What’s in that tin anyway?

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Most of the dogs I’ve had have been prepared to eat just about anything – including socks, paper, and packaged pet food. But this doesn’t necessarily mean any of those things are actually good for them. Household items aside, many commercial pet foods – particularly wet foods (tins, etc.) all have a particularly unappealing smell. A nasty, I-wouldn’t-want-to-eat-that, sort of smell. I don’t think the pretty pictures on the tins/sachets make up for this in the slightest.

So it occurred some time ago to question the quality of of said food? Really – would you eat it? Like most people, I’ve tended not to read the ingredients list too closely. Even when I do, the information doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. What even is animal digest or high quality protein?

The pet food industry is big business, but it doesn’t appear to be particularly well legislated and the standards for compliance in terms of content appear sketchy. This 10-minute video provides an overview of impressive machinery, manufacturing process standards and some charming pet pictures. Where the Pet Food Industry Association of Australia video falls down is that it doesn’t provide any detail on what actually goes into the food that’s being so carefully processed.

pfiaa vimeo video

I hunted down the Australian Standard on the Manufacturing and Marketing of Pet Food (AS 812-2011). It’s available online so, if I really want to check what’s allowed to go into pet food, I could download that. The catch? Well, to gain access to more than the cover, preface, contents, and part of the scope statement of the of the (2011) legislation, I need to invest $200.

The (free) preview pages online tell me the following, but essentially it’s committee-speak and leaves me no better informed than the video did.

This Standard was prepared by the Standards Australia Committee FT-033, Pet Food. The objective of this Standard is to provide requirements for the manufacture and marketing of pet food intended for consumption by domesticated cats and dogs. The focus of this Standard is on the safety of multi-ingredient, manufactured food for feeding to pets and on ensuring products are accurately labelled and do not mislead purchasers…This Standard specifies requirements for the production and supply of manufactured food for domesticated dogs and cats. The Standard covers production of pet food from sourcing and receipt of ingredients to storage, processing (including heat treatment), packing, labelling and storage of products in order to assure its safety for pets. It also includes instructions for the uniform application of information provided on labels.

So it’s not surprising that most people I speak to have no more idea than I do of what goes into the commercial food they give their pets. We see the TV ads, with puppies and kittens rushing to their delicious-looking dinners, and forget that these self-same pets would probably eat socks, cardboard, poop and pretty much anything in-between.  But commercial dog food, whether it’s dry kibble, tins of wet food, or training treats, is quick and easy. Not cheap – but easy. Not necessarily healthy – but easy.

It turns out, however, that commercial dog/cat food is largely made from leftovers. Not the yummy sort of leftovers you find in the fridge after pizza night. No. These leftovers are the scraps that can be scavenged from animal carcasses after all the saleable meat has been harvested, the bits not considered suitable for human consumption. This includes a bunch of things I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to eat (and I’m not a vegetarian): offal (liver, heart, kidney, lungs, brains, stomach), fat, intestines, blood, beaks, and so on. Not exactly gourmet fare, right? But it’s all lumped under the generic label of high quality protein or meat meal (of one sort or another) on the ingredients list.

This is amongst the reasons that we’ve chosen to make the bulk of our dog food, processing it every six weeks or so. We augment this with commercial kibble, but choose the best brand we can afford – after a rigorous check of the ingredients list. Why? Because my dogs are effectively our kid-replacements and this matters to us. I don’t want to feed them anything I consider distasteful or wouldn’t, at a push, be prepared to eat myself.

Training treats are my current bugbear. Most dog schools advocate soft treats, preferably meat-based. So many people use generic dog sausage (TM) for this. However, I find that even the products that claim to be ‘leading health food for pets’ are a little dodgy. The ingredients may well include 70% fresh meats… vegetables and grains, but it’s a bit like generic polony (luncheon meat): it can be keep in the fridge for weeks, just getting a bit dried out and shrivelled after a while. It also smells a bit odd and the dogs get mild diarrhoea the day after their training session. Given all of this, surely it’s not something I should feed to them?

So now that we’ll have two dogs at school every week, we’re going back to making our own training treats. This is a recipe for Sunshine Liver Brownies, given to us by a trainer at the dog club a number of years ago. It’s easy enough to make, keeps well, smells okay and I know exactly what’s in it. Oh – and the dogs love it and has no negative side-effects 🙂

  • 450g chicken or beef liver (I’ve used both; beef is often cheaper and easier to get hold of; 1kg of beef liver cost me $1.50 at the meat markets last weekend)
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup corn meal (aka polenta)
  • 1 cup plain flour
  • 1 tsp garlic (I use bottled garlic, but no doubt fresh is better)
  • Parsley – fresh or dried (this is optional; I think it’s just decorative & tend to leave it out)

Puree all of the above in food processor if you have one OR just mince the liver and then add it to the other ingredients and mix well. Note: the mixture will be quite thick. Line a baking tray with foil – and oil it lightly. Pour the mix onto the foil and press out as evenly as possible so that it’s about 1cm thick all over. Bake at 180C for 15-20 minutes (Check at 15 – it’s usually enough). Brownies are done when the pink (liver colour) has gone. Don’t over bake or the brownies’ll crumble. Once it’s cool, slice the bake into pieces small enough to use as training treats (about 1cm cubes). They keep in the fridge for about a week – but you can freeze the rest and take some out each week for training. Can be frozen for up to 6 months. I’m pretty sure your dogs will love you for this.

As for the dogs’ daily (wet) food intake, we combine 2 – 3 ox hearts (minced), 1 liver (ditto), 8 – 10kg mince (depending on the number of hearts used), 1.5kg sardines in oil.  That gets frozen in 500g lots and taken out as required. Our 2-year old gets 300g of this mix each day, the puppy gets 200g. They also both get an appropriate ration of (soaked) kibble with each meal, along with whatever appropriate veggies/fruit I have to hand. Now that is gourmet doggy-fare – and yes, I would eat it if I had to!

Food glorious food

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It’s the end of #blogjune… Will I miss it? Yes and no – my daily brain strain will enjoy having a little holiday, but the commitment to write something every day has been a very useful exercise. Thank you to all the June-bloggers who posted and who read my posts. It’s been fun 🙂

Actual June also comes to an end today – and with it the third of the food-drives hosted by Menagerie10 (our place). Last December some friends and I decided to collect food to help out those less fortunate than us. Sharing some Christmas cheer by giving, rather than receiving, sounded like a good idea. So we agreed to each set aside one durable food item every day up until 19 December. Then DaughterDearest and I went out to delivered the boxes of food to the Foodbank and were given a little tour of the facility.

We were very impressed with the set up – and with the great work that Foodbank does right around Australia. So much so, that I decided to host four Foodbank food drives this year. I started a Facebook group and invited a few people to join in and commit to fighting hunger in Australia by donating a tin/container of food each week. The result was that I delivered 55kg of assorted comestibles to Foodbank at the end of March.

Foodbank delivery1_2016Today, Cassie-puppy accompanied me back out to Foodbank to deliver the group’s second care package of the year: this time 25kg of food, all most gratefully received and put into stock for distribution. Watching the forklift drive away with the boxes felt good. Good to know that my friends and family are prepared to to care about the homeless and needy – and to do something concrete and practical to help out. So, thanks everyone – I hope you all felt a little warm glow too 🙂

Foodbank deliiver_20160630

We have two more collections this year, one for delivery to Foodbank at the end of September and one just before Christmas. So if there’s anyone out there (in the Perth region) who’d care to donate to the next appeal, please let me know. This poster outlines the sorts of things that are most appropriate – please note: no glass or bottles.

foodbank poster

Amuragami experiment

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A friend’s baby turns one this weekend, so I thought I’d make a gift for him rather than buying one. I then spent many (!) minutes scrounging around on craft sites, knitting sites and pinterest, hunting for a simple project. As always, I found the sheer volume of ideas for make-and-do overwhelming and stalled out more several times. But in the end I came across some adorable little crocheted animals. It turns out that they’re called amuragmi – and they’re really cute.

This is about when I reminded myself that the last time I made soft toys I vowed to never do so again… but 2012 is a whilxmasknits_dec2012e ago now… and amuragami are quite small… and there are heaps of free patterns available on the internet…. and I managed to talk myself into giving it a go.

The only tricky part, really, is that I’m not really much of a crocheter. I have crochet hooks, but only because I inherited them. To date I’ve made a few granny squares (in the dim and distant past) and a pair of glovens (last week), so making a crocheted toy was an interesting decision. Nevertheless, I boldly chose a simple pattern for a roly poly cat, then set about a YouTube video to teach me how to make a magic loop – which is the first stage of the process.

A few binned attempts later I now have all the elements crocheted and final assembly has commenced. So far the critter doesn’t look a whole lot like a the pattern, but it is kinda cute and I think 1-year-olds tend not to be too judgey, so I’m hopeful it’ll do the trick. Next time a smaller hook size, perhaps, and finer yarn.

Roly Poly Cat - construction phase

Be your own first audience

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My parents read to me when I was little – which is probably where I learned to love stories. More than that, I learned to love the spoken word. I find a beautifully narrated story the most fabulous entertainment imaginable. The combination of a well modulated voice and a rousing tale is right there at the top of my ‘best things ever’ list 🙂

Fast forward to when I was at uni. There I noticed that academic prose tends to be littered with the sort of language that professors and tutors require – but which doesn’t make for easy narration. I chose to avoid that as far as possible, reading my essays and assignments out loud after writing them so that I could get a sense of how they sounded.  My goal? To achieve words that scan well and can be read out loud without awkward pauses. This often required cutting out unnecessary words and/or complex language in order to express my thoughts more efficiently.

I’d type and scribble – then read it all out loud – then tweak what I’d written until it sounds right. Then I’d do it all again. It made me think about what I’d written differently. Hearing the words gave them different meaning, helped me to understand my research differently and make linkages I might otherwise have missed.

My postgrad supervisors enjoyed this aspect of my monthly reporting. We’d all sit down and get the social niceties out of the way, then I’d ask them ‘Are you sitting comfortably…? Then let’s begin’.  Flipping open my journal, I’d read my report to them as a story – a compilation of my research activities, thoughts and analysis over the past month. And they’d sit back and enjoy it. Afterwards we’d have a discussion about the research, but no session was complete without story time. It was enormous fun and we all remembered a great deal more about the project from month to month than we might otherwise have done.

This way of being flowed through into how I structured my thesis and, later, my memoir. It’s how I choose to write (for fun and profit).  The dogs have never been much of an audience, really, but they’re very patient with my ramblings… Perhaps they know that as my own first audience I will also always be my harshest critic?OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Creative mundanity

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I’ve been thinking about creativity, about the creative activities I’m currently engaged in (writing, knitting, mosaic, rug making, cooking) and how much I enjoy them. The one thing they all have in common is that they each offer me the opportunity to do things differently. In every instance I can choose whether to follow a script / pattern, to use one as a guideline, or to create something from the ground up. Whichever option I choose, everything I make is new and different and hasn’t been made before – at least not by me.

On the other end of that scale is what I consider the least creative pastime imaginable: household 450px-Wooden_clothes_pinchores. Somehow floors always need vacuuming, beds making, laundry washing, loos cleaning (etc) – and it’s a little tricky to come up with new and exciting ways to get these done. Emptying the washing machine today, I remembered my mother-in-law once telling me how she used to look back at her washing line with pride. She said it pleased her to see how sparkly clean the washing was and how nice it all looked in colour-coordinated sections…

I was young and the best response I could muster at the time was a smile. Perhaps it was the only response possible in that situation. It probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to tell her that her comment made me feel sad for what I perceived as the narrowness of her life – or to tell her that my feeling on looking over my shoulder at a line of washing is generally just one of relief that it was done and hung out. Again.

But was Ma-in-law actually trying to teach me something? Could she have noticed something of my newly-stay-at-home-mum frustrations and been trying to help? Perhaps she was using the laundry as an example to show that one can take pride in doing the simplest and most mundane of tasks well – and that no task need be inherently objectionable, particularly if viewed pragmatically.

With hindsight – and the knowledge that she was an kind, intelligent and creative woman – I feel it likely that the laundry comment did indeed have some deeper meaning along those lines. It’s also probable that this and other subtly delivered messages from her over the years are an example of what is now referred to as intergenerational learning. I was very fortunate to have her in my life and feel quite sure that she helped me to understand that aspiring to do something well, no matter how insignificant or repetitive that thing may be, is worthwhile in its own right – and can even be fun 🙂

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Wooden_clothes_pin.JPG