Obesity kills dogs. It’s that simple, really. We can spend our time discussing the specific health conditions that have been linked with obesity – nasty stuff like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Or we can focus on figuring out how obesity does it’s dirty business – explaining the specific biological processes going on inside an […]
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It’s easy to forget that the world as it appears to a dog is very different from the world as it appears to you and me. I mean that literally. Because we all “know” that our dogs experience the world differently than we do (at least in the sense that we’ll all agree with that […]
If you spend as much time as I do talking about pet obesity and fitness, you’re bound to run across someone who attempts to defend their overweight dog using some variation of the “so what?” defense: “Yeah, I know he’s overweight, but so what? Look at him — he doesn’t seem to mind, he’s perfectly […]
One reason why celebrity dog trainers and other self-appointed “experts” are so quick to tell you what your dog is thinking or feeling is this: it’s difficult to prove them wrong. As you may have noticed, dogs can’t communicate verbally. So they’re never going to explicitly tell us what’s going on inside their heads. Instead, […]
On a high level, the chain of reasoning supporting the claim “your dog should lose some body fat” looks something like this: (1) canine overweight and obesity are “bad” for dogs (they shorten lives and amplify suffering); (2) your dog is overweight or obese; therefore (3) your dog should lose some body fat. Most dog […]
Hang around a fancy boutique pet store long enough and you may run into a bizarre and confounding creature – the pet owner or animal rights advocate who feeds his dog or cat a primarily (or even exclusively) vegetarian diet. These curious critters come in all shapes and sizes. And while some are elitist snobs, […]
Since we were children, purveyors of folk wisdom have been telling us that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” For the most part, they’ve been right. In dogs, as in primates and humans, impaired learning and memory functions correlate with aging. It’s a sad but true fact that as we grow older our […]
Last month, the Varsity Pets braintrust took a road-trip to Charleston, SC to watch a Varsity Pets-sponsored canine athlete compete at the Southeast Wildlife Exposition. We had an absolute blast. When we returned, we wrote about our experience in Charleston for our friends at GoPetFriendly.com. If you’re interested in learning more about this amazing city […]
Last week I paid a visit to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit. As you can probably guess from the videos below, it wasn’t a trip that I’ll soon forget. I was invited by Lt. Michael Barnhill, one of the most energetic and hard-working human beings that you’ll find anywhere. Lt. Barnhill manages a […]
The majority of the content that we publish at the Optimal Dog is informational in nature. We identify an interesting health or fitness question, we research and think about it, and we regurgitate our conclusions. You, our readers, read the answers and, perhaps, learn some new information. And, sometimes, that’s it. In those cases, you […]
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