Dogs in the News

There were 3 news stories in the last couple days that have caught my eye.

1. A boy scout lost for 3 days in the woods down in the States was found by an SAR dog;
2. A bomb detection dog was just killed in Afghanistan while sniffing out bombs;
3. Millions of cans of dog food have been recalled throughout North America of all different price points because of one ingredient - wheat gluten.

The point of this post is going to be to try to show naysayers that dogs are indeed important to the fabric of society.

The boy scout had been missing for 3 days - and it was a search and rescue dog named Gandalf who sniffed him out less than 1 mile from where he'd become lost - they'd been searching over 1000's of acres for the little rat bastard, and he'd hidden himself in a bunch of rocks where no one would have found him - but that dog could smell him - so that's how they found him. And I bet his family are glad that such a thing like search and rescue dogs actually exist.

Over in Afghanistan a bomb sniffing dog was killed yesterday sniffing out bombs so that an area could be declared walkable - his handler was also injured - but not killed. I guess dogs are used extensively like this. It's probably saved 1000's of lives because they can sniff out bombs and have been highly trained to that very specific job - and you hardly ever hear about them dying - so they must be pretty good at it. And I bet they don't get too much applause for it either.

On another note - Iraqis actally use dogs as bombs - I wrote about that in a previous post. Sick.

The 3rd story is about how millions of cans of dog food are being recalled because of mouldy wheat gluten that has come from one plant down in the States. It's very interesting to me because we all feed our dogs dog food but very few of us actually think about the ingredients that go into it. Some of us have - do YOU know what wheat gluten is? You should find out what it is if you don't know.

I feel very safe that none of my dogs are going to die from renal failure like so many dogs currently are from the tainted food because I have always made sure that any dog food I gave them never had any ingredient such as wheat gluten, corn gluten meal, meat meal, poutltry by-product meal - or anyone of various gross ingredients that you can find out about if you do a little bit of research. I have always tried to feed my guys dog food that are made from "ingredients that are fit for human consumption" - and they also eat what I eat.

You wouldn't feed your child a steady diet of saltines simply because your doctor tells you to, would you? Are you really that much of an idiot? When did people become such automatons? I really hope this food recall is a wake up call to North Americans about what they're putting in their dogs' food bowl every night, and that they're starting to question the ingredients that go into dog food and where those ingredients come from. That it really IS things like brushings from the floor of human food factories and road kill. It really is.

And my dogs deserve to eat better than that.