Feeding Cerrig Darling's...

Ahhhhh! What can I say? Except, perhaps, a huge thank you to Eileen Clayton for sending us this wonderful, wonderful photo. We are exceptionally proud to be feeding the new Clayton puppies, as you may imagine.

Why dogs bite people

Hounds for Heroes Fundraiser 22nd May

This is being organised by Annette Bowcott of Hamble Hounds Dog Training School on 023 8001 1439 if you want to ask her about it. Looks like it will be an entertaining day out and an excellent cause, too.

NEW Secret Royal Wedding Photos

Enzo Leach - one of the famous Spinone Boys - fed, I might say, by Darling's - caught in secret Royal Wedding drama.

10 best positions in bed

I know, I know, this is very silly but lovely Elaine sent me this as an email and - well - I just couldn't resist posting them. Sigh.

Domestication may have been quicker than we think...

There's an intriguing article in the March edition of National Geographic exploring the whole subject of the domestication of wild animals with lots of examples including chickens, pigs and sheep. The but that fascinated me, however, was the section about an experiment involving silver foxes that began in 1959. Researchers in Siberia bred foxes to encourage a single behaviour: friendliness towards humans. Over the next few generations the foxes behaved more and more like domesticated dogs. By the second generation aggressive response to humans began to disappear, by the fourth the kits (puppies) were wagging their tales and approaching humans voluntarily as well as allowing themselves to be carried and by the sixth generation they were completely accepting of humans and would lick them. Interestingly, from the 9th generation onwards the foxes began to change their outer appearance. That is to say their ears became floppier, their coats began to change colour, their tails started to curl and became shorter. These are all things that make dogs appear appealingly juvenile to humans. The researchers believe that some animals and not others carry genes that predispose them to be more easily domesticated. This sort of makes sense and explains why all sorts of animals have remained wild, while others have been successfully domesticated. The experiments suggest that it probably didn't take very long - perhaps as little as 20 years - for wild wolves to become tame dogs some 15,000 years ago.

More about Pet Plus

When I wrote about PetPlus a few weeks ago Suzi McIntyre tried to add a comment and it got lost somewhere in space and ever since I have been meaning to update the posting but actually it probably makes more sense just to copy and paste what she said:

And I do recommend Pet Plus with raw food in healthy dogs and cats, because the raw food we feed does not contain the whole 'prey' animal. The guts contain probiotics, prebiotics and digestive enzymes which are of enormous benefit to our carnivorous pets. I am always getting comments from committed raw food feeders saying how much better their dog / cat is since adding the Pet Plus. Even our dear friend Ros Walters, a brilliant canine nutritionist, has found a vast improvement in her dogs' health since adding the Pet Plus. So it's definitely not just for sick dogs and cats. The aim is to prevent them getting sick in the first place! Feeding raw on its own is only part of the job.