Dogged Blog

Dear diary...

It's funny, back when I started this blog, I avoided personal posts. Now, it seems that I always take my political posts to Daily Kos, and pet posts to Pet Connection, and entertainment stuff to AfterElton, and what's left but personal posts?  So here ya go: nothing but personal.

I often feel like Americans are really nuts. We think that eating badly, not getting enough sleep, exposing our co-workers to infectious disease and being martyrs who never say no to anything are virtues.

Those things are not virtues. They're either harsh necessities or they're faults. Even if we can't change them, we should stop talking about them as if there is something "wrong" with us for breaking down and, in our weakness, consuming three meals a day and getting 8 hours of restful sleep and only working 40 hours in a week.

I work too much, I stress out over work, I don't get enough sleep. I've been eating well for almost 6 years now, but I sometimes emerge from the vortex of deadlines and realize I'm out of groceries, the dogs are gazing longingly out the window at the park, I haven't talked to my girlfriend in a week, and my house? A mess. And no matter how many times I swear I won't work after dinner or on the weekend -- I not only do, but I get myself into deadline schedules where I literally have to.

So I'm going to say it: I not only can't keep up this pace, I think keeping this up is nuts. I think I should not be working after dinner, should sleep at least 8 hours a night, and that pushing on working when I'm sick, exhausted or burned out is not something for which I should be rewarded, but rather something that should provoke a rousing chorus of "Get down off the cross, we need the wood" from my loved ones.

I'm thinking I may take a deep breath and start building my life on the premise that anything that keeps me from taking care of myself is, unless unavoidable, a bad thing that I should get rid of as soon as possible rather than some kind of proof of my Superwomanhood.

Eight hours of sleep. Eight hours of work, five days a week. That should leave eight hours plus an entire weekend of living, right? You know, walking the dogs, reading, sitting in a cafe, window shopping, getting a pedicure, volunteering at a shelter or a soup kitchen, watching my little nephews grow up.

Believe me, I understand that for many people, having a life is a luxury. Some people don't work "too much" because they're over-achievers, but because if they don't have two jobs their kids will go hungry.

Which actually makes this kind of voluntary martyr-superhero thing kind of offensive. It's not like we stay home from work when we're sick because if we don't, we'll lose our job and our children will go into foster care.

No, it's because we're gonna show the world we're tough and invincible and unbreakable and we don't need those things like food, sleep, and downtime to function. Not us. (Cue heroic theme song.)

Well, I do. And if the only reason I don't have them is because I'm trying to prove something about my work ethic or whatever crazy thing it is I think I'm proving? Please.

I'm going to try something different, now, while I can. Because this is really not a life. At least, it's not the life I want.

The carnivore ' s dilemma: Raw diets for pets?

It's apparently controversy week in the comments section here at Pet Connection. And if there's anything more contentious than PETA, it's got to be raw diets for pets. So hey... good timing! Because my column this week on SFGate.com is about just that.



Although I've been feeding raw homemade diets to my pets for over 23 years now, this is the first time I've tackled the subject for my column. (I did write about homemade diets once before, but not raw.) It's not that I don't have anything to say; it's more that I have too much to say. It took me a while to figure out which little slice of the subject I wanted for SFGate.



Perhaps I've just been hanging around with Marion Nestle too much, but what finally drove me to write about raw diets was the parallels I see in the home/raw feeding movement and the human slow food/locavore movement.

To most people, pet food is something that comes in a bag or can. The package might be illustrated with pictures of meat chunks, vegetables and grains, but what's inside is probably the most thoroughly processed food product on the market.



Still, quite a few dog and cat owners are deciding that packaged food isn't the only way to feed their pets. Over the last two decades, they've become a vocal movement advocating food for pets made with whole, fresh, minimally processed and usually raw ingredients.



If calling it a "movement" seems like hyperbole, consider that nearly a thousand pet owners in San Francisco and the North Bay alone belong to SF Raw, a raw feeders' buying group. Similar organizations have sprung up across the country.



[....]



A lot of vets think it's impossible to make a homemade meal for a dog or cat without a PhD in nutrition and a food laboratory in the garage. And a raw diet? Given the amount of bacteria in raw meat, they say, that's a recipe for sickness and death for your pets.



So why do so many pet owners insist on feeding raw diets to their pets? And why is the modern raw pet food movement not just alive, but growing?



If the terms "slow food" and "locavore" come to mind, you're on the right track. Modern raw feeders aren't crazy, back-to-nature hippies or indulgent pet parents trying to spoil their fur babies with grass-fed steak tartare. They're part of a much larger movement interested in doing right by farm animals, the planet and their local economies.

The column, which you can read here, is currently one of the most read and most emailed articles on SFGate.com, and it has more than a hundred comments. I haven't read them, though. That crowd's too rough for me.



Photo of Tater eating his raw diet, courtesy of Marina Chang.

Spring is for superbugs: New perspectives on managing canine chronic MRSI skin infections

It seems so obvious now, but for the last year or so I've been in a state of despair trying to figure out why my Borzoi Kyrie kept getting these terrible skin infections with MRSI, the canine version of human MRSA -- a nasty multi-drug resistant staph. (If you haven't been following her story, you'll find it here, here, here, and here.) But although we still struggle with the problem, I think I understand the big picture now.



First, a few words about this strain of staph. As much as I'd like to eradicate it from her body and, while I'm at it, from the planet, that's a task not all the working dogs of all working breeds in all the world could accomplish, with or without human help. We created these superbugs and we're stuck with them.



From thinking about "wiping out" or "curing" her resistant staph infection, I've simply accepted that a certain percentage of the staph bugs that are present on her skin will contain genes for varying degrees of drug resistance. After all, there is staph all over our skin, dogs' skin, and just about everywhere in the environment. The fact that some of those bugs (and more every year) have acquired genes for drug resistance doesn't change them into voracious eaters of canine skin; they're still just staph, albeit one we can't easily beat back if it it has a population explosion and starts causing symptoms.



In other words, staph infections are opportunistic. They take advantage of a disruption in the normal immune system and defenses of the dog (and person, and cat... etc.) to increase their numbers. Increasing numbers cause symptoms such as irritation, redness, broken skin, and other signs of staph infection or, more correctly, staph overgrowth.



When that staph gets into the bloodstream, deeper tissues, organs, or other systems of the body, things are even worse. Fortunately, that hasn't happened with Kyrie. This has been, so far, "just" a skin problem. A severe skin problem.



Which brings us to the question: what's causing the immune disorder that's allowing the staph to do its thing all over Kyrie's skin?



Allergies are apparently the culprit. We've tested Kyrie for a zillion different immune and endocrine disorders, done x-rays, ultrasounds, and blood work. Everything comes back rock-solid normal. Not "low normal" or "borderline" or "technically normal"; even her thyroid levels, often low in sighthounds, are in the middle of the normal range -- and yes, I did the expensive multi-panel test.



But she does have allergies. She always did, but they were so slight I literally never thought about them. Twice a year, spring and fall, Kyrie would get a little bit itchy on her tummy and have some eye and ear discharge and redness. It would last a day or two. I'd give her a bath, clean her ears, flush her eyes with saline, and that was the end of it for the next 6 months.



I don't know why, at the age of 9, her immune system suddenly decided to go insane and take her allergies along for the ride. I'm sure she has some kind of underlying disorder, because allergies themselves are a symptom of an immune problem. But we're at the limit of what we can test for, and certainly no one has a cure for allergies -- which won't stop a lot of people from telling you they do.



Since so many people are struggling with similar problems, I'm going to share what's worked with Kyrie.



Although I've gone through thousands of dollars of drugs trying to kill the resistant staph, I've given up on the scorched earth approach. The more we treated her staph, the more resistant it became. The last time we checked its resistance profile, it had become resistant to every drug she's been on so far. All we have left are some very toxic and expensive drugs, most of which have to be given in the vet's office daily for weeks.



So instead of treating her skin, I decided first to re-define the problem. It's not that some of the staph on Kyrie's body have genes for drug resistance. It's that her immune system can't keep the staph from getting out of balance with the other bugs and critters on the skin.



Instead of bombarding my dog with ever-harsher and more expensive antibiotics, I've simply accepted that she's got resistant staph bugs and looked deeper for a reason why they find her skin such a hospitable environment for their population explosion.



To figure that out, I tested Kyrie for underlying causes of staph overgrowth: thyroid disease, endocrine disorders like Cushing's or Addison's; other immune disfunctions. Those conditions can be treated, and treatment will likely bring the staph overgrowth under control. But Kyrie didn't have any of those.



I became very interested then in topical therapies, an approach in human medicine that's been equally or more effective than oral antibiotics for skin MRSA infections. I tried many different topical treatments, from the medical grade honey that had finally cleared up her first infection to tea tree oil, antibiotic creams and gels, vinegar rinses and a variety of shampoos.



I'm quite sure that every dog will respond to different things, but for Kyrie, the best results have been from Aveeno Oatmeal Bodywash as a shampoo. Most rinses seemed to leave her irritated, and other shampoos dried her skin -- which can lead to itching, chewing, and a flare-up.



The second step of management is hyper-vigilance. I check her several times a day for "damp spots" that tell me she's licking or chewing, and react instantly to them, or to any patch of redness.



First, I saturate the spot with Desert Essence Relief Spray, a topical containing 5 percent tea tree oil, which has been shown to have efficacy against human skin MRSA.



Next, I apply Neosporin + Pain, an over-the-counter human antibiotic and anesthetic combination ointment that worked better than anything my vet gave me, and which I'm using with her blessing.



I rarely have to do this twice, as long as I catch it right away.



The warm spring weather has made her symptoms appear more frequently, but has not made them more severe. I'm bathing her every 3-4 days right now and have only treated her topically twice in the last two weeks. Her eyes are a bit goopy, but overall she's doing very well.



I also took her off every food she'd been eating up until now and am feeding her mostly rabbit and venison, with some bison and lamb now and then. This costs nearly as much as the antibiotics (kidding), and may not be necessary. But I've tried her back on chicken, turkey, or beef a few times now, and every time she flares up within a couple of hours. It looks like food allergies are part of her problem.



I hear from a lot of people who own dogs with skin MRSI, and while in no way do I want to interfere with their relationships with their veterinarians, I have to stress one last time that thinking you're going to get rid of the resistant bugs once and for all, or that the staph itself is the problem, is a dead end.



I'm also not saying to skip antibiotics altogether. Kyrie's first infection was so bad by the time we diagnosed the problem that I doubt it would have cleared up without them. And dogs who have systemic and internal forms of staph infection absolutely require effective antibiotics.



But I no longer think there's any benefit, and may be quite a bit of harm, in treating an asymptomatic dog with a goal of eliminating resistant staph. We can't eliminate it from our environments, from our own bodies, or from hospitals, for that matter. We really aren't going to be able to eliminate it from our dogs' skin.

Can your pet make you sick?

There's no way around it: pets make our lives better and they make them healthier. People with pets have lower blood pressure, lower stress levels, and recover more quickly from illness, inury, heart attack, and surgery.



We don't always return the favor, either. It's thanks to humans that dogs like my Borzoi, Kyrie, get colonized by drug resistant bacteria like MRSA and MRSI.



But sometimes, yes, it's true: your pets can make you sick, too. AOL Health's Ashley Neglia has the story, and interviewed Pet Connection's Dr. Marty Becker to help her tell it:

Illnesses that can be transmitted from animals to humans, called zoonotic disease, span the gamut from minor to lethal. While you're more likely to contract an illness from another person than from your pet, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware of what you can catch from Fluffy and Fido. "The last thing you want to do is panic," says Dr. Marty Becker, D.V., co-author of "The Ultimate Dog Lover." "Diseases are on the rise, but if you get rid of the risk you keep the pet."

What kind of diseases are we talking about? Food borne pathogens like campylobacter and salmonella, which cause digestive symptoms. A number of parasites that can be spread from animals to humans, including ringworm (usually from cats_ and mycobacterium marinum (from aquarium water). Respiratory infections like psittacosis, also known as "parrot fever." And of course, the best known zoonotic disease of all, rabies.



Some of the infections are extremely rare, like anthrax and avian influenza. Others are much more common, like leptospirosis or cat scratch disease. How can you protect yourself?



Dr. Becker has some suggestions, along with more information, here.

AAFCO on a pet food label: Does it matter?

Once upon a time, standards for commercial pet food were set by the National Research Council of the Academy of Sciences, "a private, nonprofit institution that provides science and technology advice under a congressional charter."



That's not the case today. Their role has been supplanted by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), a private group that defines food and feed ingredients, and sets standards for nutritional levels for pet foods and animal feeds, as well as for feeding tests conducted under AAFCO guidelines.



AAFCO is not a regulatory body, but an association of state and federal regulatory agents. They also consult with advisers from the pet food and livestock feed industries, and with academics and researchers. And while they've unquestionably conquered the pet food marketplace, their guidelines have garnered criticism from a number of sources.



Take, for example, Susan Wynn, DVM's Alternative Feeding Practices from the proceedings of the 2001 World Small Animal Veterinary Association World Conference:

In the words of Quinton Rogers, DVM, PhD, one of the AAFCO panel experts, “although the AAFCO profiles are better than nothing, they provide false securities. I don't know of any studies showing their adequacies and inadequacies.” Rogers also states that some of the foods which pass AAFCO feeding trials are actually inadequate for long term nutrition, but there is no way of knowing which foods these are under present regulations (Smith, 1993).

An AAFCO feeding trial statement packs a bit more punch. A "maintenance" claim requires that 6 out of 8 healthy dogs or cats are kept alive for 26 weeks on the diet, without losing more than 10 percent of their body weight or having certain blood levels fall below specified levels, and passing an examination by a veterinarian at the trial's beginning and conclusion.



Claims for growth, reproduction, and lactation have more stringent feeding trial requirements, although they're not necessarily conducted for a longer period of time. The "growth" trial is only 10 weeks long, for example.



Claims for "all life stages" are the most rigorous of all, as they include growth and lactation as well as maintenance.



While veterinary nutritionists acknowledge that some foods formulated to meet AAFCO guidelines would flunk a feeding trial, and the trials certainly can and do catch some gross nutritional inadequacies, they can't and don't really demonstrate the food's adequacy as a pet's sole diet for a lifetime.



But whatever their shortcomings, AAFCO feeding trials are at the very least a sign that the company is serious about its products and is willing and able to invest in the foods it produces. If you think back to the days of the 2007 pet food recall, it was mega-corporation Procter & Gamble that had the systems in place to catch the melamine problem early, and the clout to pressure Menu Foods into announcing the recall.



Say what you want about big business, but when it comes to consumer product monitoring and protecting the integrity of a brand, it knows how to do the job.



And when a small company goes to the expense and trouble of doing feeding trials on its diets? That's even more impressive to me. It's a sign that the company is in it for the long haul, and takes quality control and its own responsibilities seriously.



None of which actually makes the feeding trial parameters any more valid or useful, but I still would rather see some form of testing than none.



I don't, however, think the statement that a food is formulated in accordance with AAFCO guidelines means much. First of all, I don't see any virtue in having every single mouthful or meal my pet consumes be "complete and balanced," any more than I eat that way myself. As long as she gets a nourishing diet overall, isn't that what matters?



But let's face reality: most people feed their pets the same thing every meal and every day, and it's better that food be nutritionally complete than not, as it would be very easy for those convenience feeders to create nutritional problems over time if feeding diets not intended to be nutritionally complete.



But as I look around the world of pets, I see so many health problems that may be -- and in some cases demonstrably are -- related to diet, that I wonder how safe pet owners can be in relying on those guidelines to cover the nutritional bases of their pets. Diabetes in cats, the epidemic of poor dental health in pet dogs and cats, high rates of obesity and arthritis, and kidney disease. Every one of those problems may have a nutritional component.



I think everyone knows I feed homemade diets to my own pets, but as I said before, most pet owners aren't going to do that. What should people relying on commercial pet foods do?



I would give preference to foods that have conducted AAFCO feeding trials over those that are simply formulated in accordance with AAFCO guidelines. I want companies, large or small, to have a boarded veterinary nutritionist on staff or as a paid consultant.



When it comes to small pet food manufacturers, I'd favor companies that are local and highly transparent. Do they conduct AAFCO feeding trials? (Yes, some do.) Do they allow you to visit their facility? Are they responsive to customer inquiries? Those are big pluses.



Do they use a lot of marketing language and try to tell you that not testing is better than testing for reasons that have nothing to do with science? Do they badmouth other companies? Do they badmouth veterinarians? Do they try to scare you? Those are all red flags.



And what about the NRC? In 2006, they issued new recommendations on the nutrient requirements of dogs and cats, for the first time since the mid-1980s. They differ from current AAFCO guidelines, although U Penn boarded veterinary nutritionist Edward Moser, MS, VMD, DACVN, told me in 2007 that AAFCO was working to reconcile the two at that time. As far as I know, nothing more has come of that.



I'd personally love to see a truly independent regulatory body for pet food. I'd also like to see country of origin labeling, nutritional data given in the same format as on human food labels, and, you know, a really good diet recommendation for my pet unicorn.

Use knowledge, not fear, to make pet drug decisions

My sister-in-law is a pharmacist – not the kind who hands out your prescriptions at the drug store, but an expert in drug interactions, side effects and the use of medications in the elderly and chronically ill.



A few years ago, we were discussing the use of pain medications in patients with kidney disease. "You know," she said, her head tipped to the side, "you know more about drugs than any non-pharmacist I've ever met."



I had to laugh. "You can say that until we start talking about some drug that's not used in dogs and cats."



So if you want to know my thoughts on, say, cholesterol-lowering drugs, I got nothin'. But if you want to know what I think about how, when, and with what we drug our pets, that's a different story.



Fear and lack of information are the greatest enemies of effectively and safely treating our pets' illnesses, injuries, and pain. We're afraid of drugs, and don't know how to get the information that would allow us to put that fear in context. Just as with human medicine, the influence of drug companies and their sales reps has eroded the trust we might otherwise have in our doctors and veterinarians, and so we turn to other pet owners and the Internet for advice.



But those sources are suspect, too. Much of the health "information" on the Web is nothing but scare tactics, and it's often tainted by commercial interests itself. There are many people fear-mongering about prescription drugs who are selling herbal alternatives that purport to do the exact same thing. And while sometimes alternative therapies are effective and safe, it's actually harder to evaluate most of them than the drugs with which they're competing because there has been less research done into them.



Even among those who have nothing to sell you, agendas you can't know about -- or sometimes even imagine -- are compromising the information you're getting. People become such passionate believers in certain philosophies and ways of life that it colors everything they think, say, and advocate. It's like some of my fellow raw/homemade diet feeders; everything is caused and cured by diet. They don't want to hear about anything else – and don't, usually by putting their hands over their ears and going "la la la, I can't hear you."



Big Pharma on the left, snake oil on the right. You're paralyzed with indecision and mistrust, but your dog has arthritis or your cat has kidney disease. You don't have the luxury of doing nothing. So what exactly do you do?



The answer is to educate yourself. It would be nice to be able to sit back, knowing the experts have done all the work for you and you can just be a passive consumer of health care, but that's no more reality in veterinary medicine than it is in human medicine. If you want the best for your pets, you have to work at it. Here are a few of my tips on how to do that:



Expect more of your pet's veterinarian. When you fill a prescription for yourself at a pharmacy, you're given the package insert and label information, as well as a consultation with the pharmacist, who will go over the instructions and answer your questions.



When your pet's veterinarian dispenses drugs to you for your dog or cat, that's exactly what should happen, but it rarely does. In fact, I've seen many vets respond to questions about side effects with a dismissive, "I've never seen any problems."



That's not an acceptable answer, even if it's true. The side effects of prescription medications are known. They're listed in books like Plumb's Veterinary Drug Handbook, and on the labels and inserts of the drugs themselves. The wording of those warnings are mandated by law, and you are entitled to that information. You need to politely and consistently ask about side effects, drug interactions, and contraindications.



And veterinarians need to realize that this isn't a threat to their authority but its best and most potent expression. It's ironic given how many vets are fighting to keep their drug dispensing in-house but still fail to use the one thing they have that no human, chain, big-box, or Internet pet pharmacy can offer: their expertise as veterinarians, and their knowledge and experience with veterinary drugs



It's all about risk vs. benefit. The words "safe" and "unsafe" get thrown around a lot, but the truth is, those aren't absolute terms. Virtually everything has the potential for some risk and some benefit, and where on the spectrum a given substance or therapy falls is going to vary by the individual and the situation.



You also have to consider the risk and benefit of doing nothing. Take urinary incontinence, a problem that affects as many as 20 percent of all spayed female dogs. Not treating it will protect your dog from the dangers of synthetic hormone therapy (DES) or a banned human decongestant (PPA), but it will also expose her to chronic skin irritation and a potentially increased risk of urinary tract infections.



And having a dog who constantly leaks urine can also be fatal, if it results in a frustrated owner taking her to the shelter. That has to be part of the "risk vs. benefit" math, too.



So if you're considering a medication for your pet, be sure you examine all the alternatives, including doing nothing, and ask not only about risk but benefit. That process generally does make the right answer pretty clear.



Are there safer alternatives? For all I get annoyed at the baseless claims of many "natural" products, there are several alternative treatments that are very safe, very effective, and very well-studied – and often, very unknown to your pet's veterinarian. Resources like the "Physician's Desk Reference of Herbal Medicine" or the excellent reference book "Herbs for Pets" can help you make informed decisions about them, and might spare your pet some unnecessary side effects. (You can also find my SFGate.com column about some of my favorites here.)



For example, the standard prescription for symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome in dogs is the drug Flagyl (metronidazole). This drug has some pretty severe possible side effects, and while it can help control the symtoms of IBD and IBS in dogs, there's no reason it should be the first line of treatment. Dietary therapy -- including homemade diets -- and the use of proven, safe herbs like peppermint have given thousands upon thousands of dogs as much or greater symptomatic relief with absolutely no side effects at all.



The same is true of painkillers. Why are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like Rimadyl, with their known risks including ulcers, kidney damage, and even death, almost always the first treatment offered for dogs with arthritis, when the human generic drug tramadol has far fewer and less serious side effects?



Look for the balance between "tried and true" and "new and improved." When new human drugs come out, Big Pharma gets into gear with a massive marketing campaign aimed at you, and another one aimed at your physician. The same thing happens with veterinary products, albeit with a smaller budget.



Many veterinarians quite rightly resist making their patients test subjects for a new drug, and prefer to give a new medication some time to prove itself. Others, again quite rightly, feel that it's not fair to let their patients suffer through their learning curve, and stick with procedures and therapies that are familiar to them instead of adopting new methods of anesthesia, pain control, or disease treatment.



But sometimes there really is a revolution in efficacy or safety, and clinging to an outmoded therapy can put your pet at risk. When new veterinary NSAIDs came on the market, many vets continued to give steroids, not because they were safer – they can be, but usually aren't – but because they mistrusted the new drugs. Others kept prescribing aspirin because they were familiar with it, without explaining or perhaps even understanding that aspirin, too, is a NSAID, and shares the same risks.



To be fair, many dog owners are probably glad their vets took their time here, because the side effects of NSAIDs in dogs weren't well-explained or publicized in the early days. But despite those side effects, which can include death, there are many dogs who are happily and safely on NSAIDs for years, who experience relief of pain and improved quality of life without any side effects at all – particularly those dogs whose veterinarians follow the monitoring protocols recommended by the FDA for long-term NSAID use.



The point is that you want to find the right balance for your pet and his particular situation; your vet shouldn't reject or accept a new treatment simply because it's new.



Sometimes less actually is less… less effective and less safe. It's easy to believe that giving fewer drugs will reduce the risk of drug side effects, but there are many times when the opposite is true. For instance, gas anesthetic drugs are safer when used in combination with other drugs known as "induction agents," which reduce the side effects of the gas and also allow less gas to be used.



When giving pain medications, it's often safest and most effective to use two or more drugs that attack the pain in different ways. Combining tramadol with NSAIDs, for instance, may allow you to use the NSAID only for "breakthrough" pain, or at a lower dose. And combining a GI protectant drug like misoprostol with NSAIDs will reduce the risk of one of the worst and most common of their side effects: ulcers.



The bottom line is this: don't let fear of the treatment leave your pet suffering. Yes, there are often safer alternatives to what your veterinarian is prescribing. No, you can't just blindly trust someone else to figure this all out for you – including me. Your pets can't do this research for themselves, so you're going to have to do it for them.

Dr. Becker picks the year ' s top pet products on ‘Good Morning America’

Pet Connection's own Dr. Marty Becker is appearing on "Good Morning America" this morning to talk about his picks of the top new pet products from the 2009 Global Pet Expo.



Thousands of products were available to choose from at the pet industry’s largest annual trade show, but only a select few made the cut.



The common denominator of his choices? They'll dramatically improve the life of pets and the pet parents who love them.



If you slept in this morning and missed it, don't worry. Click on the image below to jump over to ABC News and watch the video:

Dangers outside, boredom inside: Can we do better for our cats?

It's a debate that never ends. Yes, cats who go outside can get hit by cars, trapped by irate neighbors, or killed by dogs or other animals. They pick up fleas and get in fights with other cats. The list is pretty much endless, and yet... most people let their cats go out at least some of the time, even some people who would rather not.



The reason? I take a look at that question in my column this week on SFGate.com:

The sterility of indoor life leaves many loving cat owners conflicted over what's best for their pets. They doubt that a life spent indoors is healthy, and when faced with a pet who wants to go outside or seems bored and inactive, they wonder if safety is really as important as keeping the cat active, healthy and happy.



This is where the dialogue between cat expert and cat owner breaks down. No matter how many ways you restate the safety argument, until you find some way to deal with the argument about health and happiness you're not going to address the real reason many caring cat owners finally open the door.



But here's my question: Can our cats have it all? Is there a way we can keep them safe and our neighbors -- and birds -- happy, while still giving our cats the benefits of going outside?



The answer is a qualified yes. Qualified because one of the reasons cats are such popular pets is that most people see them as effortless. Unlike dogs, the majority of cats fit into our homes with little or no training. Someone who has cats precisely because they're easy may not be willing to make the necessary accommodations to keep cats both healthy and safe.



But if you already keep your cats indoors and want to give them the benefits of fresh air, sunshine and outdoor exercise, or you'd love to keep your cat safely in the house but think you're depriving her of something valuable by doing so, yes, you really can have it all -- as long as you're willing to work at it.

I go on to share some of my experiences with cat enclosures, as well as tips from certified cat behavior consultant Marilyn Krieger and "Walk your Cat" co-author Jean Miller.



Read the column here, and let me know where you stand on the great indoor/outdoor cat debate.

Two years since the pet food recall -- are things better yet?

Remember that graphic? It appeared on our very first post about what turned into the largest consumer food recall in history, the 2007 pet food recall.



We made that post two years ago today.



Last year at this time, I was huddled over a hotel computer in Austin, using one of the only working Internet connections in the whole downtown/convention center area -- the SXSW Interactive conference having overwhelmed even Austin's souped-up connectivity -- and ignoring the jittery circle of people trying to vibe me offline so they could get on.



I was filing a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on the one year anniversary of the pet food recall. In it, I questioned whether anything had changed, and concluded that very little had. And now, another year later, my analysis pretty much stands, although I'm willing to entertain slightly optimistic thoughts for the future.



Of course, "very little" is not nothing. Certainly many pet owners have a new understanding of the realities of pet food manufacturing that they didn't have before. When the current peanut product recall began, none of us who had followed the pet food recall was surprised to learn that companies from the highest-end health food store products to the cheapest crap in a vending machine all contained ingredients that originated at one single plant -- and that the manufacturers themselves often had no idea where the ingredients had come from.



While I'd still vote for shutting down both FDA and USDA and replacing them with a single agency tasked with representing the public's interest in food safety, it was kind of a nice change to see the FDA rise to the challenge Sen. Richard Durbin threw at them during congressional hearings on the pet food recall -- if the Pet Connection can keep track of this data, how come the US government can't? -- and actually start doing real-time tracking of recall information and using that durn-blasted new Intertoobz thingy to gather and report data about recalls.



FDA even reported pet and human products together in this latest recall, demonstrating that someone somewhere grasps, as Marion Nestle so often points out, that there's only one food supply.



I even have some slim hope that government of, by, and for the corporations is going to be replaced with a streamlined, modern food safety system that puts the public interest ahead of corporate profits, if by "slim" you mean "so small it's invisible to the naked eye."



And there has been some movement among some manufacturers, both the biggest companies trying to protect their brands and the smallest trying to establish a new standard for industry best practices, towards testing their products for contamination. Some of them aren't being very transparent in doing that, but it's a start.



All that said, none of that is enough. We could have another pet food recall tomorrow, and neither the salmonella in the peanut paste nor the melamine in, well, everything scandals are going away any time soon. Our food safety system is broken and needs to be replaced. And it won't be until we, the public, demand it.



Salmonella or other bacteria in food is not a failure on our part, happening in our home kitchens, and a thousand warnings not to eat rare hamburger or sunny-side-up eggs can't make it one. It's a failure of our food safety system that there are dangerous levels of pathogens and toxins in our food in the first place, and the more we buy into the FDA, USDA, and industry framing that this is a home kitchen/consumer safety issue, the more we're supporting the status quo.



That exact same dynamic played out in the 2007 pet food recall. From the beginning, Gina and I were shocked at how many pet owners blamed other pet owners for the illness and death of pets, saying that if only they hadn't fed cheap food, or kibble, or commercial food, or this or that brand, it wouldn't have happened.



Here at Pet Connection, we believe that no matter how inexpensive or "generic" the food, it shouldn't be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria nor industrial toxins. Call us crazy, but that's what we think. Blaming individual consumers does nothing at all but allow manufacturers of human and pet food to continue to build their businesses on models that guarantee contaminated food will be sold in our stores, to us, our children, and our companion animals.



A year from now, I'll be doing another one of these posts. I sincerely hope it will have a headline that reads: "Three years since the pet food recall... and everything's changed!"



But the only way that's going to happen is if we demand it.

HSUS: Laws are good for pet owners, but not for shelters?

Last night I went to an Animal Welfare Commission hearing at San Francisco City Hall. Nathan Winograd was giving a presentation on the history of the No-Kill movement, which was born in San Francisco, and Dr. Emily Weiss of the ASPCA was going to be speaking, I thought about her "Feline-ality" program, which I'm researching for a future column on SFGate.com.



Apparently there was a lot going on that I wasn't aware of, because I walked into a battlefield. I really can't give my thoughts on what happened and what it all means, because at this point I'm close to head explosion time and I want to do some more research and see what happens next before I write about it.



By way of background, it appears that this hearing and others planned for the future have to do with a proposed law that would change the way shelters are run in San Francisco. In general I'm not in favor of legislative solutions, and I hate micro-management even more. I do support the goals of the law, particularly transparency and accountability and, of course, the end of the use of the killing for animal population control. But mandates are just not my way; while I don't want to weigh in too strongly on this until I learn more, I suspect my feelings aren't going to change.



But there is one small piece of this story on which I'm crystal clear, and it's a letter HSUS wrote to the Commission, signed by Wayne Pacelle.



HSUS doesn't share my aversion to legislative mandates or micro-management. They advocate, write, and support all kinds of laws about the way people keep animals, from California's AB-1634, which I opposed, to California's Proposition 2, which I supported. I think it's fair to say HSUS has never encountered a situation that they didn't think could be improved with a law... with one glaring exception.



After recapping HSUS' views on the state of animal sheltering today, Pacelle writes:

The HSUS generally does not recommend approaches that force agencies to adopt practices that cannot be funded or sustained. Simply enacting a mandate or a policy not to euthanize does not address the root cause of pet overpopulation, and it is not a pathway for meaningful change. At the extreme, such mandates or policies can lead -- and have led -- to serious animal welfare problems affecting large numbers of animals.

I have a few problems with this, like the fact that we don't have pet overpopulation in San Francisco, and that the proposed law goes quite a bit beyond "simply enacting a mandate or a policy not to euthanize," and oh yeah -- this isn't about euthanasia; it's about population control killing, which is not euthanasia by any true definition of the word.



But this is the big one: why doesn't that exact same argument work when we make it in response to intrusive, unfunded, over-arching laws such as universal forced sterilization of owned pets that are advocated and supported by HSUS itself? Those laws have never once worked anywhere they've been tried -- which the policies and programs that are part of this proposed law at least have, even if I still oppose mandating them -- and they, too, have resulted in decreased animal welfare by reducing compliance with animal licensing and rabies vaccination. And they've arguably increased pet abandonment as well.



So it's not just okay but part of HSUS' mission to legislate how pet owners own and keep pets, but not how shelters -- which depend on the tax dollars and donations of the public -- treat animals? Even if you argue that private shelters should be excluded from mandates, how could it be appropriate to tell me at what age I should spay or neuter my pet dog or cat, but inappropriate to tell a public animal control agency how to operate?



If the shelter industry wants to dish out laws, they shouldn't squawk when they're expected to take them.



Disclaimer: I've recently been doing some editorial consulting for Maddie's Fund, but my attendance at this hearing was not related to them in any way.