, leaving no space for small fingers (or noses) to get in.

Even under the steps, where I folded the screen in half to fit.

Now, this is only plastic chicken wire, which isn’t very strong.  It’s more of a mental deterrent than a real physical barrier. In an attempt to make it stronger than it was, I kept it all as one long piece for as much as I could, and, of course, stapled the crap out of it.

I did the top as well, hiding the raw edges on the outside where il Principe couldn’t see them.  Of course the first thing he did when he came out was stick his fingers through the holes and try to push his brother’s stroller through one of the panels.  The screen works better in deterring Gren from wreaking havoc.

I did run out, and there is a hole about two feet wide next to the steps, but we can just put a large potted plant there.

We might end up ripping it out (the top stuff at least) and using real metal chicken wire, just because when il Principe is determined about something, he’s really determined.

Dog Digestion and Pumpkin

Gren has been living a chaotic life these past few weeks, adjusting to new people, new places, and new food.  He’s also been eating a lot of random objects on the side of the road, and that can wreak havoc with a puppy’s digestive system.

If your dog has a bit of a traveler’s gut, diarrhea, or is constipated, there is a quick and easy solution, and I will let you in on the secret.

Ready?

It’s pumpkin.

I’m serious.  It has all this lovely fibre in it to help ease a dog’s digestion, without the sugar of your regular fruits.  I’m sure it works on people as well.

You can give your dog up to a tablespoon of pumpkin purée a day.  Just plop it in the dog’s food and all will be well.  I give Gren a teaspoon in the morning and one at night and he’s good to go.

I also add a teaspoon each time of plain yogurt, to make sure his little tummy has all the good bacteria in it that it needs.

Make sure when you’re buying pumpkin in a can that you get the plain stuff, not the pumpkin pie filling.  Your dog doesn’t need the spices and the sugar.

And because you probably won’t need to go through a whole can before your dog’s gut is back to normal, you can freeze the pumpkin in individual serving sizes (like I did here in ice-cube trays) for the next time you need them.

Gluten-Free Dog Treats

In honour of Ruby’s first birthday, Cait and I got together and concocted some fabulous dog biscuits for her and Gren.  Being a corgi and therefore very food-obsessed and prone to obesity, Gren only took home a few to try, but they were still enjoyed by all.  I even had one, as I won’t feed my dog anything I wouldn’t eat myself.

Ruby murders Gren

Fortunately, we were able to easily find a dog treat recipe online that conformed to our philosophy of feeding our dogs biologically appropriate food.  That means most definitely no corn, no wheat, and no soy, and none of those other things that people seem to think dogs need, like salt, sugar, and artificial flavours or colours.  This recipe from Sandra over at dog-nutrition-naturally.com totally fit the bill and was easy to do.  We tripled the recipe so that there would be plenty of birthday treats for everyone.

First, peel yourself a large sweet potato.  And I mean LARGE.  Cut that sucker up.

Plop the potato pieces in a pot and boil them silly until they’re mashable.  Then of course mash them.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and lightly brush a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil.

In a large bowl, plop in 1lb ground meat.  We used extra lean ground beef, but you can use turkey, chicken, pork, or lamb — or really, whatever you want.

Add to that 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder (not garlic salt) and a large egg.  Drop in 5 tablespoons large flake rolled oats as well, just for cohesion purposes.

Chuck in the mashed sweet potato and mix it well.

Spread it flat on the prepared cookie sheet and smooth the top.

Bake for about an hour.  The cookie will shrink and pull away from the sides.  Now you can score the cookie into smaller pieces, or use a cookie cutter to make fun shapes.  A pizza cutter is handy about now too.

Reduce the oven heat to 250°F and pop the cookies back into the oven for another hour or so to dry out.  Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn.

Tada!  That’s it.  Now SIT.

Good dog.Make sure to store your treats in an airtight container, and of course remember that treats should never be used as a substitute for your dog’s regular diet.  Yum yum!