Cynology: Dog Nutrition. Translation and explanation of top-end dog food

There is a bewildering supply of dog foods on the commercial market in Central Western Brazil.  It is important when choosing a food for your pet to take into account the breed.  Is it a small, medium-sized, large or giant breed?  I have two dogs, a Siberian Husky (Husky Siberiano) and a Black-and-Tan German Shepherd crossed with a Belgian Shepherd (Pastor Alemão de Capa Preta x Pastor Belga). These are considered large breeds.  The consideration is based upon their weight, not height at shoulder, which might be used were we discussing wild canidae. 

There is a well-known top-of the-range dog food and today I read the label and explain it.  

Firstly it is recommended to change a dog's diet gradually, and that means over a period of seven days. 

This top-of-the-range food consists of the following. Ground bird viscerae; ground whole corn.  This corn is genetically modified by Bacillus thuringiensis, Streptomyces viridochromogenes, Agrobacterium tumefaciens and Zea mays.

Continuing with the ingredients: broken rice; soybean meal.  The soybean has been genetically modified by Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Arabidopsis thaliana, Streptomyces viridochromogenes and Bacillus thuringiensis. 

The dog food also contains potassium chloride, chicken fat, genetically-modified corn-gluten-meal, beef tallow, calcium carbonate, beetroot pulp, refined soy bean oil, zeolite.  Zeolite is a readily hydrateable and dehydrateable  mineral used as a cation exchanger and molecular sieve. 

Also the food contains refined fish oil, sodium chloride, that is, common salt, bicalcic phosphate, vitamains E, A, D3, B1, B2, B6, B12, PP, pantotenic acid, biotin, folic acid, choline chloride, iron sulphate, copper sulphate, manganese oxide, zinc oxide, calcium iodide, dry beer yeast, selenium-enriched yeast, DL methionine, palatabilizer (chicken-liver) and antioxidant.  

That's the product's basic composition.  For a complete picture, one must take into account the minerals and vitamin enrichments, which are given on the label. But this provides hopefully some insight into quality dog food. 

Lifestyle Pages: Security in a Brazilian City

Last month the neighbour got burgled so I went out and bought two dogs.  They are both big and boisterous breeds.  This was covered in a previous post under the title 'Dog or Burglar Alarm'.

Today the security expert came and installed other security devices.  I was left pondering on the ethics of having a security system capable of emitting potentially 20000 volts.

Driving has become problematic in this Brazilian city with the introduction of a draconian fine system.  I don't object to it, only certain aspects of the way it was introduced.  Perhaps the most unusual rule is the fact that behind some amber traffic lights there is a no-man's land.  Actually, it makes perfect sense.  The driver has to be able to clear this área after driving through an amber light without the light changing to red.  It is the same principle as the box junction in the UK, a system designed to prevent congestion at junctions.

And to end, I bought some sporting materials  today and I swear they came in a tic-tac container.

And here's a funny story, and something to be aware of. Although a certain instant free mobile texting service has really denigrated the quality of some of our lives, our street has launched a neighbourhood watch scheme by creating a group on the messenger service.  And here's the thing.  Be careful with car-locking electronic devices around electronic gates to private houses.  Today somebody used such a device in my street and it opened my gate enough to allow na intruder to pass through.  Never a dull moment.

Puppy Dental Care in the Cuiabá Basin, Mato Grosso

Welcome to the site again. It has received some alterations more in keeping with the subjects discussed, that is, the management of all things animal in Brazil, and particularly the very extreme environmental conditions found in and around Cuiabá. Future pages will focus on presenting and clarifying facts about animals, both domestic and wild, in an effort to improve welfare of domestic animals and raise awareness about wild species. This is done by bringing together the sciences of field biology, conservation biology, habitat management and veterinary medicine. Today the focus is cynology, the study of dogs.

It is necessary to pay special attention to rearing puppies in the Cuiabá Basin, or indeed anywhere in the World as hot as Cuiabá. When you have a puppy, you have a unique opportunity to get it accustomed to - to condition it - to the care you wish to provide for it. This includes tooth-brushing and crate training. You should brush your puppy's teeth after its meal, just like humans do. Regular brushing prevents tooth decay, just as it does in people.

You may find yourself presented with a bewildering array of toothpastes in Brazilian pet shops. Some, I was told recently, can be used after each meal, some just once a week. The former was just to clean the teeth, the other contained therapeutic properties. It is better to get the daily use one. You can condition your puppy to daily brushing.

The one this vet uses on my dogs contains calcium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate. Calcium carbonate is "a common form of supplementary calcium for dogs on meat-based diets because of its high concentration of calcium (40%)".  Source:

Saunders' Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary by Blood, DC, Studdert, V and Gay, CC, published by Saunders-Elsevier, London.  Note that there is a Portuguese-language edition of this available.  We have it at our library here.

Choosing your puppy.

The Cuiabá Basin is a hot environment for obtaining, and raising, puppies. Two popular sources of obtaining puppies are a web site where people whose bitches (cadelas) have had a litter (ninhada) can advertise for free, and pet shops. The purchaser should be wary to obtain a puppy that is alert, playful, neither overly dominant nor subservient, has the conformation of the breed's (raça) standard, as published by the coutnry's kennel club, has been well socialised, had three vaccinations and been wormed. 

In practice, it is very difficult to obtain dogs meeting such standards.  If that is what you want, go to a breeder. One of the best breeds is a Pastor Alemão de Capa Preta, the Black and Tan German Shepherd.  But it has to be your choice.

What to Expect as a Student in Brazil

I wasn't going to cover this today.  Instead I was going to write about the challenges of caring for puppies in the tropical heat of the Baixada Cuiabana, the Cuiabá Basin of Mato Grosso.  But I am a man of conscience and am aware that, as a blogger, I am supposed to blog most days.  Having not blogged for a while, here is my excuse.  It has been an eventful few days.

When you do university in the UK you have two events at the end of the course: the Graduation Ball and the Graduation Ceremony.  For the former, many male students hire a dinner jacket - a DJ. In Brazilian this is rather endearingly known by the English word 'smoking'. So you have to hire a 'smoking'.

In Brazil things are rather less straightforward if you are a guy like me - sickeningly older than the bright young things that are my classmates.  And, sadly, quite unable to understand the jokes and slang. And, for the record, it's probably quite a good thing that I was unable to understand any irreverancies or swear words.

Here there is semesterisation.  Which I think is similar to the American system. Each semester is some five and a half months long.  Expect lots of public holidays in the first semester of the year.  Right now we are in the middle of Carnival.  Soon it will be Easter.  Then Labour Day.  Then the Day of the Dead, which I believe is the opening scene to a James Bond film.  By the way, I may have got the sequence of these public holidays wrong, which is entirely my fault.  Here in Mato Grosso there are private universities and public ones.  The private ones demand a monthly fee.  The public, or federal, ones are free.  There seems to be a high level of strikes at one of the federal universities in Mato Grosso. The private ones are expensive.  The tuition fees match those of any British university. However, when you consider that the cost of living today in some places in Central Western Brazil appears to be similar to that of some Western European cities, if you are a student  who has to wait while your university ends its strike, that can render the word 'free' a little hollow-sounding. 

I paid a lot to my Veterinary School, but still consider it a privilege to have studied there. I graduated a week on Friday.  There was a rehearsal in the morning and Graduation Ceremony in the evening in which we swore an oath.

At the beginning of university life, apart from the practical jokes in the first week, there will be the organising of a Comissão de Formatura, a Graduation Committee.  This will be composed of students who, during university life, will collaborate to raise money for the graduation.  Graduation itself is not one or two events. In my case it was five.  I attended one, which was the graduation ceremony itself. This is because the other four events would have cost me about two thousand pounds sterling.  The other events included the Aula de Saudade ('Goodbye Class' would be a rough translation),  church service,  uncovering of the class plaque and ball.  In our university, when you graduate a plaque is put up with the photo of everyone in the class and the year you graduated.

Last week I had my first interview and the recruitment process occurred in two phases.  The first phase was a test, the second, an interview.  So now a new chapter begins. I await my result.

Take-home message.  Studying is a private affair and you must work out what method works for you.