Greenies Pill Pockets is a great product for pet parents who have to give pills to picky pets or for those who have pets on lifelong medication. They are incredibly convenient and easy to use. You just pull out a pill pocket, pop one or more pills into it, close it up and your pet will scramble to eat it. Seriously, check out the video to see our kids scarfing them down. They love them – they think they’re getting treats! In fact, the next day we had to start giving ALL the cats a piece of pill pocket because they would beg for some! Try them out, I bet you’ll love them as much as we do!

Disclaimer: We bought our Greenies Pill Pockets at our vet and were not asked to do this product review nor were we compensated in any way.

Hey everyone! This week’s Pet Parent Files gives a few quick tips on how to give liquid dewormer, specifically Panacur, to dogs. Nothing fancy, but a nice how-to nonetheless. Please forgive the poor video and sound quality. This is an old video taken before we got our new camera. Also, that “rescue” in the background is our very own Snarf. Yeah, as if he would stay a foster for long. ^_^ We hope you enjoy and please comment with tips of your own!

Hey everyone! Be the Change and BlogPaws are at it again, asking bloggers to be the change they want to see for animals. This latest call to action involves raising donations for shelters, rescues & pet food banks to help animals in need. It’s called the “Dog Days of Summer Food & Supplies Drive” and starting today (July 19th), with your help, we in the pet blog community are going to be collecting cat and dog food for shelters all over the country. Here’s what you can do to take part!

How to Participate

• Find a shelter or pet food bank near you and call to find out whether they accept food donations. (For people in the US and Canada you can search for a local shelter and pet food bank here.)
• Print out the BTC4Pets flier then head over to your local pet supplies store to pick up a bag of food.
• Drop off the bag of food at your local shelter or food bank and have someone take a picture of you with the bag and flier.
• Write a blog post, tweet (with #BTC4Pets) and share on Facebook your pawsome achievement to inspire your friends to do the same. (Of course you can always write two blog posts — one calling your friends to join you in the food drive and the second talking about your group’s trip to the shelter!)
• Post the picture of yourself donating the food and a link to your blog/twitter account/Facebook post to the Be The Change for Pets Facebook wall along with the pounds of food donated. We’ll add this amount to the total food/supplies donated so we can all see our impact!
• Want to take the campaign to the next level? Find out how to start a pet food bank on a shoestring budget.

To help out in our town, I Love Rescue Animals is going to be starting a drive to collect food for a few local animal groups, including our favorite cat group Central Texas Feline Rescue. We are personally trying to gather donations from several different area businesses – our main being at Camp Bow Wow Austin. If you’re in town, stop by! What plans do you have for the Dog Days of Summer Food Drive and who are you going to help?

Blog The Change!

Hey everyone! It’s Blog The Change for Animals Day!

That means pet lovers everywhere are blogging to do their part to improve the lives of animals all over the world. We here at ILRA would like to take this opportunity to get our Last Chance Pets twitter project going again. Last Chance Pets is a sub-account of RescueAnimals and was started because we saw how the real time interchange of twitter was actually saving lives and we wanted to be able to harness that power to help even more animals on death row. It soon became apparent to me, however, that one account could never cover the vast scope of animals in need. And so it began – we put a call out for people who wanted to tweet about urgent animals in a specific state. Breaking it down into smaller areas means that it is not only more manageable for the person running the account but that other twitter folks can follow an account for their own area – one which they are more likely to be able to make an impact in. So, for instance, people in and around Connecticut can follow LastChanceCT and either look for animals that they can personally save, or retweet it to their own followers, many of whom are also likely to live in that general area. Thus the probability of it reaching someone who can actually step up and rescue the animals is increased.

Anyway, we had several people take on the challenge and thus our list of states began to grow. As time went on, however, we stopped getting new volunteers and some of the accounts became inactive. So here we are, relying on the amazing hearts & spirit behind the Be The Change movement to get the Last Chance Pets project going again. Below you’ll find lists of those states already covered as well as those needing to be taken over. We are also hoping people in the states not represented will want to join the cause. All you have to do is let us know and we’ll get everything set up for you, both an email account and a twitter account. From there it’s up to you to find animals in urgent need and post them. You won’t be alone, however, because you can always ask the established accounts for help (LastChanceCT is a plethora of knowledge on how to gain followers, find shelters & humane officers you can work with, etc.) There are also several ways to find animals in need, even purely searching the internet.

Here are the Last Chance accounts we have that are currently in action:

LastChancePets (Main)
LastChanceCT
LastChanceMI
LastChanceNC

Last Chance accounts created but have since died:

LastChanceCA
LastChanceKY
LastChanceNY
LastChanceMN
LastChanceMD
LastChanceNJ

And we will make one for any other state! As of this moment, all LastChance state twitter names are open except for Indiana (LastChanceIN) which we are going to try and work on. We are also desperately trying to snatch up all those names so that we can have consistency across the board making our accounts easy for anyone to find. We can also set up accounts for the different provinces in Canada or anywhere abroad you’d like! If there’s someplace you’d like to cover, let us know and we’ll make it happen! We really believe in this cause and I know if we all join together, we can make a huge difference! All that a lot of these animals and shelters need is more exposure. There is always someone out there willing to help – we just need to reach them. Wouldn’t you love to be able to make that happen? Then please join us! Comment below telling us which area you’re interested in. And if more than one person is interested in the same state, we can always work something out where you can both tweet for the same account. Don’t be shy! Let’s start saving more animals today!

Hey all! This week’s Pet Parent File gives advice on what to do when you find a baby bird. What prompted this video was me finding a baby dove in the yard at a house I was petsitting at and not really knowing what to do. The video I posted on that day, which also has some tips on setting up a new nest for baby birds, can be found below. I hope you enjoy them both! Also, if you have more advice to add, please comment below or, better yet, make your own video & upload it as a response to ours then tell us where to find it! Let’s grow our knowledge base together!