Welcome, Penny the Labradoodle

A furry addition to our naturopathic lifestyle

family with labradoodle dog

If you follow me on Instagram, you probably already know that our family got a puppy last fall. I’m not really an animal person, let alone a dog person. I blame that on my animal infatuated mother, Mama Crow. I always had a dog or two growing up, and there was never a part of my childhood where we didn’t have one.

One of the things I dislike most about dogs is the way my hand smells after petting one. I’m an HSP with a hound dog nose. I’ll neurotically sniff the hand that touched the dog over and over, even after I’ve washed it. When I sniff the dog-contaminated hand, it puts me in a meditative OCD trance where all I can think about is how much I do not like the dog smell.

labradoodle in water

One of my dog crazy friends told me that a dog’s smell is based on what he eats. If you feed him healthy, high quality food, he won’t smell badly. Makes total sense. You really are what you eat, and so are dogs. Save me some psychiatric problems, and stop feeding your dog those junky high carb dog biscuits!

Fortunately, Penny is a hypoallergenic labradoodle. Our hands smell lovely after we pet her.

Before we got a dog, I told a friend that I couldn’t ever own a dog because I’d want to treat it naturopathically. Which really means that I know way too much about natural health, and we’d spend way too much money on all the “good stuff”. Which seems like a waste of money when you owe $178K in medical school student loans.

We ended up taking Penny to a local, non-natural vet down the street, only because the natural vet was 30 minutes away and I’m getting too old for the soccer Mom gig.

I do give Penny fish oil capsules, two a day, from Thorne’s vet line. One to two times a week I give her 500mg of Taurine and a packet of Knox gelatin. All her food and treats are grain-free. I make homemade yam treats for her in my Excalibur dehydrator.

I want to give her Thorne’s canine multivitamin a few times a week, but I have been too lazy to special order it directly from Thorne. So how’d I get the Thorne fish oil then, right? As a doctor, I have an account with a company called Emerson Ecologics, and that’s where I usually get all of my supplements for my practice. It’s a central source for several brands to keep supplement buying easy. But Emerson Ecologics doesn’t carry the canine multivitamin, so it sits on my doggie-do list.

By the way, Thorne is one of my favorite supplement lines for canines and humans alike. Top notch quality.

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