Animals Unfolded

Many guardians discover as they tend to pets in their final months, their appetite just isn’t the same as it once was. It’s not a happy observation. It’s important to understand that pets aren’t giving up or being willful about their desire to eat: it’s something that can emerge with that time of life.  Disease processes can affect a pet’s appetite, along with medications and changes in physiology can impact how food tastes to them. Pain of all sources most definitely plays a role, in fact it’s the most common reason behind appetite challenges, with anxiousness following closely. Pets who’ve entered the period that leads up to animal hospice supported natural death—usually three months prior, give or take—most certainly see a decrease in food intake, along with other signals, and that’s expected and interpreted differently. While that is a topic for another time, what I will be focusing in on here is that messy, grey area in those final months when families really struggle since...

Flickr photo by EraPhernalia Village “I can’t believe that as someone who knows as much as you do about the pet food industry, that you don’t feed a homemade diet,” an acquaintance of mine asserted a few months ago. “Doing otherwise is so risky…” I think it’s safe to say that the topic of the diet of companion animals evokes a lot of emotion in pet owners. It’s no surprise, really. Although the pet food industry was branching and embracing a holistic, natural approach a few years ago, the largest pet food recall in history surely propelled the movement to consider what pets are eating everyday a bit more closely. Then, a far-reaching recall involving Diamond Pet Foods seemed to be the tipping point for a lot of people. It’s one thing for quality control tests to occasionally find salmonella contamination in a batch of food, but as many of you have noted in your emails and phone calls to me, for one company to overlook such huge lapses in the safety and quality during p...