Does anyone else have a dog that spends 10 or more minutes searching for a place to hide a bone you just gave them?

Every time we give Tink a rawhide bone that she knows is going to take a while for her to eat, she looks all over the house for places to hide the bone. She sometimes spends hours finding the perfect hiding place and after she has found her place she keeps watch of the bone and if anyone goes near her hiding place she quickly follows them. She was even doing this before we got Chubs as if she thought we were going to steal her bone.

I remember when Tink was about 4 or 5 months old, Lisa and I came back from PetSmart with the biggest bone Tink had ever seen (at that time). Her eyes lit up and she immediately took the bone gratefully. But then her eyes changed, all of a sudden she was focused on something, something very important, an emergency. With the bone in her mouth, Tink walked with a determined pace to find somewhere to stash her bone.  She was serious about finding the perfect place and no place was good enough. Not the nooks in the couches, under the bed or behind the pillow. She had to find that perfect spot to place her bone.

Long story short, she does this all the time and even more now that Chubs is around. Luckily Chubs can care less about those kinds of things. We’ve found bones hidden under blankets, in closets, inside our shoes, under rugs, you name it. Most of the time, she forgets where she hides them. But when she does find it, she’s happy as can be and will only bring it out once we are all asleep. I think it’s quite funny.

We want to hear more places your little buddies has stashed their goodies.

When it came time to leave Tink home alone, it was extremely hard for us to do. She’ll cry and sometimes try to squeeze herself through the door. Sometimes while standing outside the door, we’ll listen through it and hear her screaming and scratching because we were leaving her alone.

So we decided that every time right before we left her alone, we would give her a meal to distract her. This worked really well for a couple days. But, then she caught on to us. But it gets worst. Now every time we give her a meal, she thinks we are about to leave and she doesn’t even want to think about the food. She stays furthest away from her bowl as possible and follows us around the house and sometimes waits infront of the door.

No matter what, it seems like we make crazy decisions for Tink’s food life. During meals we would have to stay in the room with her and encourage her to eat. We’ll rub her back sometimes and say “good Tinky, yaaay!, good girl., mmm, food good”.

Right now, she’s back to putting her head in the plate before it hits the ground. But, the second we walk away, it better be to get comfortable on the couch.

After a couple weeks and several brands of food, we finally found a food our Frenchie Tink will eat. We have tried various brands of dry dog food and she refused to eat most of them, or was excited at first but then stopped eating it. She even started to be picky with wet food and we thought we were never going to find a food to her liking. As for the dry food, she would eat the wet off the kibbles and spit the kibbles out every time. After talking to a few pet store employees as well as other frenchie owners, we learned that it could be the texture of the kibbles and the sensitivity of her little puppy jaws. How could we expect Tink to go from the milky texture of mommy’s milk straight to dry rugged texture of kibbles? Or could we? Tinky was fine with dry kibbles and she was eating them at the breeder’s house until she experienced wet food. She was fine with Nutro Max, but we know how that goes. She liked Avoderm, but it contains iffy avocados and very little protein.

We heard of this brand called Orijen on the internet several times. I checked out the site and next thing you know I was calling Noah’s Ark to ask them if they had any Orijen Puppy in stock, they sure did. We introduced it to Tink as a treat. She gobbled it down without thinking if it was food or not. Then we put a few on a plate to see what she thought about the new food. She liked it, even though it was completely dry.

At this time Tink was pretty much only eating Avoderm wet. So we had to gradually switch to all dry. We actually tried dry a couple times and she still prefers it with some wet food. If we didn’t let her be spoiled, I’m sure she would love Orijen alone. We wanted to find a wet food to switch to because we were over Avoderm and I was scared about the possible effects of Avocados. We did a little more research and decided to try out Nature’s Variety Instinct. Tink loves the chicken, duck & lamb flavors. (We were told that we could switch it up.)

It’s been a full week now with our French bulldog eating Orijen Dry and Instinct Wet. She loves it and we love the fact that she loves it too. Our little Frenchie is so fat now and that makes us VERY happy.

Pet Food Update - Nutro

As we have been hard at work searching for the perfect food for Tink (and with the help of others) we came across this interesting website called Consumer Affairs. There are tons of comments regarding Nutro and it’s negative impact on dogs. Customers are complaining about the quality of Nutro and even linking Nutro to the recent illnesses in their dogs.

All these consumer’s pets coincidently have the same symptoms of drinking excessive water, throwing up and diarrhea. Some consumers are even claiming their pets on Nutro are suffering from a deficiency in white blood cells and have had kidney failures. On our last trip to Petco we noticed the Nutro shelves were almost empty and there was a sign that read “This product may not be available at this time due to manufacturing slow down“, however as I recall there were still bags left on the shelves, it was as if there was a recall but they were going to go ahead and sell the remaining bags. I remember James and I saying good thing we decided not to go with that brand it would suck to come to a store for puppy food and it be out of stock. We did not even consider a possible recall.

However after reading all those consumer complaints I’m starting to second guess the nature of the almost empty shelves. One consumer even stated that she should have known better when her puppy did not want to eat the food. That’s pretty interesting considering Tink did not want to touch this kibble either (however Tink doesn’t want to touch any kibble).

Please take a look at this website and if you are using Nutro and have experienced similar symptoms write a comment hopefully this food will be recalled, I hate to hear about sick dogs, especially when they are getting sick off the food that’s supposed to nurture them and make them healthy.

Here’s a link to Consumer Affairs Nutro Compaints.

10 Minutes later, I read this : FDA Blocks Nutro Pet Food Shipment from Entering the U.S.

WOW! Thanks for the Warning Tati

While looking for the best food to feed our little Frenchie Tinky, we found this great French Bulldog Meetup post titled “How to Grade Your Dog’s Food“. It’s a fantastic post that implements a point system to grade your dog’s food. We decided to put the 3 foods we’ve been giving Tinky to the test. After going through the test ourselves, we found the list of foods that have already been graded. Here’s how the puppy food we’ve tried measured up against each other.

Science Diet Puppy - 80

Looks like Science Diet looses in everything. Not only does it contain by-products and a non-specific animal meat. It contains 2 types of corns, soy bean and salt. However, they did receive extra points for being supported by a nutrition group (The Hills Company) and for having beet pulp.

You may already know how I feel about Science Diet based on my previous post; What is the Right Food to Feed a French Bulldog.

Nutro Maxx Puppy - 84

We loved Nutro because we were sold by the PetSmart/Nutro sales lady. We had a big bag of Science Diet in our cart when she showed us how to read ingredients and things to look for. Mainly she told us to avoid by-products. Now that I think about it, she didn’t even know what a french bulldog was, however we were very naive and ready to learn whatever we could.

Nutro Maxx lost many points on the French Bulldog Meet up grading system as well. They lost points for not having a specific meat (poultry fat). They had 2 of the same grains and lost a little more points for corn and wheat. But they did get 3 points for also containing beet pulp.

Avoderm Puppy - 105

Lisa’s favorite fruit is the avocado and her main concern was having a healthy dog with a shiny coat. Luckily for Avoderm they claimed to give dogs shiny coats and it contains avocados from California. Avoderm only lost points for having 2 of the same grains. The problem is that both of those grains are too high on the list as if they are a majority ingredients. Avoderm did receive points for having fruit, oatmeal and herring meal also. Avoderm is a premium dog food just short of enough protein for a frenchie puppy.

Tink really loves wet Avoderm. But, this test was on the kibbles and we discovered that the wet food has even less protein then the kibbles. Being that protein is the most important part of a French Bulldog’s diet we have decided Avoderm is also not for Tinky.

Dang, off to more puppy food research…

UPDATE: NUTRO RECALL

Lisa and I have been going through the worst frenchie food experience ever. When we first got Tinky, she was healthy and was fine living off kibble dry dog food. However we wanted to give our little princess an awesome meal mixed with a little wet food. BAD IDEA! She literally sucked all the wet food off the kibbles before spitting them all out individually leaving only kibbles in her bowl.

We figured after a while if she was hungry enough she would start eating hard dog food again, so we tried giving her only dry food for a couple meals. Negative. It seems like she just doesn’t like kibbles anymore. Back to mixing, and back to getting the dry dog food spit out. We even counted how many kibbles we placed in her bowl. She would only eat about 3-4 out of 20 of them. We searched for solutions. We were told by a Pet People store worker that we should feed her a dry dog food more palable, tasty. On the same day we were discovering that Science Diet wasn’t a great choice. We thought maybe we can find a kibble Tink likes and is good for her.

While shopping at PetSmart, we were confronted by a Nutro person. She explained to us by-products and suggested a better quality meal like Nutro. However being a nutro employer, she didn’t explain to us how good the others were also. Ignorant to this situation, we thought Nutro was a life saving food that we could switch Tinky over to. While we were there, we picked up a bag of Avoderm as well, just in case she didn’t like the Nutro and we thought Avoderm would be a good choice based on ingredients and the benefits it offered to a healthy skin and coat.

Even with the new dry food options Tink would still only eat the wet food and a couple kibbles. After 10 days of putting Tinky through 3 food brands, (Science Diet, Nutro Max, Avoderm) she finally started to eat Avoderm wet and 5 out of the 20 Avoderm dry kibbles. She’s soooo spoiled. But at this point, we’re just happy she’s eating and not throwing up from a bad stomach. She’s a tough girl.

For the past 2 days, Tinky has been eating Avoderm wet mixed with very little kibbles. I forgot to mention that the only way we were able to get her to eat the food was for us to put it in the microwave. I don’t know if it is the aroma the microwave gives off or if it just taste better hot. But, one thing I’m sure of is the microwave is not good for the containment of essential nutrients in the dog food. Ever since we started heating her meals, she’s been eating the wet food so fast, a few extra kibbles slip past her here and there.

Here’s the worst part, we learned about the Dog Food Analysis, the possible dangers of Avocado to dogs and the lack of protein in Avoderm. So, we decided to switch her again. We heard it takes about 2 weeks for the dog’s previous dog food to fully leave the system. So we don’t really want to switch the food so fast again. We’re going to wait to at least she only has 1 food in her system.

We feel so bad for Tink because we know the dog’s (let alone, a puppy’s) digestive system is so sensitive. We just really want to find a food that is perfect for her with enough protein and hopefully something she will eat in the kibble form. What makes it harder is we can’t tell if and when she has a tummy ache. So far, the only sign of a tummy ache we can find is diarrhea, but all Tink eats is soft food, so all her stools are soft.

Well, off to more puppy food research.

If you have any tips, please let us know!

We want to make sure our French Bulldog Tink had the best food possible. I’ve been doing some research on the popular dog food brand Science Diet because that’s what our breeders were feeding Tink as well as the brand our Vet recommended. Since we posted a blog regarding Science Diet we have gotten many negative feedback, so we decided to dig a little further. Besides finding out that Science Diet has by-products in it, I have also read that the only reason why vets recommend Iams and Science Diet is because the two companies help put them through veterinarian school and are the ones who publish the textbooks they use while in school. The company that provides the vets with these textbooks, research labs and information is The Hill’s Company, which coincidently happens to be the makers of Science Diet.

I also read it is not recommended to trust vets when it comes to nutrition because vets spend very little time on nutrition while in school (some vets don’t spend any time on it whatsoever) and just aren’t qualified to render a good judgment as to what’s good and what’s bad. This is why people need to go to sites like Mordanna’s Dog Food Project (http://www.dogfoodproject.com/) and research for yourself as to what’s good and what’s bad. Or check out Ashley’s Pets Dog Food Info (http://ashleyspets.com/DogFood.html) for juicy veterinarian diet info.

I spent hours surfing through the Dog Food Project and found some very interesting reads about different dog food brands and the veterinarian politics around them. I also discovered an ex-veterinarian journalist named Charles Danten. He pretty much exposes all of the unethical veterinarian nutrition practices and how vets make money off brands like Iams and Science Diet.

Here’s the twist. Tink’s Parents are some of the healthiest adult frenchies we’ve ever seen. They have a good bill of health and have never had any problems. And when we got Tink, she appeared and acted as healthy as a French bulldog pup can be. And they eat Science Diet. hmmm… maybe all this controversy is a myth. It seems the more and more we research anything in the puppy world the more we realize that everyone has a different opinion, the question is who do we believe? Perhaps different brands work better for different dogs, I guess in the end as long as your dog is healthy and happy thats all that matters.