FDA Pet Food/Treats Recall Site

An email recently reminded me that there are almost as many pet food recalls as there are human food recalls. That jolted me a bit because unless it’s something hugely newsworthy (like the major Blue Buffalo recall), we don’t generally hear about it.

Treats are just as vulnerable as food, which is something I didn’t realize. I found the FDA website with all the latest pet food/treat recalls, so I thought I’d share that with you here. I’ve bookmarked the site so I can check it every couple of weeks to make sure nothing in our pantry is on the list.

It also tells you what ingredients are banned (I’ve heard  you can occasionally find an old bag of food being sold somewhere with a banned ingredient), why a food was recalled, and more.

Better safe than sorry!

Daisy Samples PureBites Treats and LOVES Them!

Gus – now that Daisy’s seen your picture, I think she may have a little crush on you! LOL 🙂

Thank you According To Gus!

We were among the lucky 10 who received 4 packages of PureBites dog treats from According to Gus’s pet nickname drawing, and what perfect timing they had – the treats arrived on Valentine’s Day! Along with a wonderful personalized greeting from Gus, it was like Daisy received her own little Valentine! 🙂

We couldn’t wait to try one out, so we gave her a Cheddar Cheese treat first. She absolutely LOVED it! We’ll try a different treat every day, but I’m sure she’s going to gobble them all up with equal enthusiasm.

Many thanks to According to Gus for introducing us to a wonderful new treat!

YUM YUM YUM!

 

 

 

 

 

Don't bother me now, these are fabulous!

Havachon Food Fun – Canine “Ratatouille”

 

I'll play with this grain of rice until it dissolves!

 

If you’ve ever seen the animated movie “Ratatouille”, you’ll understand why we compare our little Havachon puppy to the main character, who’s a chef named Remy. He just happens to be a rat….but a cute one.

Boiling the movie down to its absolute core, the movie is about an adorable little street rat (yes, they actually made a rat look adorable in this movie!) who refuses to eat trash or whatever else comes his way. He’s got a gourmet palate – his senses of smell and taste are acute, and he can only eat good food. He can discern every single ingredient in a recipe and tries to educate his fellow street rats so they can appreciate gourmet food rather than scarfing down every disgusting, rotten remnant they find in streets and alleys. Gordon Ramsay would have loved having him on Hell’s Kitchen!! 🙂

But this is all to no avail. So he leaves his rat pack and through a series of events, he ends up becoming the head chef of a fancy restaurant in France.

What does this have to do with Daisy, you ask? Well, when it comes to food, she has a couple of things in common with Remy. If we give her a teeny, tiny piece of something she’s never tasted before, she excitedly but gingerly takes it with her front teeth and trots off happily into the family room with it.

And that’s where the hours of food fun begin. She puts it down and looks at it carefully, sniffs it liberally, thinks about it for a minute, then licks  it cautiously. Then she gets down to business. Lying down on the floor with the treasured bit before her, she picks it up in her mouth and puts it down, over and over again. Sometimes she trots around to different spots and repeats this performance until finally, 10 or so minutes later, she actually eats the thing.

We introduce new, safe food items (we don’t feed her table scraps or anything much besides dog food and treats) in tiny amounts because her sensitive little tummy needs to adjust to new foods slowly, or we’re doing a lot of cleanup. And it’s not pretty.

I gave her the tiniest, 1/8 inch bit of pretzel last night, and somehow she made it last throughout her entire routine. Same thing with one Rice Krispie and one grain of rice – go figure! She’s a funny little gal.