Dog Jaunt

Photo by David Paul Ohmer

The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (“RTA” or “NORTA”) operates buses and streetcars in the cities of New Orleans and Kenner. The system was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina (flooding ruined dozens of vehicles, damaged tracks and other infrastructure, and made the RTA’s headquarters uninhabitable) but has been recovering. You will have to admire the RTA’s grit and determination from a distance, however, because only service dogs are allowed aboard its buses and streetcars. (I called twice, since the first answer disappointed me so much; alas, that really appears to be the policy.)

The other major public transit agency in the area is Jefferson Transit (“JeT”), which operates buses in suburban Jefferson Parish, including Metairie, Gretna, Terrytown, Harvey, and Marrero. JeT routes essentially ring downtown New Orleans, so they go to plenty of useful places (including the airport). Please note that on weekdays, the E-2 Airport Downtown Express goes from the airport to the corner of Tulane and Loyola, right in downtown New Orleans (on weekends, the bus only goes as far as Tulane and Carrollton, unfortunately). That’s good news, because a JeT customer service representative told me that small dogs in carriers are allowed on board JeT buses.

Please note that SuperShuttle does not service New Orleans International Airport. The local provider, Airport Shuttle New Orleans, only allows service dogs on board.

For other posts about traveling with dogs on public transit, take a look at Dog Jaunt’s handy guide!

This week’s Chloe’s Clicks is a cheerful assortment of miscellaneous items, so we’ll just bounce from one to the other and not hope for a theme. Let’s start in lovely Santa Cruz, CA. Last week I told you that the city’s downtown merchants were about to vote for/against lifting a long-standing dog ban, and this week the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that the vote went in favor of lifting the ban, with caveats: There will be a six-month trial period, no more than three dogs may be allowed to gather together, and dogs must be kept on 3-5′ leashes.

Even before the ban was lifted, Santa Cruz had some great dog-friendly options — SantaCruz.com describes several, including a beloved dog-friendly breakfast place (Aldo’s) and the oddball (and dog-friendly) Surfing Museum.

On the other side of the country, SarasotaDog.com wrote enthusiastically about having a beer and beach food with your dog at O’Leary’s Tiki Bar & Grill — the place sounds like a hoot (there’s even a small beach for the dogs to enjoy), and the pictures make me smile. I just wish I’d known about it when we were in Sarasota a couple of weeks ago!

The next three links I have for you are all resources for dog-friendly hotels and other places to stay. I’m really exited about maps4pets.com, a nice-looking site with an easy-to-use map of pet friendly accommodations in the U.K. Click on the part of the U.K. you’re interested in, and then click on the particular county you care about. A color-coded menu of choices appears (“Hotels,” “Guest Houses,” “Self Catering,” etc.), and matching color-coded dots indicate where properties of that type are located. Click on a dot, and you are given its address and easy access to its website, e-mail, and Google Maps location. Love it!

Back in the U.S., a WalletPop post reported that the Pet Realty Network offers a database of pet-friendly real estate properties to search. The pickings appear to be slim right now (I couldn’t locate any pet-friendly condos in Seattle, for example), but the site has ambitious plans (its tagline is “Pet Friendly Real Estate Around the World for Pets and their People”).

One more leap around the world, and you land down under, where a new provider, KennelSearch, allows you to book pet-friendly accommodations in Australia and New Zealand online (and helps you find other pet service providers as well).

All of this is happy news for travelers with dogs, but Stuck At The Airport wrote a post this week for msnbc.com exposing the dark side of pet travel, including owners who let their dogs poop indoors (and don’t clean up), sneak their dogs into hotels that don’t allow them, and demand unreasonable amounts of pampering (including one owner who wanted her dog to have a bed of its own with linens that matched hers). People! Don’t do that! Dog travel is in a fragile place right now — service providers are just starting to be convinced that offering pet-friendly amenities makes economic sense — and we need to be careful, thoughtful travelers so that the notion can take hold.

Speaking of picking up poop, the newest hands-off device is called the Catch-It waste collector, which is essentially a small hoop on a stick. You secure a poop bag to the hoop, and when your dog goes into her crouch, you slide the hoop underneath and catch the poop as it falls. With “the flick of a finger,” says the maker, the bag seals and can be pulled off the hoop and discarded. Chloe is not a dog that would tolerate having anything tucked under her tush during a private moment, so we will be sticking with a simpler approach.

Today’s photo was taken almost a year ago somewhere in Britain — you can tell it’s not the U.S. because the train looks so sleek and because there’s a dog on board (Amtrak has not allowed dogs on board since 1976). When I first saw this picture, I thought the dog’s owner was surely breaking some rule, but it turns out that leashed dogs are allowed on National Rail trains (other small animals must be enclosed in a carrier).

Leashed dogs may accompany you in the passenger cars and, with advance permission, in sleeper compartments. They may not be taken into buffet or restaurant cars. For details, download National Rail’s Conditions of Carriage (PDF) and scroll down to page 17, then to pages 23-27.

Photo by healthserviceglasses

Please send me links to your favorite dog travel photos! They’ll get listed below, for everyone to click on and view. Here’s how it works:

1. Every Friday, I’ll put up a post like this one, sometime during the morning (Pacific time).
2. If you have a blog or a website, post a dog travel photo on your site on Friday and link back here to the current week’s “Photo Friday” post so that your readers can see other great dog travel photos. Please take a moment to make sure that you are linking directly to your photo post instead of your homepage.
3. If you don’t have a blog or a website, simply post your photo to Flickr (or Facebook, Twitpic, etc.).
4. Enter a link to your photo or your blog post in the form at the bottom of my post. That way, Dog Jaunt will link back to you. Please include a few words in the “Link Title” box describing where you took the photo.

This is a guest post by Jim McBean, a blogger, dog lover and guardian to a Border Collie named Sweety and an American Pit Bull Terrier named Zeus. Jim blogs at http://doggybytes.ca which focuses mainly on canine health and nutrition. I asked Jim to write this post after I found myself with a measuring cup in one hand and a Ziploc bag in the other, not knowing how much kibble to pack for Chloe. The package had a suggestion, but after reading Jim’s recent posts I no longer trust dog food packaging the way I used to….

Photo by TheGiantVermin

How much and how frequently should you feed your dog? There really isn’t one answer to this question. Some people free feed their dogs, filling their dog’s dish and leaving it out all day for the dog to “nibble” on. Other’s feed their dogs “three squares” a day.

I once knew a lady with a golden lab named Buddy. Buddy had to eat “lunch” every day at 12 noon, because well, that’s “lunchtime”.

I had a conversation with another lady, a cat owner who leaves a dish of cat food out on all three floors of her house, just in case her cat was hungry and didn’t feel like getting off the chair and go down to the kitchen to eat – I guess?

You Don’t Need to Eat Today, You Ate Yesterday!

Dogs didn’t evolve to eat on a schedule (nor did humans for that matter), they evolved to eat when food was available, most times after a kill. There would days, perhaps many days when little or no food was available at all. Other days after a kill they’d gorge themselves.

Did You Know? Wolves can eat up to 20 pounds of meat and bone in a single feed.

Feeding Frequency

I feed my dogs a raw meaty bones diet once a day, with healthy, single ingredient treats offered randomly. Rarely do they eat the same food two days in a row, and they almost never eat at the same time every day. This is not to say that it’s a “bad idea” to feed your dog at the same time(s) every day. At the moment my schedule allows me to feed my dogs whenever, and whenever is usually when I wake up.

Another thing I do is fast my dogs one day a week. No, this isn’t a mean thing to do, it actually gives their pancreas and digestive systems a break, and along with the RMB diet, more closely aligns with a diet that canines evolved to eat.

How Much To Feed

Kibble

Recommending a portion size for kibble, that’s a tough one. Every formula has its own feeding recommendations, which you’d think would make it easy to figure out how to feed Fido or Chloe – just follow the instructions on the bag right? Well unfortunately in many cases it’s not as easy as that.

Take a recent study published in January by The Journal of the Americal Veterinary Medical Association, conducted by the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. The study looked at 93 commercially available pet foods (dog and cat) making “weight management” claims and showed that the caloric density of the pet foods studied ranged from 217 to 440 kilocalories per cup (kcal/cup), and portion recommendations ranged from 0.73 to 1.47 times the dog’s resting energy requirement. So basically double the calories and double the recommended feeding portions. Nice!

Co-author of this study Dr. Lisa Freeman, professor of nutrition at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, says “There is so much information — and misinformation — about pet foods, it’s understandable that people are confused about what to feed their dogs and cats. To counteract these myths, people are accustomed to turning to the labels on food — but, as this study shows, packaging might not always be a reliable source of information.”

Raw Meaty Bones

On average, a small dog will require 3% of its body weight in food (preferably raw meaty bones) on a daily basis, or 21% spread over 7 days. So, an 18 pound dog would need a little bit over 1/2 lb of raw meaty bones daily, or just under 4 lbs for the entire week. That’s a ridiculously small amount of food!

For bigger dogs I shoot for 2% of their body weight in food from raw meaty bones or 14% over the course of a week. Many large dogs may only require 1% of their body weight daily, or 7% weekly. By the way, raw meaty bones should be about 70% meat and the rest bone – so more meat than bone.

Dehydrated Raw Food

What do you do if you travel a lot with your pet, aren’t crazy about feeding kibble but feeding a raw meaty bones diet isn’t possible while traveling? There is a third option, and that is finding a good dehydrated dog food that you can bring along with you and rehydrate at feeding time no matter where you are.

To be honest, I don’t know much about these products yet, but I did find a company online called The Honest Kitchen that I pointed out to my friends Rod and Amy Burkert of GoPetFriendly.com. They travel A LOT and wanted to feed raw, which isn’t feasible for them when they’re on the road, so they switched their pals Buster & Ty over to HK’s Force back in December. So far the reports coming from the GPF camp are of gleaming stainless steel food bowls (after eating) and very happy dogs!

Signs of Overfeeding

• Weight gain (obvious)
• No visible waist line
• Burying bones in the backyard (not hungry now but I’ll have it later)
• Not eating

What About Balance

Balanced nutrition does not happen on a “by the day” basis, but rather “balanced nutrition” is achieved over time. In fact, no animal on this beautiful blue globe of ours has ever achieved a “balanced diet” on each and every day of its life. Think about it, have you or anyone you know, ever consumed every single required nutrient every day for an entire week straight? No, because it just doesn’t happen that way.

Balanced nutrition is achieved by supplying a variety of necessary nutrients at varying levels over time. I could get into the implications that this has with regards to dogs eating the same nutrients in the same quantities every day over a its lifespan, but that’s another post.

I can see problems occurring in pets fed multiple times per day, every day. Eating two or three times per day means that the pancreas has to produce digestive enzymes two or three times per day. In other words it has to work harder and over a number of years, this can take its toll. Potential weight gain by overfeeding is another common occurrence.

The Bottom Line

To me, the notion of feeding a dog a daily fixed portion size doesn’t make much sense. As with people, there are several factors that dictate how much a dog should eat, age, activity level, health problems, metabolism etc. We know that when we gain weight we either need to increase our exercise level, decrease or restructure the amounts and types of foods we eat, or both. The same holds true for our dogs.

Recommended Reading

Work Wonders: Feed Your Dog Raw Meaty Bones

Give Your Dog a Bone: The Practical Commonsense Way to Feed Dogs for a Healthy Life

Photo by Jordan Batch

Back in December 2009, I wrote a post about how I’d jumped through a number of hoops to ship frozen raw dog food ahead of us on a trip we were taking. Chloe’s a picky eater, I explained, and I’d be flirting with disaster to rely on the other food she’s sometimes eaten (Dick Van Patten’s Natural Balance rolls). My father-in-law assures me that no dog offered some form of food ever starved to death, but Chloe the Puppy seemed as determined as any cat not to touch food that offended her. When she first approved the raw food she now eats regularly, I just about wept with relief.

A couple of months ago, inspired by my blogging friends Jim McBean (Doggy Bytes) and Rod & Amy Burkert (Go Pet Friendly), I tried again with samples of Honest Kitchen’s dehydrated raw food. Jim and the Burkerts rave about the stuff, but Chloe rejected both Force (chicken-based) and Verve (beef-based). Picky, I tell you.

Imagine my surprise when, on a couple of recent trips, she polished off bowls of (1) reconstituted Stella & Chewy’s Dandy Lamb freeze-dried raw food and (2) Taste of the Wild High Prairie kibble! Take it from me, I was surprised. I was also thrilled to death, because shipping frozen raw food isn’t easy and it’s wildly expensive.

The take-home lesson, no doubt, is that a dog’s preferences change over time, and that you should keep running alternatives past your picky eater. I’m just relieved that traveling with Chloe has become that much easier.

But what about dogs that make Chloe look like a lean and hungry scavenger? Blogger Helen Fazio wrote a post about traveling with very picky eaters — “the eaters of home cooked food, the dogs who need it hot out of a pot, the dogs who think kibble’s just a little pile of rocks” — and her tips for finding healthy food your dog will like on restaurant menus and in grocery stores are well worth a look.

Photo by FootAJ

It occurred to me this morning, as I was looking through Chloe’s pantry for treats that would work well on a walk, that we have a wide variety of treats but only some of them pack well. Chloe loves Etta Says! meaty treats, PureBites freeze-dried treats and Stella & Chewy’s Carnivore Crunch treats, for example, but none of them breaks into smaller pieces well (they crumble instead) — and for the same reason, they don’t travel well. She also loves New Zealand Real Meat jerkey treats and Wellness Pure Rewards jerky treats, but they’re borderline — they break apart into small-dog-sized bites, which is great, but they’re a bit fragile for packing.

When I’m packing treats for Chloe, I reach for Merrick lamb lung filet squares (be sure to get the flat filets, not the lamb puffs, because they can easily be broken apart into small bits). I also reach for Zuke’s Mini Naturals (which are really a bit too big for Chloe, but can be broken in half with your fingernail) and Zuke’s Z-Filets, which are excellent. Finally, I always pack some flavor of Buddy Biscuits (the Soft & Chewy ones, though Chloe also likes the crunchy Itty Bitty Buddy Biscuits).

Have I missed your dog’s favorite treat? Let me know — no doubt Chloe will want to check them out!

There’s something for everyone in this week’s Chloe’s Clicks! Let’s start with dog-friendly dining. ZooToo posted a cheerful report about an increase in the number of communities that allow restaurants to welcome dogs to outdoor patios (including Newport, RI and Panama Beach City, FL). Across the country, downtown Santa Cruz business owners are considering a repeal of the current dog ban, in an effort to reap the same benefits that downtown Carmel and Los Gatos merchants are enjoying. The vote is due on Tuesday, March 16th — fingers crossed!

A couple of links highlight dog-friendly spots in New York City: Glenwood, a real estate site, posted an article with some useful links to NYC dog resources, and offManhattan tracked down five excellent dog bakeries in Brooklyn.

Here’s the kind of link we love to see: Brampton Inn, about an hour from Annapolis, MD, posted an entry in the inn’s blog that describes its pet-friendly cottage as well as some local pet-friendly trails and attractions. As a bonus, it includes a recipe for Cheesey Dog Biscuits.

Speaking of local pet-friendly attractions, Avenue K9 posted its list of the top ten dog parks in North America. Unlike some top-ten lists I’ve seen, this one highlights parks sprinkled around the U.S., and includes one in Ontario. I was happy to see Seattle’s Magnuson Park, one of Chloe’s hangouts, on the list.

Still speaking of local pet-friendly attractions, I’m happy to report that Rod and Amy Burkert, our friends at Go Pet Friendly, received their specially-wrapped Winnebago and have set off on the first of many trips to investigate and report dog-friendly locations and activities around the country. Keep an eye on their travels through their blog Take Paws — and check out the fabulous new vehicle!

And speaking of the Burkerts’ blog, take a look at Take Paws‘ new series of guest posts from Dog Spelled Forward’s Eric Goebelbecker about training dogs to be good travelers. The series starts with a post describing how to capture your dog’s attention (don’t miss the video and the handout).

This week’s photo was taken last October in Amsterdam’s Oosterdok area, and I just love it. I don’t know for sure, but it looks to me like this dog is living on a houseboat — which prompted me to look for Oosterdok houseboats you can rent. Here’s one: The M.S. Atalanta has recently been redecorated and looks absolutely charming. I wrote to the owners, Brad and Marieke, and they told me that they welcome house-trained dogs on board. How soon can I get there?!

Photo by ricardo-pereira

Please send me links to your favorite dog travel photos! They’ll get listed below, for everyone to click on and view. Here’s how it works:

1. Every Friday, I’ll put up a post like this one, sometime during the morning (Pacific time).
2. If you have a blog or a website, post a dog travel photo on your site on Friday and link back here to the current week’s “Photo Friday” post so that your readers can see other great dog travel photos. Please take a moment to make sure that you are linking directly to your photo post instead of your homepage.
3. If you don’t have a blog or a website, simply post your photo to Flickr (or Facebook, Twitpic, etc.).
4. Enter a link to your photo or your blog post in the form at the bottom of this post. That way, Dog Jaunt will link back to you. Please include a few words in the “Link Title” box describing where you took the photo.

We visited Sarasota, FL last week for a marathon opera weekend. No, Chloe is not an opera fan — but neither is my husband, so they cocooned together at the Hotel Indigo Sarasota, one in a chain of boutique hotels sprinkled around the country (with some outliers in Shanghai, London, Costa Rica and Mexico). It’s located only a couple of minutes away from the Opera House, and it’s a delightful place, so all three of us were happy. I should mention that we paid our own way at the Hotel Indigo — I’ll always let you know when something I’m reviewing has been paid for by someone else.

Dog’s-eye view: This is not a hotel that makes a big fuss about dog guests — no doggy welcome basket here — but the receptionist came out from behind the desk to collect kisses and distribute pats, and the staff generally beamed on Chloe. There are a couple of useful patches of grass directly across from the front door, and a large grassy lot just across the driveway, so bathroom breaks were a breeze.

Hotel Indigo Sarasota room

What we liked: It’s a small hotel with a charming personality. The lobby is inviting and friendly, and the rooms are large and well-appointed. The decor in this Hotel Indigo is Nantucket-with-a-twist — cheerful, oversized, white-painted wood furniture, lots of blue-and-white linens, and truly enormous beds. The hotel is located a heartbeat away from the most interesting part of downtown Sarasota, and even though it’s on Tamiami Trail, we had no problem at all with street noise.

What we didn’t like: We slept poorly the first night we were there because the hall door between the first floor rooms (where the management prefers to lodge pet owners) and the lobby slammed loudly. When we spoke to the front desk in the morning, we were moved to the third floor, which was perfectly quiet. All well and good, but we would have been satisfied with a sign on the door asking guests to close it quietly. It was our impression that the sign idea would never be implemented, so when you visit, mention the problem and ask to be given a room on another floor. It will not help to have a room far from the door — ours was nearly at the far end of the hall, and we heard it clearly.

The hotel has a café that serves breakfast, but both the menu and buffet choices were mediocre. The bar, however, was a pleasant place to sit and chat with a drink in the afternoon.

The shower is large and enjoyable, but there is no bathtub — and after an opera double-header, I yearned for a soak. I could have soaked in the hotel’s outdoor hot tub (there is also a small plunge pool of cooler water), but I failed to pack a swimsuit.

Next time? We will happily return to the Hotel Indigo, as long as we are assured a room on an upper floor. Our room was in the $200/night range, and we felt that it was worth the price. Please note that there is a non-refundable one-time $125 pet fee.

Chloe in the van

Driving from Sarasota to Tampa this weekend, I realized that although I’ve described my preferred away-from-home car safety set-up for Chloe (a 3-in-1 vest harness plus the strap from a PetBuckle kit), I’ve never given you a picture of it in action. So here’s a picture of Chloe in my father-in-law’s van, just after a very satisfying trip to one of her favorite dog parks. It’s already hot in Florida, so she’s resting on the Zentek pad I bought a while ago. Please note that the strap is long enough to let her lie down comfortably, but short enough to keep her from being slung around the car in an emergency.

The only downside of this set-up is that she can’t quite see out of the window, which she loves to do (at home, our car is equipped with a booster seat). The tidiest collapsible booster seat I’ve found, though, only works on seats you can pass a belly-band around, and you can’t always be sure that the rental car you’re getting will have free-standing back seats. It also takes up more room than I currently have in Chloe’s suitcase, so we settle for the very compact harness-and-strap option.