Monday, May 25, 2009 , lunch time

No More Homeless Pets Conference

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary has just announced that enrollment is open for the 2009 edition of the No More Homeless Pets Conference, held annually in Las Vegas.  It’s a great chance to mingle with others who share your goals and values, and you’ll definitely come away from the conference refreshed and eager to put the things you’ve learned into action in your own community.  Best Friends is actually offering a number of different conferences/workshops in 2009, including quite a few of their world-renowned, “How to Start an Animal Sanctuary” workshop.  At one time they offered this workshop once a year, but it was so popular that added more and more of them, and they still quickly sell-out!  This workshop gave me the knowledge I needed to start Wee Paws—it taught me how to register as a nonprofit, how to get the proper license for my community, and it helped me work out a relationship with a veterinarian.  The relationship with the vet and her regular visits to our home (well, either she visits or one of the vet techs does) then got us the approval we needed to become part of Petfinder.  From there it required a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone type work, but we were able to find donations of food and litter because we’d established a good reputation.  I highly recommend this workshop to anyone who has a dream about having their own sanctuary… I know there are a lot of you.  You won’t have any regrets.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/25 at 01:15 PM
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Sunday, May 24, 2009 , early evening

Cat food and cat litter: coupons for sale

I’m finally getting around to trying to clear out a backlog of free cat food and free cat litter coupons that we’ve acquired over the last couple of years.  I don’t want it to seem like I don’t need these items, because I do, but in this case they aren’t my preferred products.  The litter, for example, is the absorbent crystal silica gel litter, which our cats aren’t used to using, so I’d rather trade it for cash and buy the litter we normally use.  The same with the canned cat food—it’s a great brand but really expensive compared to the cost of making homemade.  A case of 24 cans of cat food lasts us about two and a half days, whereas the comparable amount of raw chicken (in terms of dollars) will buy enough meat to last us more than 7 days.  So, let me tell you what I’ve got:

- coupons for free cases of 24 x 5.5 oz. cans of Merrick cat food.  These cases sell for upwards of $35 online, and locally, we can buy them for about $33.  I’ve heard of someone in a different part of the country who only pays $25/case (freight shipping differences, I guess), so these coupons are worth up to $35 each, depending on where you live.  You can only redeem them in a retail pet food store and not online, so make sure someone in your area stocks this food before you decide to try it.  It’s excellent, excellent food, and I think it’s probably almost as good as homemade if you can afford to feed it to your cats.  The food looks great, it smells delicious… I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it myself.  I’ll sell the food case coupons for $22/each, which I know isn’t a huge bargain for some of you, but might represent a $13 savings per case for someone else.  Just email me and tell me how many you want (I’ve got a couple dozen of them), and I’ll send you a bill for them via PayPal.  I’ll ship them for free, of course.

- coupons for free 8 lb. jugs of Precious Cat Senior or Precious Cat Long-Haired cat litter.  Both of these litters are made of biodegradeable silica gel crystals, and they also contain an herb which helps attract cats to the litterbox (it’s true, it really does work).  The silica crystals discourage the growth of harmful bacterias and molds, so they’re good for older cats or long-haired cats, both of which can be prone to urinary tract infections from contact with contaminated litter.  You can use these litters for any cat, of course… they’re supposed to be low-tracking, which I always like.  These were given to us by someone who’d in turn received them and couldn’t use them, and I’d rather use the cash to trade for the other Dr. Elsey’s products that I use, specifically, Precious Cat Ultra.  I’ve got quite a few of these coupons, and the product retails for between $14 and $21—I’ll sell them for $10 each, with free shipping.

One other thing… I’ve got numerous copies of DVDs put out by Animal Planet to help new pet owners.  The cat DVD is called “Be Your Cat’s Meow: A First Guide to Cat Care”, and the dog DVD is titled, “Bark Smarts:  Caring for your New Best Friend.”  I haven’t watched either of these DVDs, so I can’t vouch for what’s on them, but I hope it’s helpful tips for new pet owners!  If you’re just curious about it, or a collector of stuff with the “Animal Planet” logo, I’ll sell these DVDs for $1 each, plus $2 shipping.  The shipping charge (postage and new padded envelope) should cover multiple copies of DVDs, and I’m sure I could probably get at least 4 DVDs shipping for the one $2 price.  Share with a friend!  Donate them to a shelter!  I’ve got tons of them and I’m going to have to start using them for coasters soon if you don’t take them.

For any of these items, email me at the link above and let me know what you want, and I’ll send you a bill via PayPal (please include your PayPal email address so I know where to send the bill).  If this stuff doesn’t sell, it’s going on eBay and I’m raising the prices!  Don’t forget, we’ve still got a massage chair to sell, too.  Out of curiosity, are there any of you who’d be interested in purchasing a new iJoy chair from us in lieu of the more expensive type of chair I mentioned in a previous entry?  We could sell you a new iJoy 130 or 550, shipped to your home, for about $600.  If that sounds like a deal, let me know.  If you want to haggle, feel free!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/24 at 07:20 PM
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Trader Joe’s dog and cat food

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Trader Joe’s lately.  We started doing it with the mindset of “quality over quantity”, but quickly found out they’ve got pretty good prices on many things.  They’ve also got the variety that we crave so much, and since we started to shop there fairly regularly a couple of months ago, we’ve been almost entirely vegetarian, eating meat perhaps once a month when we have a craving for something specific (check Flippy’s blog for some of our favourite TJ’s stuff).  I guess I was bound to end up in their pet food aisle one day, reading labels and checking prices, and I was pretty impressed by what I found.  Their canned dog food contains meat, lots of identifiable meat (from chicken to lamb to beef) and none of those nasty “wheat middlings” or “corn gluten”.  It’s not human grade food, and it still looks/smells like dog food, but the label is better than anything you’ll read from Alpo or Pedigree or Iams, and the food is less expensive.  A 20 oz. can is 99 cents, whereas that’s often the regular price of a 13 oz. can of crappier food.  If you used canned dog food for anything, even snacks or pilling, I think this food is a good buy.

I also checked out the dry dog food, and if you just consider the cost (approx. $1/lb.) it’s good food.  Nothing fancy, and it won’t hold up if you’re comparing it to Solid Gold or Wellness or something more in the $3/lb. range.  However, it again contains a small number of ingredients, and is primarily made of chicken and chicken meal.  The senior food contains small amounts of glucosamine, chondroitin, and omega 3 & 6 fatty acids… not enough to truly count as a sole source of those things, but at least they’re making an effort.  In contrast, I picked up a cheap bag of store brand dog food at Target and the ingredient list is horrifying: beet pulp, animal fat, corn, soy, wheat, bone meal, and just about anything and everything that isn’t edible by humans.  If you’re on a budget and feeding a dry dog food, I think you can feed the TJ’s brand without guilt.  Our two large dogs have always eaten dry food as their main diet (simply because of the expense of feeding raw/homemade to 200 lbs. of dog), but I always supplement the food with something like eggs, cheese, tofu, sweet potato, raw chicken wings, or whatever leftovers we don’t feel like eating (the dogs enjoy both spaghetti and chili).  While I’d prefer to be feeding them Wellness Super 5 Mix or something similar, I feel okay about the TJ’s food.

Probably the best of TJ’s pet foods is their canned cat food.  All meat, no by-products, no carbs, and only 59 cents per 5.5. oz. can.  It might be the best hidden cat food bargain available, although again, it’s not anything like Merrick or Spot’s Stew or homemade (where the ingredients are human grade and identifiable).  TJ’s also has canned tuna made just for cats, and the only ingredients are tuna and water.  It’s terribly stinky stuff, and so dark that it must be made with unimaginable parts of the fish, but it is tuna!  The label claims it’s a complete diet, although I can’t find any references to added taurine or other vitamins, so I think I’d just feed it as an occasional treat and not as a sole food.

Sadly, there seems to be a stinker in the TJ’s pet food family: the dry cat kibble.  It doesn’t have a perfect list of ingredients (there are some corn products), but it starts with chicken and chicken meal, so that makes it better than any of the staple cat foods you find on grocery store shelves (stuff like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix, Cat Chow, etc.).  I bought a bag to use for the “kibble hunts” we do a couple of times a week, and it was a disaster: almost every cat got diarrhea from eating about a tablespoon of this food, and Chelsea refused to eat it completely (smart cat).  Our cats seem to have pretty strong stomachs because they eat both homemade and whatever we’ve had donated, so eating a new kibble isn’t an unusual thing, but we’ve never seen this kind of stomach upset before.  The only cat it didn’t seem to bother was our foster cat, Kevin, but after a couple more small servings of it even he started to have the runs.  I thought of using up the rest of the bag by feeding our porch cats with it but couldn’t bring myself to do it because of all the bad reactions we’d seen amongst our own cats, so the bag still sits in a cabinet, open and unused.  I’m going to contact TJ’s about it in case there’s a problem with the case lot but I can’t find anyone else reporting problems about it… I think our cats just can’t eat it. 

I’d really like to hear from anyone else who’s fed Trader Joe’s dry cat food (I bought the chicken flavour), to find out if you had the same experience.  I don’t care if you find this entry two years from now, I still want to know!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/24 at 08:23 AM
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Friday, May 22, 2009 , mid-afternoon

Djupa Andetag

This isn’t particularly on-topic regarding anything… just something running through my head.  When I was about 12 years old I did a fairly good job of teaching myself Swedish (languages being the one single thing I seem to be able to pick up at the drop of a hat).  I had quite a few penpals in Sweden at the time, although they wanted to practice their English in letters, so I read Swedish gossip mags and listened to a lot of Swedish music.  A few days ago I came across a Swedish music video on YouTube and as I listened to it, I was shocked/thrilled at how much of it I still understood.  My brain may be turning into Swiss cheese, and my English words often evade me, but I guess I’ll just plan on relocating to Stockholm when I’ve totally lost the ability to make myself understood in North America.  I thought I’d post the video I was watching, because I find it so calming, and because it contains an expression I’ve been comforting myself a lot with lately, “djupa andetag”.  Oh, if you teach yourself Swedish and listen to the song 1035 times while standing on one foot and juggling a banded krait, you’ll discover the darkest secrets of Flippy and me, heh.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/22 at 03:33 PM
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Remembering Bonnie Underfoot

Join me over at the 2Tabby’s blog to give condolences to Victor Tabbycat and Tabbymom Jen on the one year anniversary of the loss of Bonnie Underfoot.  Bonnie was one of those cats who tries to fight off your friendly advances, which just makes you love them all the more.  While visiting, you can also ooh and aah at the beautiful Nina, who now keeps Victor company.  I hope your day will be full of good memories and catnip, Victor and Jen! (sure, Jen… go ahead and roll in the catnip.  What can it hurt?)

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/22 at 03:17 PM
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Thursday, May 21, 2009 , late afternoon

When did you first start to become involved in charitable work?

Sigh… another bizarre accusation tossed my way this week came from someone I’ve known for about five years, and who wanted to know why I only helped animals and not people.  It’s a stupid question, (surprise!), because about half of the time that I help animals I’m also helping a person.  When we fostered those two cats in March and April, it was so their families wouldn’t have to relinquish them to a shelter, and so their daughter wouldn’t have to lose her beloved pets.  When we adopted Missy Mae, it was so a woman with cancer could die in peace.  When we adopted Chelsea and Jackson, it was so a grieving daughter would know her dead mother’s cats wouldn’t have to be euthanized.  When we bottle fed Madison (and the late Miles), it was so the family who found them could stop worrying about killing them through lack of experience, and they looked forward to the day when they could take their new babies home after I’d weaned and socialized them.  We once spent a couple of weeks driving 20 miles to a casino on the outskirts of town to try to trap a stray cat for an elderly woman who wanted to adopt it.  Animal control was always trying to trap the cat as feral (and have it euthanized), and this 80 year old woman was in love with the cat and wanted to give it a good home.  The cat hated our trapping attempts, and they exhausted us, so believe me, I did this to make an old lady happy and not to make the cat happy.

Those examples aside, I find it rather obnoxious that someone who’s known me for just a few years would slap me with the “loves animals more than people” moniker.  (Well, I have to say that generally speaking, I do love animals more than people, and every day I’m given more and more reasons to feel that way.)  The truth is, I started doing charity work when I was 15 years old, and I helped the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in their fundraisers, and also made regular visits to kids my age who were hospitalized.  I have a nice letter of thanks from the CCFF for a special project I developed for them (I hooked up two performing artists I was friends with and together, they wrote and released a fundraising album), so maybe I’ll dig that up and post a pic of it to my Flickr album.  I also still have bunches of old letters from penpals who had CF.  The problem with working with teenage cystic fibrosis patients at that time was that they all died.  All of them.  I’d make a new friend, and in a few months, I’d be at a funeral.  I met my first adorable boyfriend through CCFF, and still remember my first kiss from him, when he leaned over and kissed me while we sat in his car.  I also remember attending his funeral a few years later. 

My work with cystic fibrosis gave me good preparation for when I moved to the United States at the height of the AIDs epidemic.  I personally provided home hospice care to three men who were in their dying months… all of them I’d known before their diagnosis.  They were my friends.  I learned how to flush pic lines with heparin and administer bronch treatments and I did a lot of wishing that time would slow down so a cure would be found.  Again, I went to a lot of funerals, some extra upsetting because the Catholic church was going through a period when they didn’t want gay men with AIDS to have their funeral mass in the church (at the very least, the Priest would refuse to perform it, and you’d be lucky to get a deacon). 

I can think of other work I’ve done only for the benefit of humans.  I started a nonprofit agency in New Mexico called “Albuquerque ABCs”, whose purpose was to provide free speech therapy services to under served (i.e. impoverished) families.  Going back about twenty years, just after I’d come out of the closet, I volunteered for a gay rights group and gave talks at Toronto high schools about how it felt to be gay and lesbian and not accepted, and how kids could make their closeted and uncloseted classmates feel safer and more welcomed.  It was the beginning of the era of teaching tolerance to school kids, and it was quite a lot of fun.

I dabbled in animal welfare issues back in Canada, when I owned my retail store where I sold bird supplies.  People often brought me injured wild birds, like doves and jays, and with the help of a vet I learned to patch them up, feed them back to health, and release them.  Some were raised from eggs and ended up as odd pets… I had a mourning dove and a sparrow as pets at one time.  I never got back into animal work again until over a decade had passed, and I was in San Francisco and had free time on my hands.  I’ve just come out of a biomedical program at University and loved medicine, but I wasn’t too sure I was thrilled with human patients (so many of whom cause their own problems).  I started to volunteer at the infirmary of the SFSPCA, and I was instantly hooked.  All I’ve ever wanted to do since that first day was animal rescue and rehab.  My sister is lucky in that she lives near a wildlife sanctuary, and she’s volunteered there often and learned to raise rabbits, deer, raccoons, and even bats (I’m so envious about the bats… I love bats!)  When we moved to Las Vegas we deliberately chose a spot on the outskirts of town, near a farm/bird sanctuary, but the setup is quite poor and volunteering is difficult.  When the vet started to send us more and more orphaned kittens and elderly cats who needed homes, I figured it was a sign I should just work with cats.  I’m happy I listened, because it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.  Flippy and I have a lot of stress in our life because of health and financial issues, but every day the cats make us laugh a dozen times or more, and they all keep us up and active.

I saw my parents volunteering from the time I was born, so it seems only natural to me to do.  I’ve helped “Mommy bloggers” by designing their websites for free, I’ve helped raise funds to pay medical expenses for people without healthcare.  I do what I’m able to do with the energy I have and the skills I’ve developed.  In contrast, my parents have been delivering Wheels on Meals to the elderly for years (and they always bring along pet food if they know the person has a pet), and my Mom used to belong to a Canadian group which provided in-home services to elderly and disabled people (services like meal preparation, doing the laundry, washing floors, etc.).  My parents’ life is dominated by volunteer work within their community—they make newcomers to the area feel welcomed, they organize day trips for the retirees… they keep busy.  I’m really proud of how my parents and family members have given back so much.  I think we’d all feel really empty if we weren’t giving of our time in some way or form.

So, what’s your personal experience with volunteer work?  When did you start?  Were you influenced by your family?  Which experience have you enjoyed the most?  My “dream charity” is one where I help senior citizens keep pets by taking care of all the grooming/feeding/veterinary expenses and visits, so the pet owner only has to enjoy the company of their pet without worrying about what will happen if an emergency arises.  If the pet owner had to be hospitalized, my charity would foster the pet until the owner returned home, and if that didn’t happen, would guarantee to find a new, loving home for the animal.  I’m still a long way from getting to a point where I can build a charity like this, but it will happen one day.  I’ve made such great contacts just through Wee Paws that the help and support will be there, once I’m settled in a spot where I want to stay.  Please share your volunteering experiences and ideas!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/21 at 05:09 PM
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Sunday, May 17, 2009 , early afternoon

Someone accused us of “stealing” people’s pets, LOL

So, the nuts keep coming out of the woodwork, and today one of Flippy’s family accused us of stealing other people’s pets because we take in strays from our front porch.  Let’s discuss the cats we’ve taken in from outside, shall we?

The first cat was Frank, approximately 2+ years old, unneutered, covered in scars and bloody wounds after possibly being hit by a car.  He was as thin as can be, his coat was in such poor condition that it was falling out, and he had no microchip or collar.  If he was someone’s pet, he was either so poorly cared for that he was practically abused, or he’d been lost for so long that no one would still be looking for him (good luck finding your lost “black cat”).  Letting an unneutered male cat wander a neighbourhood near a major freeway?  I think that’s a big problem.  I called our city shelter and they said any cat I brought in that needed medical care would be immediately euthanized, so of course I didn’t take him there.  Frank needed to be neutered, needed two toes amputated, and it took him quite a while to adjust to living with people.  Someone’s beloved pet that we stole?  Anyone taking bets on that?

The second cat was one we named Stewie.  He was thin and dirty, but adorable, and seemed healthy.  He had no collar or microchip.  Trying to be good citizens, we took him to our local shelter, and said that if no one claimed him, we would adopt him.  He was dead within a couple of weeks.  No one at the shelter will tell us what happened, but needless to say, no one claimed him.  He would still be alive if we hadn’t trusted our local shelter system with him (the same system that was shut down by the Humane Society about a year later for gross negligence).

The third cat we took in from our front porch was Rory, a six week old kitten who had obviously been left there deliberately.  I’m quite sure she was put there by a family down the street, whose kids knew we had cats.  Leaving a terrified six week old kitten on a stranger’s porch?  Yep, that’s a sign of a great pet owner.

The fourth cat we took in from outside was Dobby, also approximately 6 weeks old and pretty much feral.  After two years living inside with us, Dobby is still semi-feral—we can touch her back occasionally, she shows up for meals, and we can NEVER pick her up.  When she recently seemed to have a bladder infection, the vet sent home antibiotics because we can’t catch her to take her in for a checkup.  Someone’s beloved pet?  Ha!  She had no experience with people prior to us trapping her (it took a couple of weeks), and I’ve often wondered what happened to her siblings.

The fifth and final cat we took in was Kevin/Cody, who I fed outside from September of last year until about April, when I gained his trust and and was finally able to touch him and bring him inside.  Before I could approach him, he’d spend the days sleeping in our neighbour’s backyard in the shell of an old Mustang, and then he’d come eat once I’d put the food down and returned inside.  He’s a great cat, but again, no microchip, no collar, and most importantly, he has an eartip.  The morons who accused us of stealing people’s pets (as an aside, I’m actually starting to realize that it’s true: 50% of the population does have an IQ of under 100) I’m sure have no idea what an eartip is, but I know the animal lovers reading this do.  There’s a bird and farm sanctuary located less than a mile from our house (I hear the peacocks every morning around 5am), and the place has literally dozens of abandoned cats.  I’m sure Kevin came from a managed colony, and found our feeding station during his wanderings.

In summary, of the five cats we’ve actually taken off the streets, one is dead, and two have been adopted.  That leaves us with two “stolen” cats—a wild female torti (‘nuff said about temperament of that one), and Frank, an older male with a tendency to bite me and draw blood.  The line to adopt these two starts over there, and I’m sure it will be winding around the block!

I’m not an idiot (unlike some people).  Before we ever took any cat off the streets, I consulted with two major Nevada animal welfare organizations about the legalities of trapping/rehoming.  Both told me that a cat without a collar and without a microchip is fair game to take off the streets, and both recommended that I not take these cats to the city shelter because of the high kill rate.  Both organizations commended me for my willingness to get involved, too.  Some of us contribute to society by trying to make it a better, safer, happier place for both animals and people, and other people contribute by buying themselves new baseball bats.  To each his own, but I sleep with a clear conscience.  We own a universal microchip scanner (donated!), so checking for a chip is as easy as waving the scanner over the cat while it eats. 

I also want to write about the cats we haven’t taken off the streets, but have fed.  There’s a cat from up the street who comes by occasionally, and who seems to lack ID but I know where he lives and leave him alone.  There was a cat named Chloe who had a collar and ID, so I called her owner, and the woman was surprised her cat had travelled so far.  The cat wasn’t allowed indoors anymore because it had “scratched the baby”, so I talked to the woman and told her about Soft Paws, and even said that declawing was a far better option than letting her black cat wander near the freeway.  I never saw Chloe again, and I hope her tale had a happy ending.  There was one other cat, a really pretty longhaired tortie who lacked ID and a chip, but who I’d never seen before and who seemed to be in extremely good health with a shiny coat.  I took one of those plastic collars you see on cats in shelters (the disposable, adhesive kind you can write on with a Sharpie), and I put a collar on the cat with a note: “If this is your cat, please put ID on it or microchip it.  If Animal Control finds this cat, please call (our phone number)”.  I never saw that cat again either.

Most of the cats we have at Wee Paws have come to us from our vet’s office, either as orphaned kittens, or as adults scheduled to be euthanized because their owners died and the rest of the family didn’t want to take responsibility for them.  There’s also Missy Mae, who was a stray who’d been abandoned at an apartment complex in another part of town, and whose caretaker died of pancreatic cancer.  There are actually people slamming me because I helped a woman with pancreatic cancer die with peace of mind—I know the woman was grateful, because she cried with happiness when she thanked me via telephone.  She told me that as long as her cat was safe, she could die without worry.  What a terrible person I am to help someone near death resolve their biggest worry… I could have spent that time and money getting my nails done!

To put this all in perspective, these accusations come from people who think dogs should live outside (even when it’s 110 degrees, which is actually illegal), who are disgusted by the thought of animals sleeping in bed with people, and who euthanize their pets to avoid expenses.  The person who equated our rescue work with theft has an unspayed female dog who’s about 7 years old now, and that dog’s pretty much doomed to get mammary cancer or pyometra.  As soon as it gets sick, that dog will be put to sleep faster than you can snap your fingers.  The worst part is that we gave the owner of that dog a certificate to get the dog spayed for $25, but he was “too busy” to get around to doing that.  He hasn’t done it even though it’s illegal to have an unspayed dog in Las Vegas without a breeder’s license… oh, how I’d love for him to get fined, but that would require his dog getting picked up by Animal Control, and I’m sure he wouldn’t want to pay the $150 ticket.  As the guy said today on the phone, “it’s only an animal”.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/17 at 02:48 PM
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Monday, May 04, 2009 , late morning

The adorable Slow Loris

I’m sure you’ve all been talking about the Slow Loris for months without my knowledge, but just in case you missed the boat on this adorable creature like I did, here’s the cutest video I’ve ever seen.  Yes, I think it’s even cuter than kittens:

I was interested in knowing more about the Slow Loris, and found the website of an Australian researcher who’s raising an orphaned baby Loris.  Turns out the Loris is venomous, which might put a small crimp in my plans to have a whole houseful of them.  The Loris is an endangered species due to habitat destruction and its use in Asian medicine.  There’s a lot to love about Asian culture in general, but wow, I sure wish they’d use more Viagra and less tiger penis, for example.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/04 at 11:14 AM
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009 , the wee hours

Support Wee Paws: buy our AcuTouch Massage Chair!

Wee Paws has had an HT-7450 Zero Gravity Massage chair donated by the Human Touch Technology company.  It was actually more of a trade than a donation, but the result is the same, so we’re selling a brand new HT-7450 as a Wee Paws fundraiser.  The chair is available in your choice of brown or black leather, and it will be shipped directly from the HTT factory with all applicable warranties and such (you can read about the chair and see photos by following the link above).  The chair sells for $3299 from HTT, but other stores price it as high at $3999, so it’s a pretty darn nice chair.  I know everyone is hurting because of the economy right now, and the last thing most of us need are luxuries, but if you’ve ever considered purchasing this sort of thing, please email me and make us an offer!  Many years ago we bought a much more basic massage chair for wholesale cost at a chiropractic convention and it’s been wonderful for aches, pains, and everyday stress.  It’s also held up really well, and still going strong after at least six years of regular use.

Later this evening I’m going to post about some more items I have for sale, specifically, coupons for free bags of cat litter and free cases of cat food, so I hope you’ll check back.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 04/28 at 02:00 AM
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You’d think I’d be better at this by now

I just can’t seem to get back into regular blogging, no matter how hard I try.  It’s not from lack of topics, as I compose a blog entry in my head almost daily—I just never get around to actually writing it down!  We’ve had a few bumps in the road over the last few weeks, too… we lost our Internet connection for over a week, and the server this blog is hosted on was down for about three or four days.  I don’t even know if anyone is still reading, but figure I might at least get a visitor who’s lost :) 

All the creatures and humans here are doing well, although Eli, our 13 year old German shepherd, is starting to really show her age.  She’s lively and happy, but is having a lot of trouble with her back legs due to arthritis and muscle atrophy.  I inadvertently exacerbated the problem by stopping her access to the second floor of the house a year ago, when she started to have a leaky bladder.  The incontinence was so bad that she would just leak urine when she walked around, and it was almost impossible to keep track of the leaks on the carpet to clean them, so I kept her downstairs.  We eventually got her on Proin, which fixed her bladder problems completely, but by that time she’d trained herself to not go upstairs and I didn’t really think anything of it.  In retrospect, the stairs were great exercise for her hind legs.  I made her leg problems worse last fall when I removed the doggie door (the cats kept going outside)—when she used the door, she had to lift her hind legs over a high step, and I think that helped keep her limber.  Now she even stumbles slightly just walking over the track for the sliding door.  Her weight had dropped about 15 pounds during her last wellness exam, and I’m pretty sure that’s entirely a loss of muscle mass.  The good news is that she still loves to run around the yard with Dante, and rarely misses a chance to ask me to throw a ball for her to fetch.  Rimadyl has been great for her, and when she’s on it she’s vastly more agile and less prone to stumbling.  Flippy suggested today that it might be time to see about getting Eli a cart to help support her back legs, and it’s definitely something for us to consider if the problem seems irreparable.  Right now I’m still hoping I might help build those rear leg muscles back up by getting Eli back on the stairs a couple of times a day.  I wish she liked the pool—I’d happily deal with cleaning dog hair out of the pool filters if I could get Eli to use the pool for exercise.  I’ve been trying to get her in it for years, though, and she always refuses to go beyond the first step.  When Eli was about 10 weeks old we spent a lot of time at Laguna Beach and she just hated the waves and getting her feet wet, so she’s never been a dog who likes water.

Other than Rimadyl, the one thing which makes a big difference in Eli’s agility is Dasuquin.  If you’ve got a dog on Cosequin, you might want to consider making a switch to Dasuquin, which seems to be just a little bit more effective for a similar price.  Eli’s been on glucosamine and chondroitin supplements for most of her life, and I’m positive they helped hold off these problems.  I’ve seen a couple of the older cats start to move around more after putting them on Dasuquin, too.  Use it as a preventative if you’re able, but better late than never.

Speaking of cats, I’m still anxiously awaiting my first set of bottle-babies in two years.  I’ve told the vet’s office that I’m willing and able to take on the next litter which is brought to them, and while I don’t wish any kittens to be orphaned/abandoned, I’ll be happy to blog about any that I’m lucky enough to care for.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 04/28 at 01:27 AM
The Litterbox • (7) Comments • Permalink
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