A simple DIY dog toy

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Having completed puppy school last month, we enrolled Cassie in the beginners obedience classes at the Southern River Dog Club for the next step. The class is quite large (about 30 dogs), so it’s demonstration/instruction-based for the most part and there’s not a lot of individual attention. But that’s okay, since the class is as much about exposing Cassie to lots of dogs and people as anything else – and our young lady is already up to speed with a few commands (sit, wait, leave, come) and walks happily (albeit a little too enthusiastically!) on lead. So class one was mostly about Himself and Cassie familiarising themselves with clicker training.

The only gotcha of the evening was that the trainers had requested that we bring along a training-specific toy. They suggested something along the lines of a simple tug-toy that was to be used at dog school – not at home. Since we hadn’t bought one – and pet stores were closed by the time we realised this – we had to come up with a last minute cunning plan.

Himself described what he was after: a woven or plaited fabric rope, soft enough to not hurt Cassie’s mouth but sturdy enough to withstand her piranha-teeth. So, with precious little time to spare, I hunted through my fabric scraps and found a narrow strip of fleece that looked like it might work. Step one was to cut it into strips… but then we were faced with the problem of how to turn those into some semblance of a tug-toy. This is about when I had a Eureka! moment…

I remembered a knotting craft that was all the rage when my own kids were at primary school:  Scoubidou (Scooby-do). It’s a cheap, colourful, useful and, above all, quick and easy way of creating a woven item. To minimise craft-talk confusion, I hunted down a simple instructional video and Himself got to weaving. Since the fabric scraps I’d scrounged up weren’t very long, the toy turned out a little shorter than we’d hoped – but it was well and truly ready in time for school. A recycling win – both the fabric and the weaving method 🙂

Yesterday I took it one step further. I scrounged through the bargain bin at our local fabric store and, for the princely sum of $8, acquired a couple of pieces of fleece fabric offcuts. Next was a quick interwebs search to see if anyone else had ever made such scoubidou-style fleece tug-toy.

I was astonished to find that not only have (many) others made similar toys, many of those crafty-folk have shared their techniques on blogs and in videos. I perused a couple and then, Scoubi-muscle-memory refreshed, I knocked up two slightly longer, snazzy-looking tug-toys whilst watching TV last night.

DIY tug toy

If you’d like to try one yourself, this is what I’d suggest:

  • Scrounge down some fleece offcuts – ideally these should be at least one metre long or your toy will end up more of a cat toy than a puppy toy.
  • I’d suggest you check the bargain bin at your local fabric store unless you’re feeling super precious about colours/designs.
  • Tip: the weaving will be a lot simpler if you have two different colours to weave with.
  • Cut four strips of fleece (two of each colour), about 5cm wide and as long as the fabric.
  • Tip: You don’t need to be too precise about the width – it’s not super important.
  • Line up one end of the strips and knot them together really firmly.
  • Now start your fleece-scoubidou tug-toy. It’s done in square (box) stitch, the building block of most scoubis.
  • Essentially, the trick is to isolate the individual strands (strips of fleece). Do this by pushing one to the back (1), one to the front (2), and one to each side (3,4) – and then keeping track of them.

DIY tug toy showing strands

  • Tip: make sure you pull the strands tight after every weave row – this keeps the tug-toy firm.

DIY tug toy showing weave

  • When you get to the length you’re happy with, tie the strands off in a tight knot and trim them.
  • Tip: leave a reasonable amount at the end to tie your knot – it takes more fabric than you’d think.

Of course, if you don’t want to make one you could just ask me to knock one up for you… especially if you already have some suitable fabric. Although, since I only used a very small amount of the fleece I bought, I’d be happy to use that up 🙂

Trip down memory lane

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On a recent rainy afternoon (rather like today) I went hunting for something to read. As always, I had heaps of must-reads cluttering up my bedside table –  but none of them appealed. They all seemed too weighty or too complicated. Basically none of them fitted what I was after… so I went trawling through our library for something that felt right.  What I found was our remaining three Dick Francis paperbacks.

Dick Francis novels

I don’t remember when exactly started reading Dick Francis thrillers, but it was sometime in my teens. What I do remember is just how much I loved them. The writing style was clear and clever, the protagonists easy to identify with, and the detail on all aspects of the racing world intensely believable. I also remember that I was both surprised and gratified to discover that Dick Francis was a retired champion jockey. No wonder his words seemed to hold the ring of authenticity!

Over the years I’ve continued to read his books, some from the public library, some from stock – and even buying them from second-hand bookshops when on holiday. The man was a prolific writer, producing over 40 novels, along with an autobiography and the official biography of racing legend Lester Piggott. It’s been fun to discover and rediscover his version of the racing world each time I’ve delved into one of them.

Not long ago, we swapped many of our paper copies for eBook versions – and I confess I do miss those well-thumbed old paperbacks. Even so, Kindle in hand, I’ve romped through Banker, Bolt and Come to Grief over the past few days – revelling the adventures of Kit Fielding, Sid Halley and Tim Ekaterin, all top blokes and very dashing protagonists.

It’s been a bit like coming home after being away for ages – the feeling that I’m reacquainting myself with people I’ve half forgotten but who’s company I enjoy each time we meet up. I’m looking forward to spending time with Neil Griffon in Bonecrack next, then Gene Hawkins in Bloodsport. I’ve got the rest queued and ready to go – and if the rainy weather persists, I may make it through them all 🙂

Have you read any? If not, you could try your local library for a taster – it really doesn’t matter in which order you read them.

The food paradox

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I always thought French food must be singularly unhealthy. After all, it seems to use an awful lot of butter and cream – and to be rather heavy-handed on the weird ingredient front (frogs legs, duck fat, blue cheeses and suchlike).

But then I watched a video countdown of the best diets in the world. Screened on SBS last week, the rather perky presenters (Kate Quilton & Jimmy Doherty) showcased typical weekly food shopping and family meals in 50 countries around the globe.

Iceland came out on top overall. They have a really clean environment, eat loads of fish and a dairy product called skyr – which sounds rather like yoghurt, but is exceptionally low in fat and high in calcium and protein. Italy, with its Mediterranean diet (my favourite), came in at second place; the Marshall Islands (in the South Pacific), with its high levels of type 2 diabetes, came in last.

My understanding of French food as inherently unhealthy led me to anticipate that France would be somewhere down the bottom of the list too. Not so. In fact the French seem to have a significantly healthier lifestyle than we do here in Australia. Not what I’d have expected, given our abundance of sunshine, fresh produce, sunshine and enthusiasm for outdoor living. But there you go: we ranked 38/50, whereas France came up as very commendable 8/50!

Since I’m generally pretty suspicious of information presented on TV, I hunted around for some more data on the pros and cons of French food. I found some commentary on high levels of saturated fat and possible under-reporting of coronary heart disease related deaths, but the bulk of what I found supported the notion that the French lifestyle is a positive one.

A recent good food study conducted by Oxfam concluded the same thing. It ranked 125 countries according to the quality of their food, its affordability and availability – and on the prevalence of diet-related health issues. On this food index, Australia was ranked eighth – with the race to the bottom won by Chad. France came in at second place.
oxfam comparisonWhilst this was interesting, it didn’t tell me what the French are doing that we’re not. As author Mireille Guiliano asks: “…they eat as they like and they don’t get fat. Porquoi?”

Why is it so, indeed? Considering that key ingredients of French food include butter, speck, duck fat and cheese, it sounds implausible. What is it about the French diet and lifestyle that has resulted in France being relatively high on the preferred diet list and low on the international overweight index?

Well, firstly, it’s very flavoursome food. It’s also very filling – which makes it easier to be mindful of what you eat and to not overindulge. They also tend not to snack between meals and to include walking as part of their lifestyle. Add to this that the French have traditionally made an art out of food preparation and eating. It’s something they take seriously, finding pleasure in relaxing over their meals rather than rushing through them or eating them on autopilot whilst busy with other things – in the car, at work, or in front of the TV/computer.

The past couple of decades has, however, seen this lifestyle starting to fall foul of la restauration rapide épidémie (the fast food epidemic). According to some research, this shift is resulting in a reduction in the number of people maintaining the tradition of two or three sit down meals a day. Even so, it seems the French are still getting things more right than not, with the average body mass index remaining pretty much the same over the past 40 years.

So where to from here for our household? My take-home message from all this was to try to make our lifestyle a little more French, whilst retaining key elements of my favourite eating style (the Mediterranean diet). My new plan is to get retro: go back to taking time to plan the meals for the week, increase our fish and blue cheese (!) intake, use lots of veggies every day and exile fast food / ready meals / snacks (for the most part).

With this in mind, I conducted a mini-audit of our fridge/freezer and pantry yesterday and found a preponderance of fresh food (yoghurt, cheese, eggs, fruit and veg), as well as tinned/dry staples (tuna, lentils, rice, pasta). It looks like my plan won’t really result in much extra shopping – or in that much of a lifestyle change – although cutting back on red meat and eating more fish probably won’t sit too well with the meatosaurus of the family. Perhaps he won’t notice if I wear a beret when I’m cooking… he’ll be too busy laughing 🙂

How about you? What’s your favourite food style?

It’s a knitting thing

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Have you ever had one of those moments when, no matter how logical it may be, something you’ve heard or read or watched simply didn’t make sense? At our place we call it being ‘hard of understanding’ – it’s a polite way of telling someone that they’re being slow on the uptake.

This week I had just such a moment – or, more to the point, a series of moments. I tried using YouTube to learn how to do something called a provisional cast on. It’s a knitting thing – and is touted as being a most cunning cast-on technique with many applications. Whilst I’d heard about it from time to time from extreme knitters, I’d never found any need to figure it out. Until now.The fabled back room at Bendigo Woollen Mills

To make a short story long, I’ll rewind to July last year for some context. That’s when I trotted off to the Bendigo Sheep & Wool Show with my sister (an extreme knitter). She’d talked wistfully about wanting to go to Bendigo for a number of years and had waxed lyrical about the Aladdin’s cave of the fabled ‘back room’ at Bendigo Woollen Mills. I confess I was curious – particularly about the cave – and it seemed a good way to celebrate her retirement. So off we went for a few days of woolly, touristy fun.

On our second night we had dinner with a number of other knitters, many of whom were originally from Perth and stay in contact via email, Ravelry and the Bendigo weekend. I ended up sitting next to Nan Bray, the force behind White Gum Wool – and not from Perth. She told us a little about her journey from marine science to sheep farming and luxury wool production while we tucked into some local fare. Nan mentioned that the scarf she was wearing was an example of her new range ultrafine 12ply bouclé yarn. Although she explained that it was made from 14.8-micron lambs wool, I didn’t really grok what that meant until I felt it. It was silky smooth, delightfully soft and so squishy and touchable that if she’d had any for sale I’d have bought it on the spot – and I am not an impulse purchaser by any means.

So the next day I made it my mission to hunt down the White Gum Wool stand at a woolly-event. I was disappointed to find that the colour I’d fallen in love with (hawthorn) was sold out, but decided that I really needed some of that yarn – just to pat and cuddle. So I simply chose the next best option and bought a single 100g ball of Ultrafine Quarrystone Bouclé – and cuddled it all the way home 🙂

Now, a year later, cuddling the ball whenever I hunt through my stash of yarn is not enough. It was time to knit something that I could actually use. Luckily Ravellry came through (as usual) and  I found a pattern that uses exactly one ball of bouclé.

soft and swift cowlBut…. the starts with a provisional cast on… Fortunately there’s a veritable plethora of short instructional videos available on this topic online. I watched seven, yarn and needles in hand, pausing, replaying, pausing – until my brain overheated. It’s not that the technique is especially tricky, but it is fiddly – and the flying fingers and rapid instructions from the demonstrators, with no slow-down option available, made success problematic and reverse knitting my forte.

Much time, all (!) the videos and several scrapped attempts later, I eventually achieved success. But by then I’d concluded (a number of times) that I was a)definitely hard of understanding on the instructional video front, and b)never going to be an extreme knitter! Nevertheless, my deliciously squishy scarf is almost halfway there – although this does mean I’ll meed to revisit the land of scary how-to videos at some point to remind myself how to do Kitchener stitch to join the ends together… I see more hard of understanding moments ahead this week.

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!