The Katzke Dog Diary

Eowyn’s nickname when she was a little puppy was “Munch Rat” because she chewed on EVERYTHING. She’d chew on furniture. On parts of the house. On walls. On furniture. On pillows. Towels. Bedding. Her food dishes. The inside of the crate. Other dogs in the house. Before she came to live with me, she even once ate my ex-girlfriend’s Battery Operated Boyfriend. (Phone call: “Do you know what YOUR dog did?”)

Finding toys that she stays interested in and can’t destroy in minutes is difficult. It’s basically limited to Kongs, Rawhides, and a few others. There’s a few web stores that offer dog toys in wholesale quantities, but you usually have to buy some absurd quantities (well, yeah, wholesale!) or a set dollar amount before they’ll even take your order, much less give you a discount. And then there’s shipping to pay for.

I joined Amazon Prime this month because it offers free 2nd day shipping on any orders you make for a year. The tradeoff is like Costco — you can buy cheaper bulk quantities of stuff, you can get things a dollar or two (or more) cheaper than you would at a retail store, and you can sometimes find a wider variety and/or backorder without dealing with retail stock-outs. Just be aware that not all things are sold by Amazon Prime, so you might have to pay shipping on some things if you buy them through a 3rd party — and some of the 3rd parties have some serious shipping costs.

Disclaimer/Full Disclosure: The following Amazon URLs have my Amazon Affiliate code embedded in them. If you click them and then purchase something, I will get a share of the purchase price of the things you buy. You will not be charged anything extra. If I do happen to get some, I immediately turn any money I get back into dog treats and split them between my kids and a foster rescue, so you’re really helping the pooches if you do click through. Thanks!

Air Kongs are a great example. Henry’s learning to fetch. It’s been fun with the Air Kongs because they squeak and are interactive. At certain retailers in my area, Air Kongs can go for up to $17. Amazon has them for $11.10. With the free shipping, it’s well worth saving $6-7. And regular Kongs can be had too — Eo’s favorite snacks, XL Black Kongs, will only run you $15 instead of the $19 that PetSmart charges.

A good example with training treats is Zukes Minis. The local store that carries quality, healthy dog treats will have the Peanut Butter variety from time to time in the six ounce bags for $4.29-$5 per bag — Amazon also carries the Chicken and the nigh-unobtainable Salmon.

When you’re prone to dropping a couple hundred bucks a month on the dogs like I am (between vet visits, flea and heartworm preventative, medications (Henry’s Prozac and Eo’s pain meds), every last cent counts… and between christmas gifts and dog stuff, I’ve earned my Amazon Prime membership back before the free trial’s even up.

This is a hotly debated topic among my friends and family, and it’s gotten worse since my roomie’s girlfriend just went to work for PetSmart. Which big, national pet chain do you prefer?

Just given our local examples, the PetSmart is clean, the staff is friendly and adult, the displays are always neat and organized, there’s a lot of beneficial services right in-store, and where they do offer things like cat adoptions, they get the animals locally through a rescue or shelter, not through a puppy mill like the mall store does. They offer grooming, training, veterinary services, and everything else you need right in the store.

PetCo on the other hand always looks like something exploded in the store, and they don’t seem to have enough staff to put it back together. It’s difficult to get to a lot of the products (i.e. crates) that are stacked high on shelves without help, and help is sometimes hard to find. My local store offers only grooming; I don’t personally think it’s a bad thing to limit the services in-store because the staff is very good about referring people to the diferent types of services that are available in the general community. PetCo invites several animal rescues to hold weekly adoptions. PetCo refers people to several veterinarians in the area that I respect highly and guides people away from veterinarians that overcharge or seem to be in it for profits and not the animals. Our local PetCo is about half the size of the local PetSmart but manages to offer the same services — and it offers them in a way that’s good for the animals in most cases. For the most part, instead of being in cages in the aisles, birds are in a separate (soundproofed) aviary room where they don’t have to deal with the stress of people walking by constantly. It’s the little things that seem to matter.

Personally, I stick with whichever one has the products I like best. PetCo carries high-end foods like Solid Gold, Wellness, and several other minor brands, PetSmart does not (with very few exceptions like Royal Canid, but that’s no longer a very good product.) PetCo’s crates are of higher quality and can contain Henry during a panic attack. Henry’s destroyed three plastic and two wire crates from PetSmart. PetCo’s prices are usually more reasonable.

Hotly debated topic, but PetCo has really worked hard to be a better citizen than PetSmart has in a lot of ways… PetSmart provides services through the pet’s entire lifetime at a mediocre level whereas PetCo educates people about services that are already available through other small businesses in the community. While the former might be best for new pet owners, I respect the latter a lot coming from a large, national company.

Fruitables were developed by a clinician/nutritionist at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine, and I was given a couple of samples by a friend. I’m happy to report that the kids loved them to a tail-wagging extreme.

When looking at training treats, there’s three things I look at. The first is ingredients and caloric content. (Pupperoni? Bad. Our usual 100% dried chicken chips / cheap lunch meat? Good.) The second is smell. The smell of the treat has to be SUPER DUPER so that the kids will want them even when they can’t see them. Remember, I’m training a couple of dogs that are mixed hounds at best and exclusively sighthound at worst. The final thing is portability. This is where the wonderful cheap lunch meat, which is usually well-regarded, fails — it’s hard to separate the pieces, it’s hard to control how much I have with me in my training pouch, and if left out or on a long training “exercise” (aka a day at the office for public desensitization / socialization) … well, it’s better if you have a refrigerator, ifyaknowwhatImean.

If you can’t find them at your local pet store yet, you can order them from Amazon.com. There’s several varieties available:

• Pumpkin & Blueberry
• Pumpkin & Banana
• Pumpkin & Apple
• Pumpkin & Graham
• Canned Dry Food Supplement – For mixing with / supplementing your dog’s dry food.

My only wish, which has been communicated back to to Dr. Bauer, is for smaller bits. The 9 calorie cookies are great, but it was too easy to go through them quickly. I ended up (approximately) quartering the cookies for our training session. He responded to my email by saying that they had heard that (and also had found in the process that birds greatly enjoy the treats) and were planning to produce something along those lines in the future.

Cleaning out a few product reviews that I’ve had stacked up in the wings… we’ve made some good progress in training, but I’m busy with some consulting projects at the moment and can’t find time to write it up. While we wait…

I picked up this Delta shower head at Home Depot for $49 last month. Money well spent. It’s winter here in Texas now (for the northerners in the audience — that means it’s 80F during the day and gets down to a bone-chilling mid-50s F during the night) and that means that the dogs get bathed inside because their human’s turned into a wuss.

I’m a little skeptical of the amount of plastic that’s in it’s construction — ok, it’s entirely plastic — but we’ll see how it holds up over time. Our water’s REALLY high in salts and minerals. There’s three inline filter screens, and the main/default water stream comes from little rubberized jets which don’t seem to be susceptible so far to the amazing clogging power of central Texas aquifer water.

On the other hand, the six foot no-kink cord is nice, and it’s very refreshing to be able to rinse the dogs off completely without having to use cups and splashes and then still having their coats be half-full of shampoo when we get out of the shower. It’s also made cleaning the inevitable small mountain of fuzz, mud, and dog hair that builds up on every surface in the shower very, very easy.

If you are a dog owner and you do NOT have this shower head or something similar for bathing the mutts, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

In my original review of the Everlasting Treat Ball, I pointed out that a large, smart dog could get the treats out by chewing the long way on the ball itself and would then very rapidly consume the treat.

At ~ 60 lbs, Henry is a “large” dog (although he’s at least fifteen pounds short of Eowyn), but (bless his heart) he wouldn’t qualify in anyone’s book as “smart.” The Large Everlasting Treat Ball (with both “ends” filled with Chicken refills) occupied his exclusive attention for three entire days with him cooped up in his crate. In fact, it’s one of the few things (besides a beef bone, which I won’t leave him alone with because he’ll eat the entire thing) that has kept him somewhat happy in the crate by himself.

Save the Pit Bull, Save The World has a review up of a Book about training reactive dogs that I’ve been considering buying for Eowyn.

I purchased an Everlasting Treat Ball (comes with one treat) today at PetSmart for Eowyn. Unfortunately, this product doesn’t live up to it’s name.

The Everlasting Treat Ball is a soft blue jelly-like item that you can slip an “everlasting treat” into. The everlasting treats are about the size of clay pigeons and are made up of edible, digestable stuff that’s fairly hard — think an edible Nylabone or a Greenie or something of that nature.

Eowyn sniffed the treat and loved it. Unfortunately, she figured out in under a minute that if she chewed on the holder the long way, the treat would pop out and she could chew on it directly. So that I could fully review it, I purchased two ‘refills’ for the top of the ball, and since you can put two in at a time, I did so to see if she could get THEM out too. Bad news — it’s far too easy for a smart dog.

My advice: Just get the fillers themselves, and skip the holder ball.