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Posts Tagged ‘random information’

Australia is a fantastic place for dogs – at least if you compare it to Finland, where we came from. One of the advantages is an easy access to butchers scraps, that make excellent and inexpensive dog food. Quite surprisingly, not all people know what excellent food it is! I mentioned “barfing” to a veterinarian, who looked at me with wide open eyes and said she’d never heard of such diet, and a shop keeper asked what we were planning to cook of lamb neck that we got. She said a lot of customers buy them for dogs, but she could not phantom her dog, a German Shepard of all things, to eat raw meat! We told her that raw meat and bones is excellent food, and cooking only makes the bones splinter and create a danger of cutting holes in their intestines, but raw stuff is just the way the nature intended.

BARF comes from words bones and raw food, but as simple as it sounds, there is a whole science behind it. However, it can sound more complicated than what it is – after all, unlike what you think, a piece of meat probably contains more nutrients than any processed dog food you can find on the market shells. (Sometimes when I forget to go to the butchers, I do buy a can of dog food, but cans only. Dry food is mainly useless.)

One thing that clearly tells you how much of the food your dog actually uses, is the size of his poop. I can tell you that the difference between the size of dry food poop to a beef poop is MASSIVE. Most of the dry food comes back literally untouched.

I’m far from expert at this myself yet, but I am convinced that if you have a butcher near by, you should take advantage of his services and ask for some off cuts and scraps for your dogs. Some even give them away, but the others take a dollar or two for them. And it is all usable. (So if you’re tight with money, and you don’t have a dog, there’s a tip for you. Some of the pieces the butchers throw away, look absolutely lip smacking good.) Like my husband said: “A dog never misses out in Australia.” :p

If you want to know more, please check out this FAQ for beginners for example.

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Did you know that dogs don’t sweat? I recently came into an understanding, that it wasn’t such common knowledge as I always thought it was. Dogs don’t have the glands to sweat, and the way they reduce body heat is by panting. The longer their tongue hangs out, the more they reduce heat. Sweating on the other hand, makes the skin damp so that it can sense any movement of air in form of sweat evaporating and thus feeling cool on the skin. Most animals don’t have the ability to actually sense moving air in any other way than pressure on the skin and sense of hair moving, but as their skin stays dry (unless they get wet in water) they don’t have the sense of cool air on the skin. Therefore trying to cool down an animal with a fan is utterly useless, as they won’t know the difference – apart from some animals like horses, that are notorious of their sweat (or foam).

There you have some random information, that I for some reason tend to collect up in my brain a lot…

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