Weekend Roundup

Just some random 'stuff' from a mostly relaxing weekend.

This is Maverick. He and his person are one of our walking buddies. This little fellow was literally picked up wandering the streets, with heartworms. Maverick is the most mellow, laid-back dog I have ever met, and a real cutie, as you can see. I'm pretty sure he is a Cardigan cross becaue his body shape is all corgi.

And I have no idea who these two are, but we see them every morning on weekends. Their people walk on the other side of the bayou, and we all wave and shout 'Good morning', but it's too far across for more. Those dogs must have a lot of energy; their people throw a frisbee down into the bayou over and over and over. . .

And here's some pretty flowers from the bayou. I had some pictures of them in an earlier post and said I thought they were azaleas, but cardigrandma says it's the wrong time of year. Anyone know what they are?

And finally, the prodigious pile of hair groomed out of Holly and Mikey yesterday. Although it's a little blurry, I just think this picture is hilarious! Mikey looks just SHOCKED! And Holly looks totally mortified! The truth is, that pile is about 3/4 Mikey hair!

We also had a very fun visit to the cardigrandparents house this morning. The dogs ran mad in their backyard and I got to peek at the cardinal's nest that cardigrandma has been enjoying for the past week. If cardigrandma will e-mail some pictures over (hint, hint) I will gladdly share them with everyone!

Holly and Mikey say 'Hi'.

Remembering Barbaro

The Kentucky Derby was today, and Barbaro's world class performance in the Derby last year was in everyone's minds. As well as the devastating events that followed at the Preakness last year. There was a touching documentary on tonight as well.

There is nothing so sad as seeing a champion struck down in his prime. Only a truly cold heart could not have been touched by Barbaro's courageous will to live over the many months at the New Bolton Center, as well as the dedication of all those who worked to save his life.

Once upon a time, in another lifetime, I rode hunter/jumper and dressage and had a beautiful Thoroughbred myself. I spent some time this evening playing in Photoshop with some pictures of Barbaro; what a gorgeous, majestic horse!

Swamp Dogs

Related to River Dogs, but much, much muddier! Seems like with all the rain we have had the kids may grow webbed feet. Strong storms passing through every hour or so this evening; obviously, no agility. Actually it's storming like crazy right now. Man, it is POURING!!

This would have been a really good night to take my camera on our stealth walk on the bayou, but of course I forgot it, and was totally too lazy to go back and get it. I say stealth walk because our walk this evening was just a quickie between storms.

Wish I had a picture of the bayou. Our little 'Cardi Creek' has turned into a raging river! Made me really nervous and the dogs did not play off leash for very long. They very seldom go into the bayou, and they both know that 'Up Here' means get your little butt out of the bayou, but all that rushing water. . .

Also saw a HUGE bullfrog; poor thing was probably trying to stay clear of that wild water.

I have always loved black and white pictures, so here are a few pictures of the cardikids that I played with to turn into black and white. Also some pictures from last weekend of the azaleas (I think) that were hanging over someones fence on the bayou.

As I've said over and over, if you need current info on the ever expanding pet food recall, go to The Pet Connection or Itchmo.

Oh, and I injected my second dose of Enbrel last evening. Ouchie! This one really stung. Think I must have nicked a little vein, because it bled a lot more than the first time, not to mention burning. OK, second dose, ready to feel better! Like, Hello! Waiting!

Currently re-reading 'Dies the Fire' by S. M. Stirling.

Holly and Mikey say 'Hi'.

Kinda Like the Energizer Bunny. . .

The pet food recall. . . if I can still call it that, since it has gone so much further. . . just keeps going and going and going. . .

More recalls announced by Menu:

TORONTO, ONTARIO–(May 2, 2007) - Menu Foods
Attention Business/Financial Editors
Menu Foods has previously recalled wet cat and dog food produced with adulterated wheat gluten supplied by ChemNutra Inc. Menu Foods is now expanding the recall to include cuts and gravy and select other products which do not include ChemNutra wheat gluten but which were manufactured at any of Menu Foods’ plants during the period that ChemNutra wheat gluten was used at that plant, to the extent they have not already been subject to a recall, due to the possibility of cross-contamination. Menu Foods has received a report from a customer and has received study results, both of which indicate cross-contamination.

Gaaaah! This is exactly why I have had about 15 cans of food that have been sitting untouched since the recalls started. No, this is not a brand that has had any recalls, but the canned food was manufactured at Menu Foods. Having worked as a microbiologist and in facilities that manufactured both human and pet drugs, I am very familiar with issues of cross-contamination, and this is exactly what I was afraid of with the cans of food sitting in my extra bedroom.

Other recall related fun from this week - the FDA has placed an import hold on the following products from China: Wheat Gluten, Rice Gluten, Rice Protein, Rice Protein Concentrate, Corn Gluten, Corn Gluten Meal, Corn By-Products, Soy Protein, Soy Gluten, Proteins (includes amino acids and protein hydrosylates), Mung Bean Protein.

The FDA has reported 2.5 to3 million chickens (as well as several hundred hogs) that were fed melamine contaminated feed have entered the food chain. . . but they 'think' that the risk to humans is 'minimal'. But all swine and chickens that have not yet entered the food chain will be detained and slaughtered, i.e. the hogs and chicken that we haven't eaten are not fit for human consumption, but the ones that we already have eaten are 'probably' ok.

The FDA has finally stopped the 17-18 pet death BS and are now reporting over 4,000 pet deaths and around 17,000 calls to the FDA regarding recall related pet illness/death.

Somebody pinch me, please!! I soooo wanted to have a positive post this evening, but after I saw that there were additional recalls. . . What can I say? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or is it just an approaching train?

Holly and Mikey say 'Grrrrrrrrr'.

Mikey glamor shot.

Enough Already!

I know, I haven't been posting much lately. Too much going on. This is a long post. If you want to skip the yada yada about the recall debacle, feel free to scroll down and enjoy pictures. Also, sorry about all the formatting issues in this post, maybe someday I will figure out how to deal with blogger formatting.

A reminder that if you need up-to-date info about the pet food recall the best sources I have found are www.petconnection.com and www.itchmo.com. By the way, these are available at the top of my links list now. At this point you'll do yourself a favor by checking every day, because new or additional products are being recalled on a daily basis. In fact, at this point, it is so complicated that I'm not even going to attempt a synopsis; just go to one of the suggested sites to get the lay of the land.

Posted several days ago at itchmo:

'If melamine spiking started happening before the Menu Foods recalls, why are we learning about it now? Two theories so far (which can be combined as well):

1. Greed. Initially, small amounts of melamine was used to slightly increase perceived protein content. As time went on and money kept flowing, the fraud got even more brazen by using larger amounts of melamine in lower standards of ingredients.(This is Itchmo’s theory)

2. Mistakes. Proper dosing and mixing of melamine in foods kept pet deaths low enough to be undetected. But someone got careless and large amounts of melamine got into smaller batches. One batch was detected with melamine concentrations as high as 6.6%.(This is David Goldstein’s theory) '

Unfortunately, these theories are confirmed in the article below, lifted from itchmo:

'Highlights below from the IHT article (emphasis Itchmo):

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer. But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level. “It just saves money,” says a manager at an animal feed factory here. “Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level.” The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” says Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
Most local feed companies do not admit that they use melamine. But last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, a pair of animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine, whose chemical properties give a bag of animal feed an inflated protein level under standard tests.
“If you add it in small quantities, it won’t hurt the animals,” said one animal feed entrepreneur whose name is being withheld to protect him from prosecution.
The man - who works in a small animal feed operation that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas - said he has mixed melamine into animal feed for years.

We’ve always suspected that this problem went back further than Menu Foods and this article confirms our suspicions. Again, we may never know the degree of deaths and illnesses in pets as many have long died and evidence has been lost.'

And the last is a soooo reassuring quote from a joint update released by the FDA/USDA regarding hogs fed contaminated/poisoned pet food (emphasis mine):

'At this time, we have no evidence of harm to humans associated with the processed pork product, and therefore no recall of meat products processed from these animals is being issued. Testing and the joint investigation continue. If any evidence surfaces to indicate there is harm to humans, the appropriate action will be taken.
The assessment that, if there were to be harm to human health, it would be very low, is based on a number of factors, including the dilution of the contaminating melamine and melamine-related compounds from the original rice protein concentrate as it moves through the food system. First it is a partial ingredient in the pet food; second, it is only part of the total feed given to the hogs; third, it is not known to accumulate in the hogs and the hogs excrete melamine in their urine; fourth, even if present in pork, pork is only a small part of the average American diet. Neither FDA nor USDA has uncovered any evidence of harm to the swine from the contaminated feed. In addition to the dilutional factor and the lack of evidence of illnesses in the swine fed the waste pet food, we are not aware of any human illness that has occurred from exposure to melamine or its by-products. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention systems would have limited ability to detect subtle problems due to melamine and melamine-related compounds, no problems have been detected to date. '

Baby back ribs or pork chops anyone? Like David Goldstein says 'translation: "We are unable to detect such problems, but don't worry, no such problems have been detected.".

In other news, I have finally gotten a prescription for a six month trial of Enbrel. Getting the prescription has turned out to be the easy part. I knew this was an expensive drug, and I knew my medical insurance had really poor coverage, but fark!

I gave myself the first injection Thursday. Even though I know that I can't expect to feel an improvement for at least two weeks at the earliest, Hello!?! Enough already! I'm sick of hurting all the time and I'm sure the cardikids are sick of short walks and a cranky cardima!

Enough ranting! Here's some pictures of the kids collected over the past week.

Holly and Mikey say 'Hi'.

Food, Food Everywhere and Not a Bite to Eat!

Until this week the pet food recall was awful, but didn't really hit that close to home. After all, it was in my mind mostly the 'cheap' foods that had been recalled. I can't believe that there are people who still give their dogs foods like Alpo and Ol' Roy, but now I wonder how much quality there really is in the 'premium' brands.

I used to feed Natural Balance Venison and Rice until suddenly Holly broke out in hives every time she ate it. My dad was feeding this food until Monday of this week. So far, both of his dogs seem ok. The final straw for me was the dishonesty of Natural Balance about their ingredients. The recalled ingredient, rice protein concentrate, was not a listed ingredient until after they were caught with their pants down this week. So can I trust the label on any bag of dogs food?

And then there are so many other issues going on with the pet food recall. Still only 16 animals reported dead! Oh please! The FDA really looks like a bunch of goons with their hands deep in the pockets of big business pet food companies. The incompetence here harkens back to the hurricane Katrina debacle. The pet food companies are so obviously only interested in covering their butts and could give a fark about the pets that have died and are dying. Then there is the issue safety in human foods. Wheat, rice and corn gluten are all used in human foods, and the FDA hasn't been able to ensure that none of the contaminated products are in the human food chain. We do know that contaminated food was fed to hogs in California, and that all of the pigs sold recently for human consumption have not been accounted for. And then we have the Chinese companies that sold the poisoned wheat, rice and corn glutens to begin with; the evidence is pointing more and more strongly to deliberate contamination with melamine because this chemical can make the protein content of the gluten concentrates look artificially higher, and thus worth more. Last I heard, the Chinese government is still blocking visas of FDA investigators.

There are so many issues going on with the pet food recall that it's hard to keep up with the facts. Several sources that I have been using, which have had information posted about various recalls long before the information was available at the FDA website are: www.petconnection.com/blog, www.itchmo.com and www.thepetfoodlist.com. All of these web sites have tirelessly kept current information available and have been invaluable to me in keeping up-to-date. I have also learned a he!! of a lot from the comments sections too!

From the comments section at The Pet Connection:

o I lost my Golden Retreiver to kidney failure Dec. 27th. He was also placed on Purina NF by my Vet in Florida. I was in the process of moving to NC and when I got him to the Vet up here, he only lasted another 3 days. He was just 8 years old. I know that I was feeding him one of the recalled foods, but who keeps grocery receipts from November? I feel so guilty……….he depended on me, I should have been able to protect him. Fortunately my Rottie was on a prescription weight control food, I could have lost them both.
Comment by Pat —

o I forgot to post this earlier today. I finally heard back from our state FDA representative today (my first call to their office was the Monday after the original recall was issued). At any rate, she told me that they were averaging around 25 pets per day being reported with almost half of those being reported as deceased. She said it had been a nightmare for their office. I had a lot of questions for her but unfortunately she didn’t have many answers.
Comment by Adrienne —

Holly and Mikey say 'Hi'.

Virginia Tech Tragedy

There are just no words. . .

Farewell dear friends, yet not farewell,

Where I go, ye too shall dwell.

I am gone before your face,

A moments time, a little space.

When ye come where I have stepped,

Ye will wonder why ye wept.

Edwin Arnold

Rally-O

Holly, my dad, Meg, and I went to our first Rally-O class yesterday. Rally Obedience is really essentially the low calorie version of AKC obedience. In rally you follow a series of signs, or stations, that tell you what exercise to perform, and then go on to the next station and perform that exercise, and so on. An example of an exercise is halt (with the dog sitting in heel position), pivot right (with the dog maintaining heel position), and halt again (with the dog sitting in heel position).

One really nice thing about Rally is that you are allowed to speak constantly to the dog, repeating commands and encouraging the dog all you want, unlike obedience where you may only give a command once and cannot speak to the dog in between commands. This makes Rally in some ways very similar to a training session, with the exception that you cannot correct the dog or touch the dog, so lots of people use Rally as early ring training for obedience.

The class we are taking is one two hour session once a month for three months. A nice schedule, especially considering that the class is held a little over an hour from here, so going every week would be a bit much. And there is plenty of time in between classes to practice.

The class is actually a bit more advanced than I had been expecting. The first course we did was advanced level, which is done off leash, with a jump, and obviously, advanced level exercises. And I had not done a single second of obedience training with Holly in about a year. She really did great though. In fact she did so well that I was reminded that if I just put a little bit of effort in, both she and Mikey are capable of a lot more than I realize.

My dad's dog Meg was really the star of the class. It's really amazing that such a wild child turns into a totally different dog when she works in obedience. She has the most amazing heel, with perfect focus on my dad and pretty prancing with the front legs which is so desired in obedience work. It's almost like a split personality, because no one watching her do obedience would realize what a huge handful of a dog she is, and know one meeting her outside of the obedience ring would believe that she could even do obedience work at all.

I missed the deadline for the last local conformation show between now and the big Reliant Center show in July. So I am stuck showing conformation with Mikey, even though I had planned on only showing both dogs in Rally. Will make for a very busy, very long weekend, hope that I am up to it by then. I'm really, really hoping that the rheumatologist will be willing to try some more aggressive treatment at my next appointment in May and that by July I will feel a little bit more like my old self.

Oh, and good news on the dental front. The tooth that recently been sensitive to cold doesn't have anything wrong with it! Weird I know, but x-rays and exam of that tooth didn't show anything but slightly recessed gums. I have an appointment for May 11 for the three teeth that probably will all be having root canals. Cha ching! I can't wait (ha, HA, ha).

Enjoy the pictures from the bayou this morning. Yes, one picture is Mikey getting totally bowled over by Holly, they like to play rough! And a couple of pictures I just managed to catch a minute ago through the open window of the birds at my feeder (purple finch and sparrows).

Currently re-reading 'The Secret Diary of Ann Boleyn' by Robin Maxwell

Holly and Mikey say 'Hi'.