When Henry first came to our clinic he weighed 6 oz.  and looked like a limp noodle. A family with a litter of kittens began to notice that Henry wasn’t growing as well as the rest of his siblings. Henry’s cat mom (the “queen”) didn’t want to take care of Henry. He was a reject. A bona-fide runt.

Henry’s human mom didn’t want him to suffer but at the same time couldn’t afford to pay his medical bills. So we agreed to “adopt” him and do the best we could to nurse him back to health.

It wasn’t easy.

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I understand why pet owners look to the Internet for information. Like the article states, some people simply learn better on their own rather than standing face to face with a doctor. I know I do. You can also be in a state of shock after learning your pet has cancer or requires an expensive surgery. Chances are you’re not going to absorb everything the doctor says.

Also, the Internet can help reinforce something the veterinarian said or provide a second opinion. These are all good reasons for seeking additional informaton on the web. However, depending on the source, the information you discover may not always be reliable or trustworthy.

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This may or may not be true. The fact is–the concept is used mainly by manufacturers to market their “no by-product” foods. I’ll admit that some by-products don’t belong in pet food. However, many by-products are a superior source of nutrition for our pets.

Keep in mind that just because something is “unfit for human consumption” it isn’t always unhealthy. Last I checked there wasn’t a huge demand in the human food industry for chicken hearts, pork livers, sheep lungs, or beef spleen. But these are all ingredients that offer our pets excellent nutrition.

Many by-products like liver offer superior nutrition over muscle meats when used in commercial pet foods. In fact, advocates of raw food diets don’t think twice about feeding certain “by-products” to their pets.

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The more I read, it soon became evident that this was going to be one of those stories that you hate hearing about. Granted, anytime something bad happens to a pet your heart goes out to the owner. But in this case–I just wanted to reach through the papers and give her a hug.

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If you don’t know about Adsense, what happens is Google reads the content of a website and then spits out ads it thinks readers might find useful based upon the content it finds on the page. People click on the ads and for each click the website owner earns a few pennies.

In the end I decided to have an Adsense-less blog. Why? Because I don’t want to send mixed messages to my readers like so many other blogs and websites do. For instance, I could be writing about how to select the perfect puppy, and some ad for a backyard breeder I don’t know anything about or some corporate pet store could pop up. I don’t want to support those kinds of websites even though I might make a few cents from people clicking on them.

I know of one veterinarian who writes about the pitfalls of commercial pet food, flea products, and prescription medications on his website. He believes they’re all evil and giving our pets cancer. This may or may not be the case. Either way, he has ads splattered all over his website for online pet pharmacies and pet food. It just doesn’t make sense to me!

So–you won’t find any Google ads here. That way I can write about whatever I want and I won’t have to worry about sending you off in the wrong direction .

If you’re anything like me you probably get a bunch of emails from families and friends with cute pet photos attached. I received the above photo with a bunch of others not too long ago. At first I was amazed but it didn’t take me long to realize that this photo is fake. There’s some kitty cloning going on around here–and not the kind that involves DNA!

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