I have always used the treats in the dog training process. It just never fails… dogs will do anything for the good treat. Unfortunately they can’t read the ingredients on the bag and are concerned only about the flavor. In the past I used store bought treats which were artificially flavored. At that time I was not aware that the artificial ingredients may actually hurt my dogs. Well, few years ago, I used store bought treats to train a newly adopted dog. My other dog also got the same treats during the training of the new guy. I didn’t want him to be left out. After about 3-4 weeks into the process both of my dogs got sick. One got bad diarrhea and recovered in several days after I stopped giving him treats. The other one was not so lucky. It all went very quickly. He started to have trouble urinating. It took him several minutes to do it and 3 days later he was not able to urinate at all. It went on for 24 hours. He was in pain trying to go potty every 10-15 minutes... with no result. Next morning I took him for the emergency visit to the vet, and he was diagnosed with bladder stones. The emergency surgery took care of the stones, and he recovered nicely. The vet said he will have the stones again. I can understand why he said that; he assumed I would not make changes in the dogs lifestyle, but I did. I never ever went back to giving my dogs store bought treats and, knock on the wood, the stones didn’t come back.
Every time I take my dogs to the vet, I see other dogs with many health problems. I think most of those problems can be eliminated by paying attention to what we feed our dogs. It's actually very easy to determine which ingredients are good and which are not - if it doesn't sound like food, it is not, and it shouldn't be eaten by anyone.
Today we can buy all natural dog treats, but most of them still contain preservatives, so… I thought of an easy way to make my own dog treats. I buy a big package of sausage, cut it in slices and put in the oven on the rack over the cake baking sheet in 170F for 4-6 hours. The point is to dehydrate the sausage as well as get rid of the fat. The fat melts away and collects on the cake sheet leaving the lean slices of sausage. 3.8lb of sausage makes about 1.8lb of the lean and dehydrated chips of sausage dogs love. I keep them in the container in the refrigerator to assure freshness. They taste so good, I have to actually hide them deep in the fridge from the family.
