www.handicappedpets.com

This is a very helpful site for someone who's pet has been injured, has chronic arthritis conditions or needs rehabilitation devices and much more. There is also a community to help give advice and support for the caretakers.

Water Purifying System--Zeta Rod

Zeta Rod® systems work silently, behind the scenes to condition every drop of water in your home, pool and garden; and to protect valuable plumbing, water using appliances, and surfaces from the destructive effects of hard water. Zeta Rod system's green technology is patented electronic deposit control that accomplishes the goal of preventing scale and biofilms from forming by affecting the physical characteristics of water, rather than by altering its chemistry.

Imagine freeing yourself from the expensive and time consuming task of maintaining an obsolete salt-based water softener-- no more bags of salt to lug around, no more equipment to take up precious space, no more guilt about flushing salt residue into the environment. In fact, salt-based water softeners are restricted or banned in many municipalities across North America.

For over a decade, Zeta Rod systems have successfully improved water and energy conservation, optimized performance of industrial fluids, reduced chemical usage and eliminated scale and biological fouling in water systems. Originally developed for process protection in mining, pulp and paper, and beverage bottling, its use was expanded to reduce or eliminate chemical usage in heavy air conditioning and to protect drinking water systems for airports and municipalities. Water conservation and biological control for agriculture and food production allowed us to observe the beneficial effects that water treated with Zeta Rod has on plants.

Zeta Rod systems for the home are the natural extension of the expertise Zeta Corporation has developed in the industrial and commercial arena. The U.S. and international trademarks, patents, and patents pending that we hold for the Zeta Rod and for certain applications of capacitor-based technology attest to the originality of our research. In other words, we've done our homework.

We invite you to explore this website (zetarod.com) and to learn more about why protecting your home with a Zeta Rod system is a great choice.

Water, the silent killer.

That goes for pets and people. By the time tap water reaches your sink, it's filled with chemicals like Strontium 90, and heavy metals like lead and cadmium, the products not only of groundwater pollution, but of the pervasive pollution by acid rain. By steam-distilling tap water for your own use, you may be shocked when you go to clean the distiller: brown sludge. Now imagine that residue collecting over time in your pet's body. The results may include arthritis, spondylosis, and cancer.

If you do nothing else as a result of reading this blog or picking up one of the reference books, put your pet on a healthy diet and buy a water-purifying system for your home. Bottled water can be healthy, although not great for the environment. The system is a great investment for your home, your pet and your health as well.

I purchased a reverse osmosis drinking water system called a Zeta Rod (www.zetarod.com) through my plumbing company. I love it. The Water Purifying System-Zeta Rod blog has more details. ;)

Why Best Foods? The AAFCO's "Guidelines"

Which kind of meat is contained in some foods? Your guess is as good as mine. For that matter, your guess is as good as the AAFCO's (Association of American Feed Control Officials), because this group's only job is to declare what should be stated on pet food labels. Each state has an agricultural department or office of state chemist that may enforce AAFCO guidelines--or not. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) helps AAFCO draft its guidelines, but does nothing to enforce them. Indeed, the FDA takes no action on pet food matters unless a claim is made on a label that may be fraudulent, such as that a cat food may help feline lower urinary tract disease (formerly known as feline urological syndrome) when it does no such thing. There is, in other words, no federal agency that polices the pet food industry at all, and at best a patchwork of state regulators who may, from time to time, make inquiries. Unfortunately for your dog or cat, the pet food industry pretty much regulates itself.

According to AAFCO, meat can be derived from any skeletal muscle of any slaughterd animal. It can come from the tongue, diaphragm, heart, or esophagus, and it can include fat or skin. "If it bears a name descriptive of its kind," AAFCO's guideline goes on to say of meat, "it must correspond thereto."

An investigative report by the Animal Protection Institute of America (APIA), a national nonprofit animal advocacy organization, is both impressive in its scholarshop and utterly depressing in its conclusions. A book by Ann Martin titled Food Pets Die For is even more damning.

Why Best Foods? Chemicals and Preservatives

Coming soon...

Why Best Foods? Rendering Plants!

We like to think that commercial brand pet foods contain at least some decent cuts of one or the other, the truth is they contain none. Any cuts for for human consumption are consumed by humans: they're too valuable not to be. Only the heads, feet, and various organs are set aside for pet food. And that's the best of what's in the commercial pet food. More troubling, however, is the livestock fated to end up as pet food.

The poisoning of pet food meat begins with the hormones fed to livestock to make them grow faster, so they can be slaughtered that much sooner. Pets who eat hormone-injected, ground-up and processed meat by-products every day are definitely at greater risks.

The daily feed of livestock is also laced with "maintenance doses" of antibiotics intended to prevent disease. As likely, these drugs instill toxicity that increases cancer risks, both in the livestock and the pets that feed on processed meat. And again, a pet fed the same diet of antibiotic-laced substandard meat every day is at far greater risk of cancer than a person eating choice cuts on an occasional basis.

These guidelines (from the AAFCO), such as they are, ignore a whole other category of livestock: the direly sick animals who collapse from one disease or another and, as a result, never reach the slaughterhouse. These animals are deemed unfit for human consumption, killed, and sent off to "rendering" (the boiling of any animal substance discarded by slaughterhouses as unfit for human consumption) plants which supply meat protein used in livestock and pet feed. This is an established, if little-publicized industry and that "rendered" animal substances go directly into livestock and pet feed. These substances may include "4-D" meat: meat from dead animals, dying animals, and diseased and disabled animals. These 4-D carcasses may have cancerous tumors, worm-infested organs, and the like--basically, anything and everything goes in the pot. Worse, rendering plants happily accept road-kill, dead zoo animals, and, most appallingly, euthanized pets from animal shelters and veterinary clinics.

Shocked by these standards a questionnaire was sent to the state government of all fifty of the United States, asking, among other things, if state laws allow euthanized pets to be rendered and if rendered material is freely used for livestock and pet feed. Twenty states replied blithely that no laws forbid the rendering of euthanized pets or their use in pet food. The remaining thirty states did not reply, suggesting their standards are just as lax.

A couple of years ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about the sad fate of two circus elephants so maltreated that they died of tuberculosis during the circus's run. One of the elephants story: "Workers used a forklift to put the animal's body on a truck for transport to the San Bernardino State Diagnostic Lab. A necropsy showed that 80 percent of Joyce's lung tissue was infected either with cancer or tuberculosis. The body was taken to a rendering factory to be processed into animal food."