Issue #59
REALX Time 🎉 Dogs vs. Treats Every now and then we put together a fun challenge so you can bond with your dog and give you a chance to win free treats! This challenge, we want to see how your dogs are when you leave them alone with a plate of treats. The winning prizes include: 🥇 Full Treat and Chew Box 🥈 Mini Treat and Chew Box 🥉 Free bag of Treats or Chews ~ check out #realxdogvstreats post to enter!
The Green Gold is Back 🍖 Available until Nov. 4th, here’s the current lineup: 🐠 Smelt 🐖 Pork liver 💚 Green tripe 🦃 Turkey neck 🦆 Duck wing 🐃 Steer pizzle 🐄 Rolled Cow Skin - Super Chew
Face a $2700 fine for failing to walk your dog. Under a new legislation, dog owners could be fined up to $2700 for not walking their dog. This is the first jurisdiction in Australia to recognize animal sentience, where there’s a huge push to improve animal welfare. Owners must provide basics like shelter, food and water and cannot confine their pups for more than 24 hours without a walk. Sounds fair to me.
Japan tech company releases a strap-on dog mood sensor. The Inupathy wearable device uses HRV (heart rate variability) – it continually takes your dog’s pulse – and uses analysis to give you feedback on its mood as flashing colors on the back of the harness. Everything from happy and alert to concerned and stressed is covered, though there’s no color for ‘annoyed by harness’. Before you ask, it’s too big for cats.
Obesity in dogs mirrors that of their owners. A new study from the University of Copenhagen reports that the prevalence of overweight dogs is markedly larger among overweight owners than among normal-weight owners. Previous studies have shown that on average, heavy dogs live 1.3 years less than dogs on restrictive diets and that part of the explanation may be an earlier development of osteoarthritis with the heavier weight. The study also shows that neutered male dogs have three times as high a risk of being heavy or obese compared to intact dogs. On the other hand, the study demonstrated that sterilization has no impact on weight in female dogs.
Helping Robot Dogs Trot Like Real Animals. Researchers at Virginia Tech are developing a way to use computer algorithms and sensors to help robot animals move more naturally like their real-life counterparts. They believe that even state-of-the-art machines still cannot exactly mimic the agility of animals, such as dogs, cheetahs, and mountain lions. There seems to be a fundamental gap between the locomotion seen in robots and those seen in their biological counterparts. With these features, researchers hope that the robotic dogs would be able to act accordingly to their environment.
Wood-derived yeast as protein? Agricultural bio-tech company, Arbiom, announced Sept. 10 it has successfully concluded a trial of its SylPro alternative protein ingredient for dog food. The 26-week trial (as required by AAFCO) compared the nutritional effects of SylPro to that of conventional chicken meal in a dog diet. SylPro is a single-cell protein derived from yeast, fermented using wood-based material, then processed to fulfill nutritional and functional requirements for animal food.
Owners think raw pet food is safe. Despite heated debate within the vet profession, an international survey has found that pet owners do not consider raw food to considerably increase infection risk in their own households. A total of 16,475 households from 81 countries responded to the internet-based survey conducted by the University of Helsinki. Yet, only 39 (0.2%) reported having had a transmission of pathogen from the raw pet food to a human family member during the time raw feeding had been used in the household. Respondents had been feeding their dogs and cats raw diets from months up to 65 years.
Science confirms dogs can recognize a bad person. A recent study conducted by Kyoto University, Japan, concluded that dogs can detect bad individuals. The primary agenda of the research was to detect the ability of dogs to trust lying individuals and see whether dogs judge people depending on the way the treat their owners. For instance, if a person was rude to their owner when they needed help, the dog wouldn’t take the treats they offered, but they would easily warm up to people who treated their owners nicely.