We'll do whatever works...

That cute little pink nose.

It used to be black. A total black crust of snot. Birdie wheezed and sneezed and snarffled and snuffled and snotted all. the. time. Even after all the vomiting had stopped. She also had a patchy, dry, dandruffy coat. She reacted to most topical flea treatments.

At that point, I thought, "Well hell. Getting rid of corn stopped the vomiting. I wonder what losing the rest of the grains would do?"

I assumed their coats would improve. And we got that. But we got so much more.

One day, I suddenly realized that Birdie wasn't snot-filled, and lo and behold, she had a pink nose. That "chronic respiratory infection" that she would never be able to shake, according to the vet, was gone.

Since then, she's been fine. Perfect. She has so far been fine with every totally grain-free food we've tried-- Pinnacle, Merrick, Solid Gold... And she has gone back to snotty and awful within a couple of days on any other foods with grain, even the "high-quality" ones, except Wellness Salmon. The rice and barley seem to treat her fine, so I suppose it's not a totally across the board grain-related issue. We've never done a dedicated food trial with her because just finding something grain-free has always worked so well, along with this Wellness variety that we'd resorted to when she was being picky. So we're happy with that. Someday I'd like to get everyone on raw, but I'll save that for another day.

At any rate, Birdie has been the barometer for the importance of diet. Our little guinea pig of a cat.

Alice's Adventures in Pet Food

My sister-in-law called it the rabbit hole when I asked her what she recommended we feed our new dog. She gave me the option to stop right there and go no further... but I didn't listen.

Our dog Simon was elderly, to put it mildly. He had arthritis and was developing some Canine Cognitive Dysfunction. And he was extremely fearful of people.

But dogs, he loved. He communicated better with them than with people. He was happy with doggie friends. He couldn't physically handle a puppy, but an adult dog that could just be a companion in his old age seemed appropriate. The idea of having a dog that we could be more active with appealed to us. And the prospect of a silent home when it was time for Simon to call it a day was more than I could bear to think about. I picked him out of his litter when I was 15. I'd had him roughly half my life.

We'd always fed him whatever was on sale at the store-- Beneful, Kibbles n Bits, Dog Chow, you name it. And at 13 or 14 years old, it seemed to have worked for him.

But we'd recently learned it wasn't the best, thanks to our cats.

This sweet gal, Birdie, threw up daily. Multiple times a day. She was healthy, according to our vet. I'd had cats all my life, and they'd always thrown up. But this was the first time I'd had a strictly indoor cat, and I was tired of cleaning up vomit constantly.

With a little research, we learned that corn doesn't sit well with cats' stomachs. This was 6 or 7 years ago. I can't even remember where I learned this, what websites I visited, what books I read. I know I did a lot of research (catinfo.org is my current go-to site for cat nutrition information).

This was also before the big trend of pet foods without corn. It was almost impossible to find one, especially to find one we could afford. We were poor.

But Petsmart's house label made one. And sure enough, it worked. It worked. Immediately. No more vomiting. No more cleaning up piles of half digested kibbles.

It was my first clue that what we feed our animals really matters in a tangible way-- that it's not just raw fuel for energy. It is important in so many ways.

That's when I fell down the rabbit hole. It's when I started asking an awful lot of questions about what was going into the food that I gave my animals. It was when I really understood that I'm in charge of that. My animals have no choice in that. It's all up to us humans (as if we don't have enough on our plates... ;-). It's when I started looking at what I could do to extend Simon's life and what I could do for the newest member of our family, River.