No revelations about commercial pet food in the past few weeks, thank goodness. Still, pet food industry executives are hard at work, making changes to their ingredient sourcing and quality control protocols. I’ve been interviewing some of these folks about the long-term fallout (positive and negative) of the pet food recalls, and will present excerpts from these interviews in next month’s issue.
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One preview: Expect higher prices on all pet foods soon, especially top-quality products. Consumers who are paying top dollar for what they expect to be top-quality products have been exerting more and more pressure on the makers of “super-premium” pet foods to disclose their ingredient sources, or at least, prove their purity and quality. One company owner told me ruefully, “Now all the people who said they use top-quality ingredients – but, in actuality, don’t – are out there trying to find and buy those ingredients, and the supply is small enough that the price just keeps going higher and higher.”
I’m sad to report more losses to our canine modeling squad in recent weeks – though of course, the losses to our friends, of their beloved companions, are exponentially more significant. Most recently, training Editor Pat Miller had to say goodbye to Tucker, her cattle dog-mix who had just passed his 14th birthday. I met Tucker only once, but I can say this about him: when Pat shares information about training issues she’s had with her dogs, she never had the opportunity to talk about Tucker, the benevolent leader of the Miller pack. He was a good, good dog. We also lost Tater Tot, the little ball of fluff belonging to Sandi Thompson, the Berkeley, California trainer who frequently models for our training articles. Tater, too, passed away in May at the age of 14 years.
Sandi teaches for Sirius Puppy Training, and Tater was famous locally as Sandi’s assistant in hundreds of classes over the years; Tater would arise from her bed on a table in the classroom to ring a bell at intervals during the classes, alerting students to retake their seats after practicing various behaviors. She “taught” with Sandi for so many years that Sandi didn’t have to cue her when the appropriate amount of time had passed; she just knew, and rang the bell.
I photographed Tater many times over the past 10 years and her picture will continue to appear in Whole Dog Journal’s pages for years to come. In fact, that’s her howling in delight at a San Francisco Giants baseball game on page 13.
I offer my condolences to both families.
