This past Saturday, my staff and I had a booth at the 5th Annual Doggie Street Festival at Liberty Station. It was a super fun and successful event with 125 dogs being adopted, and all the numbers are not in yet.

For those of you who attended, I am sure you had a great time visiting all of the vendors and seeing the wide array of rescue groups and shelters represented. I am always thrilled to be part of this event as it has such a great number of dogs who find new forever homes.

A HUGE thank you to all of you new pet parents who found it in your heart to adopt a new furry family member.

Dr. Becker had a very interesting article today on her Healthy Pets Website. It was about little dogs and was called "Why Many Tiny Breeds Are Terrible Canine Citizens". I was particularly interested because I  currently have a client with a tiny terrier teacup puppy and I want to make sure the puppy gets trained properly.

Although most of the points mentioned in the article I was quite familiar with, one thing jumped out at me and got me thinking.

What we commonly do with little dogs is lift them up off the ground whenever we perceive any danger to them.

For all of us making our homes in the US, today is a special day of celebration. There are parties, backyard barbeques, parades and fireworks. Although the 4th is traditionally a family day, some of our family members should not be included in some of these events. That is , the "furry kids".

Dogs and outdoor/indoor cats need to be kept indoors when some of the festivities are taking place; especially the fireworks. Our pets hearing is much more acute than ours. The booming sound of fireworks can therefore, be terrifying for them.

It seems these days we are trying to make everything as convenient and fast as possible. With micro-waved food, instant messaging, meal replacement drinks, etc. we are trying to create more time in our lives for other things and that goes for how we care for our pets as well. But at what price?

I see clients who use automatic feeders, automatic water fountains, automatic litter boxes and there are even battery -operated toys for pets that will amuse them so we can do something else. As a pet sitter, I think this is not such a good idea.