Man, didn’t you guys have a blast at Pip’s Superhero-Blogoversary-Comment a thon yesterday?? I know I may have had one too many Margaritas!
In case any of you missed it I wanted to post my Superhero costume. I’m Aussie Oskar
It hasn’t worked yet, but one day I’m going to leap into the sky, fly around the world & surprise my girl Bella!
We want to pay tribute to all of our military fallen and still alive who have helped to make our country the best place in the world!
Don’t forget to stop by Pip’s Blog all day long as he will be posting superhero pics all through the day & evening. Mine should be in the middle group & is a special tribute to a little Scottie girl from Oz who I love! The Superhero posts are part of a comment-a-thon, with all of the proceeds going to the Joplin, MO Humane Society, so do drop over several times today!
O.K., about me. I live with my mom person, my dad person & my boys John & Jack.
We live in Waterford, Michigan in the U.S. Right about here.
For any of you outside of the U.S., Michigan is shaped like a mitten, so we can always tell people where we live by holding up our hands, well people can, paws don’t work so well.
This is my dad person, Chris.
He is 41 years old & works for a local college in the admissions department. He came into a ready-made family of my mom person & John & Jack. My people have been married almost 7 years. My dad person loves the outdoors & going camping when he isn’t working about 42,879 per week. He’s also an awesome cook & sometimes I get to eat some of his yummy food.
Here is my mom person, Pam. She also blogs under the name Mimi. I guess it was her nick name when she was little & she still likes it.
She used to work all the time, but she has been sick the past few years. She has something called bi-polar depression, and last year she got a tummy sickness called gastroparesis. This means that the muscles in her tummy don’t munch up the food well, so she has lost lots of weight since that picture was taken and spent way too much time in the hospital. She’s doing better now, but the depressions & the tummy problems won’t ever go away. She say that I am one of her best medicines!
She reads lots of books, blogs a lot, and watches way too much TV. Shows called NCIS & Criminal Minds are her favorites. She is 43 years old.
My oldest boy is John David. He is 19, looking for a job & trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. John pays lots of attention to me & you can usually find me protecting him during thunder storms.
Here’s me & John after I helped him plant some trees for my dad person’s birthday.
This is my youngest boy, Jack. He just turned 15 and will be does soemthing called high school.
Jack only lives here half the time. He spends the other half of the time with his dad person, so we miss him sometimes. (John & Jack are both from my mom person’s first marriage.) Jack didn’t like me when I first came to live here. I used my needle-like puppy teeth to bite his face alot, but he has forgiven me now.
Both of my boys love music, video games and hanging out with friends, which doesn’t include me!
Make sure to join Sarge for this great Peeps On Parade event!
Proctor and Gamble, Iams & Eukanubas parent company, operate an amazing Pet Care & Nutrition Center near Dayton.
*All images were provided to us from Proctor and Gamble. We bloggers understood the need to protect their processes and inventions, but allowing a few picture with some of the puppies, etc., would allow for a little more transparency. This was some of the feeback we gave to the heads of the brands when we spoke to them.
The Pet Care & Nutrition Center, and in fact the whole Behind The Paw event was about transparency and I was very impressed with how much they shared. Walking through the facility it seemed that nothing was off limits for us to see or ask about.
Here is just some of what P&G has to say:
“P&G Pet Care is proud to have the Pet Health & Nutrition Center (PH&NC) at the Lewisburg Innovation Center in Ohio as the base of its animal feeding studies. We have gone to great lengths to create a pet-friendly environment that includes pair-housed dogs and group-housed cats. This is the only facility where P&G Pet Care feeding studies take place other than the in-home studies with volunteer pet–owning families and studies that occur in places where populations of dogs or cats already exist, such as a group that raises puppies for assistance dog training.”
One thing that impressed me most was the fact that each dog that is bought by P&G, from reputable breeders, has a life plan mapped out for it from day one. The goal for each dog (& cat, which they breed themsleves) is to be a healthy, happy, well-trained member of a household when their time at the PC&NC is done. There is a waiting list to adopt these pets and all applicants are vigorously screened by the people who have known and loved the animals all of their lives.
The other thing that really blew me away was that every pet gets one on one play time every day with people in stimulating play areas. Look at some of the amazing cat areas:
That last picture shows that cats heading out to one of the amazing fenced in catios built for maximum stimulation & fun!
We saw labs in their beautiful kennels, long and short haired doxies playing with people in a huge play area and more dogs & cats being played with everywhere we looked.
We met black labs & some puppies that were either yellow labs or goldens with 2 baby black poodle poofballs thrown in for fun. More than one blogger had to resist the urge to stuff a wiggling bundle into their purse!
They also have a room that simulates “home” with carpet steps & couches, babies toys, microwaves popping popcorn, a tv showing movies (Babe was playing while we were there). This is so no dog goes into a home unfamiliar with the sights, sounds, smell and feel of what a home is really like.
Proctor & Gamble really make sure that their pets are ready to be great community members one they leave the center.
I also wanted to share with you the other bloggers that were on this tour with me so you could check out their opinions of things.
Jennifer Costello – My Brown Newfies
John Bigley & Paris Permenter – Dogtipper and Cattipper
Susi Szeremy – KnobNotes
Jacque Newman – Dogs, Dogs, Dogs
Lynette Robinson – My Wee View
Dr. Jessica Vogelsang – Pawcurious
Amy Urquhart – Hearts Into Home
Jaime Lynn Smith – Thoughts Fur Paws
Joanne McGonagle – The Tiniest Tiger
Rachel Phelps – Preston Speaks
I met some great people while I was there and look forward to seeing them again at events like BlogPaws & hopefully BarkWorld!
and his mom person, Pam
And if I must say so myself, I do look stunningly handsome after my grooming. I suppose it’s worth it every once in a while to look this good.
Take particular care to look at my cool collar from Joan & Janie at Linden Designs and of the Peace, Love, Pugs & Pals blog. They make these pawsome collars and I won mine in a caption the photo contest. It’s very manly in a blue bandana print.
Bella, I hope you like my new do!
My mom person is still working on a post about the Proctor & Gamble Pet Health & Nutrition Center, but she says she has too many facts in her brain & is having trouble getting them all out in the right order. If I would have been there, I would have the posts dictated in no time!
Yesterday it stopped raining here in Michigan and got hot! Oskar’s with long hair do poorly in the hot.
I’m also tired of being told I’m smelly, messy & that I look like a “ragamuffin” whatever the dog that is.
I’ll go for my grooming tomorrow, like a manly dog…
But that doesn’t mean that I have to look at her!
Stay tuned, she’ll be talking about the Iams/Eukanuba Research & Development Center in our next post.
Hello friends, Oskar’s mom person Pam here. I let you know that I was going to the Iams & Eukanuba Behind The Paw Influencer Summit these past few days and I have to tell you that I had a wonderful time and met so many amazing people.
I think the first thing I have to address is the PETA video that is out there from 2002. PETA has pasted together some horrible footage from an outside facility that Proctor & Gamble, Iams parent company, used for a period of time for a small portion of their animal testing. This facility did testing on many animals from many different sources
Iams felt that the feedback they were getting about their animals at this facility, was not very good. What they decided to do was hire a person themselves to oversee the care of their animals at this lab. Iams wanted to ensure that their animals got proper care, stimulation and were being treated well. The person that Iams ended up hiring was an undercover PETA operative, who took inflammatory video, mostly of dogs that were not Iams animals and swung the power of PETA against “big corporate America” for sympathy and to raise money for their cause.
At the end of this PETA video it asks for you to contribute to Fifi, an IAMS pet. What PETA does not tell you is that Fifi was removed from the facility and adopted out to a loving family through the Iams adoption program. Any money given to PETA for “Fifi” is not being used to help her.
I met and spent almost 3 days with Proctor & Gambles Iams/Eukanuba team including Jason Taylor, who is in charge of external relations. What I want you to know more than anything is that the entire Iams family is deeply hurt by the lies that have been spread about them. I met everyone from the president of Iams Eukanuba North America to the employees that work at the production plant and these people love animals as much as I do.
Did Iams pay for me to Dayton to convince me that the PETA accusations are untrue? In part, yes they did. Were they successful in doing so? Absolutely. Do I want a fight with PETA on my Oskar’s little corner of blogland? Absolutely not, but what I do want is our friends to know are my honest opinions.
Iams research & development dogs are happy, exceptionally well treated, well trained dogs who are bought from reputable breeders, are AKC registered and adopted out to loving families at the end of their time with Iams.
I’ve got a lot more to tell you about my trip & I will in the coming days. This will be the only post in which I address the PETA video. I welcome your comments, but if their not respectful then they will be deleted.
& Pam, his mom person
This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Nutrish for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
We got the opportunity to try Nutrish Just 6 by Rachel Ray and offer a free trial size bag to our readers, so we jumped at the opportunity!
Well not only did we get the Just 6 food, but also an adorable bowl!
Here’s what Nutrish wants you to know about their Just 6 food:
Nutrish knows your dog is a part of your family. And because they know you want only the best for them, they want you to be among the first to sample new Rachael Ray Nutrish just 6 dry dog food, a limited ingredient dog food with only six simple, natural ingredients, plus vitamins and minerals for complete and balanced nutrition. Not to mention, this delicious product does not include corn, wheat or soy. Did you know that proceeds from Rachael Ray’s Nutrish product go toward helping animals in need through her Rachael’s Rescue organization?
Oskar jumped right in & loved this dog food, and the fact that it’s made with just 6 ingredients makes me feel good about letting him eat it. What I can’t tell you is how it would affect him in the long term as the sample bag they sent me was not enough to see long term changes in coat or energy levels. But the following fact make it seem like a great choice to me:
Just six natural ingredients plus vitamins and minerals.
No corn. No wheat. No soy.
No by-product meal or fillers. No artificial flavors or artificial preservatives.
100% complete & balanced nutrition for dogs
Click today for your free sample, and let us know if you enjoyed it as much as Oskar did!
Well tomorrow is the big day that my mom person flies to the Iams/Eukanuba factories without me. I expect her to bring me back a suitcase full of treats! I am convinced there are secret rooms stacked with amazing treats.
She’s very, very scared about flying, but I think she can hack it. I told her to put one of my scarves on me and say I’m her service dog, but she say’s there’s more to it than that and that I woudln’t be able to pass for an instant. Apparantly service dogs need to do things like “behave” and “listen”. Whatever.
She’ll update with all the fun I’m missing out on she has when she gets home on Wednesday. For now here’s a picture of me relaxaing in my yard with my wildflowers. We love dandelions and the little purple ones that grow in the grass!
