Today I’m beginning a section on dog food, and I expect it to become an ongoing theme on this website.

Dog food? On a dog training website?

You bet!

The many complex relationships between food, behavior, and health are well known in the world of humans. They are perhaps less well known in the canine world, but they are nonetheless well documented, and there is getting to be a lot more interest in them.

For a long time, I have fed the best dog food I could find and afford, and I’ve made my own dog and cat food off and on for years. By and large I avoid processed food for myself, and so it only makes sense to do the same for the animals I am responsible for.

But actually, it never crossed my mind to write about dog food on this website.

Not until Marley came into my life, or at least my cyber-life. We live on different continents.

Soon I will write the story of this puppy, which convinced me that if we want a good relationship with our dogs, we need to be aware of what they eat and we need to pay attention to how it might be affecting their behavior.

I’m writing mostly on the blog now, as it’s so much easier in terms of automatically updating the menus and also being found more easily by other bloggers and websites. So do keep an eye on this section for more information on dog food! I will be reviewing books and ebooks, telling stories, and more.

Here’s a link to a website about what’s in commercial dog foods (warning, it’s ghastly) and how to make your own dog food. 

[tags]dogs, dog food, dog behavior, dog food allergies[/tags]

“Don’t let your dog die young!” is the ominous subtitle of Dog Food Secrets, an 82-page downloadable ebook by Andrew Lewis. It didn’t surprise me to see this grim warning after having read the sales page for the ebook, with bright red headlines warning “Commercial Dog Food is Killing Your Dog,” “Is Your Dog a Cannibal? Think Again…” and more.

(I am no stranger to the horrendous ingredients in much commercial pet food, and I’m careful to feed the higher quality dry dog foods to my own dogs. At times I’ve prepared much or even all of their dogfood, though I’ve been lazy about this lately. I got this ebook partly to reconsider making more of my own dog food again.)

As I opened Dog Food Secrets, I wondered what would the ebook be like? Would it be something I could recommend to my readers? I hoped so, as the need for reliable dog food information is great. Often ebooks are not written by the same person who creates the sales page. If the ebook carried on in the same vein, I wasn’t sure how effective it would be in helping people make the switch to healthier dog foods. Changing any habit takes some time.

I was encouraged by a sentence near the start of the book: “Just as you seek balance in your dog’s diet, we sought the balance in the available research, and present it to you here, in the most concise fashion.”

And I did feel that the ebook succeeded quite well in that promise. The first half of the book is a concise and clearly written overview of canine nutritional needs, and then it’s followed by a variety of dog food recipes you can cook at home. The ebook ends with useful data in Appendices, such as feeding recommendations.

You can get Dog Food Secrets here. I’m glad I did.

I must admit that I am an ebook addict! With no desire to give up my addiction. Combine that with being fascinated by all aspects of dog training, and you can see why I review so many dog training ebooks.

Some are great, some are junk, and I expect to be reviewing plenty more of them in the future.

With an ebook, you can download it immediately. You can read it on your computer or print it out. Since I am always reading whatever is in front of me, I am quite happy to read on my computer. But I realize many people aren’t, and you can print out whatever parts you want. This is a feature I really like; often I only print out a few pages.

I don’t think ebooks will ever replace physical books. But if you live in a place where it isn’t always easy to get the physical products quickly, or if you want information right now as we so often do when dealing with dog training problems, then ebooks are great! Almost all use the Adobe Acrobat .PDF format.

[tags]dogs, dog training ebooks[/tags]

This video shows some of the ways you can housetrain a puppy using a clicker:

[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=wsSsxU12xGU[/video]