Meet Mr. Kitty, our newest foster cat at The Happy Beast

Our Newest Foster Cat – The Fantastic Mr. Kitty

Look who moved in with us! This kitty was set to be euthanized, but he’s getting a second chance with us as our newest foster cat! He’s very hungry and his fur is a little patchy, but our vet friends at Lafayette Companion Animal Hospital checked him out, ran his blood work, and we think that with a good diet and some TLC he’s going to be just fine. He weighed in at 5.5lb when he arrived at Humane Society of Boulder Valley on September 18 and as of October 6, he’s already up to 8.4lb! Read on for his full story or stop by the store to meet this sweet boy – and maybe help us come with a name. 😉

Before he came to The Happy Beast, Mr. Kitty had been living as a stray under a porch. He was relying on the family there for meals, but once they saw that he was competing with raccoons for food, they decided the living situation was no longer safe for him. They took him to Humane Society of Boulder Valley where he stayed for a week. The shelter determined that he may have hyperthyroidism and therefore would not be adoptable. The family who turned him in were notified that they had 48 hours to pick him up before he was euthanized. They reached out to our neighbors, Lafayette Companion Animal Hospital, who asked us if we would foster him. On September 24, he moved in with us as our newest foster cat.

A couple of days later, Dr. Kugler at Lafayette Companion checked him out and ran his blood work. His white blood cell count was slightly elevated and he has some tartar on his teeth, but the great news was that he does not have hyperthyroidism as the shelter suspected. With a relatively clean bill of health, it was time to put a new feeding plan into action.

THE PLAN: Gain Weight & Improve Immune System Health

  • Diet: High-quality canned cat food and raw goat’s milk
    • Mr. Kitty is hungry and eats almost anything we offer to him. We’re selecting high protein foods with as few carbs as possible. He loves Tiki Cat, Mauri, and ZiwiPeak and Big Bark raw goat’s milk provides probiotics and additional fats.
  • Supplements: Optagest Prebiotic & Digestive Enzymes
    • We sprinkle InClover’s Optagest over Mr. Kitty’s food to boost his digestive health and support his immune system. The powder is odorless and tasteless.
  • Lifestyle: Mr. Kitty is hanging out in our office on soft beds and a cat tree. We leave the door open (and shut it when over-enthusiastic dogs come into the store) so he can come out into the store when he feels comfortable. He’s getting frequent visits from new friends, including a few animal communicators and energy healers (and Loki, of course). All that love is definitely pulling him out of his shell!
Smile, it's our 1st birthday at The Happy Beast

The Happy Beast’s 1st Birthday Party!

How time flies. Just a little over a year ago, we opened our doors in Lafayette and, like a new puppy at a dog park, we’ve been having a near-overwhelming amount of fun ever since. 😉 Now we’re throwing a party to celebrate our first birthday and all of our amazing customers. Check out all the details below and we hope to see you there. You can also RSVP on Facebook to earn an extra ticket for our awesome prize drawing.

WHAT: Super sales, adoptable pets, prize drawings, games, magic card tricks with Essie Snell, and food and treats for animals (frozen yogurt tasting with The Bear and The Rat) and humans alike!

WHEN: Saturday, October 10, 2015 from 10:00am – 2:00pm MT (also Donuts & Dogs event on October 11th)

WHERE: The Happy Beast, 545 W. South Boulder Rd., #170, Lafayette, CO 80026 (Google Maps link)

FOOD FRIENDS ATTENDING: The Honest Kitchen, Primal Pet Foods, Natural Balance, and Earthborn Holistics

ADOPTIONS & RESCUES:

AMAZING ENTERTAINMENT

SUPER SALES:

  • 10% off collars, leashes and harnesses
  • 20% off toys and beds
  • 20% off Big Bark, Cloudstar, Diggin Dog, Evanger’s, Grandma Lucy’s, InClover, Nature’s Logic, Party Animal, Primal, RadCat, Sojo’s, SmallBatch, Stella & Chewy’s, Steve’s Real Food, The Bear and The Rat, The Honest Kitchen, TikiCat, Vital Essentials, Weruva, ZiwiPeak
  • Real Meat: 15% off
  • Natural Balance: $10 off 26lb bags, $7 off 12lb bags
  • PetKind: $7 off 25lb bags, $5 off 14lb bags, and $3 off 6lb bags
  • Fromm: $7 off 33lb and 26lb bags, $5 off 15lb and 12lb bags
Our Journey Toward Greater Sustainability (Part 2) - PACE Certification

PACE Sustainability Certification (Part 2)

Earlier this month, The Happy Beast received sustainability certification in waste, water and energy efficiency through Partners for a Clean Environment (PACE). In partnering with PACE, we’re joining a community of businesses that:

  • Are dedicated to the community in which we live
  • Care about our customers
  • Pursue more sustainable practices to support the health, environment, and economy of our local community.

Our PACE certification in waste diversion and water efficiency demonstrates our high level of environmental performance. PACE’s certification performance criteria are based upon and consistent with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria as well as EnergyStar Building certification. To achieve certification, we demonstrated:

  • Waste Certification: Diversion of at least 70 percent of waste stream away from the landfill. (Our diversion rate is 87%!)
  • Water Certification: Water savings of 20 percent better than usage predicted by current code. (Our savings is 21%!)

We’re making some great strides in sustainability certification and will continue these efforts throughout 2015 and 2016. You can read our Part 1 blog post to see where we started, or check out our progress-to-date below.

The Happy Beast: Steps to PACE Certification
(Audit conducted: May 15, 2015 | Last updated: September 15, 2015)

  • Water: CERTIFIED (Gold)
    • Install low-flow faucet and dog wash sprayers: COMPLETE
    • Install additional drain screens for dog washes: COMPLETE
    • Install water efficient toilet: COMPLETE
    • Install dual-flush toilet conversion kit: Pending
  • Energy: CERTIFIED (Silver) 
    • Update thermostat programming: COMPLETE
    • Use smart power outlet strips: COMPLETE
    • Use sleep mode for all computers: COMPLETE
    • Install Energy Star certified washer and dryer: COMPLETE
    • Upgrade all remaining lighting to LEDs: COMPLETE
    • Install occupancy sensors in bathrooms: Pending
    • Upgrade to energy-efficient water heater: Pending
  • Waste: CERTIFIED (Gold) 
    • Establish composting and recycling, including packaging film plastics: COMPLETE
    • Provide reusable shopping bags and $.10 bag credits (stop by the store to get yours!): COMPLETE
    • Divert over 70% of monthly waste stream (recycling, compost, plastics, and trash): COMPLETE

 

The Benefits of Pet Food Rotation | The Happy Beast

Ending the Monotony Meal Plan: The Benefits of Pet Food Rotation

At The Happy Beast, we believe that there are significant benefits from pet food rotation. In fact, we think it’s a big pet food myth that animals should eat the same formula of the same brand of food for their whole lives. While this is a great marketing ploy for the pet food companies (who don’t want you to feed anything but their brand of food) it is not in the best interest of your animal’s health and well-being. For one thing, eating the same thing over and over is boring… just imagine eating one kind of cuisine for every meal for the rest of your life! Even more importantly, from a health perspective, a monotonous diet can have negative effects on your animal for the following reasons:  

  1. Although pet foods are formulated to be “balanced and complete,” it’s unlikely that one food will meet all of an animal’s nutrient requirements over a long period of time.
  2. Feeding one food may cause your animal to develop an intolerance or allergy to the ingredients in that food.
  3. The digestive system of an animal that has only had to process one kind of food will be weaker and less tolerant to changes and natural aging.

The good news is that there are many ways to incorporate pet food rotation into your animal’s diet:

  1. Even if you like feeding a specific brand, choose a different recipe or protein source each time you buy a bag, box, or can of food. Most companies offer several formulas. If you usually feed a chicken recipe, try bison or fish.
  2. If you normally feed dry food or kibble, supplement with another, less processed food. Raw, dehydrated, freeze-dried, and canned foods can all make great mix-ins.
  3. Add fresh food. “Table scraps” aren’t necessarily bad as long as you’re not feeding them during a meal at the table! Just limit what “people food” you share with your animals to healthy foods like lean meats, salmon skins, yogurt, and cooked vegetables. Although small fish bones are fine, you should not typically feed larger “table scrap” bones because they have been cooked. In comparison to raw bones, cooked bones can more easily splinter and cause a choking risk. 

If your animal has a very sensitive digestive system or has been eating the same food for a very long time:

  1. Add in new foods very slowly.
  2. Supplement the diet with a prebiotic, probiotic, or digestive enzyme. (We like Optagest or raw goat milk.)

Chicken, turkey, lamb, and beef are often used in pet foods, but new protein sources are making their way into the market. “Novel proteins” is an industry term for meats not commonly found in pet foods. We commonly recommend novel protein diets for animals with food sensitivities or allergies, but healthy animals can benefit from these meats as well. Try including goat, rabbit, venison, alligator, or kangaroo in your animal’s next pet food rotation!

 

If variety isn’t the spice of life, is it catnip?

The Truth About Grain-Free Pet Food | The Happy Beast

Flimflam Food: The Truth About Grain-Free Pet Food

Grain-free pet food is one of the fastest growing areas of the pet food industry. Even major commercial brands such as Purina and Science Diet now have grain-free pet food options for cats and dogs. Due to clever marketing, “grain-free” has become synonymous with premium quality and the assumption is that it is a more biologically-appropriate food for both cats and dogs.

However, it’s important to note that “grain-free pet food” does not mean “zero” carb, or even “low” carb, which is a very important distinction. Carbohydrates are an essential part of the manufacturing process of dry pet food, or kibble. Just like with baking; you have to have a flour source or binder to create kibble; whether it’s wheat, corn, potatoes, peas, etc. It is the nature of kibble and can’t be avoided.

“Grain-free” kibble only means that the carbohydrate binder of choice is something other than grain, such as potatoes, lentils, or peas. Grain-free foods can be equally high in carbohydrates when compared to their grain-based counterparts. For cats, potatoes and peas are just as inappropriate as corn, wheat, or soy.

A cat’s natural diet of rodents, rabbits, insects and birds, is about 2% carbohydrate. Dry cat food is generally 25-35% carbohydrate. Carbohydrates in such excessive percentages contributes to both obesity and diabetes, and therefore no kibble is a biologically appropriate food option for cats.

As a frame of reference, let’s take a look at how many carbs are in some of our most popular foods as well as other foods on the market:

Percentage of Carbohydrates | Sample of Brands

Cat Dry Food (Kibble)

  • Orijen dry food: 17%
  • Earthborn dry food: 18.5%
  • Acana Dry food: 27%
  • Taste of the Wild: 27%- 39%
  • Blue Buffalo Wilderness: 25-27%
  • Science Diet w/d: 30%
  • Science Diet t/d: 34.4%
  • Hill’s Ideal Balance: 35.3%

Dog Dry Food (Kibble) 

  • Orijen: 29%
  • Earthborn: 29.5%
  • Petkind: 29.5%
  • Fromm Grain-free: 35%
  • Blue Buffalo Wilderness: 30-35%
  • Taste of the Wild: 37%-46%
  • Kirkland: 45%
  • Science Diet w/d: 40.2%
  • Science Diet t/d: 51.7%

Carbohydrates are not typically listed on pet food labels, but there is a simple calculation to figure out how many carbs are in your animal’s food. Simply add all of the percentages listed, including protein, fat, fiber, moisture and ash, and subtract the total from 100. Here are a few examples:

EXAMPLE 1: Earthborn Cat Primitive

  • Crude protein – min 44%
  • Crude fat – min 20%
  • Crude fiber – min 3%
  • Moisture – max 10%
  • Ash – max 4.5%

TOTAL: 81.5%

100% – 81.5% = 18.5% CARBS!!!!

 

If you are trying to figure out how many carbs are in canned or raw food you must first convert the percentages into dry matter.

EXAMPLE 2: Earthborn Cat can Chicken Catcciatori

  • Crude protein – min 10%
  • Crude fat – min 2%
  • Crude fiber – min 1.5%
  • Ash – max 3%
  • Moisture – max 82%

Total: 98.5%
Dry matter conversion: Subtract the moisture percentage from 100 percent: 100%-82% moisture = 18% dry matter

100% – 98.5% = 1.5% / 18% = 8.3% carbs

 

EXAMPLE 3: Small Batch Raw Cat food:

  • Crude Protein (min): 15.9%
  • Crude Fat (min): 8.9%
  • Crude Fiber (max): 0.3%
  • Ash (max): 2.9%
  • Moisture (max): 71.8%

Total: 99.8%

Dry matter conversion: Subtract the moisture percentage from 100 percent: 100%-71.8% moisture = 28.2% dry matter

100% – 99.8% = 0.2% / 28.2% = 0.71% carbs

 

In summary, we feel that for a majority of dogs and all cats, protein should be the main source of dietary nutrition and calories. Incorporating less processed and lower carb food options is always encouraged, and there are a wide variety of ways to accomplish this. Feeding canned, raw, freeze-dried, and air-dried meat options are easy to incorporate, highly digestible, and very palatable – even for the pickiest of eaters.

Stop by the store to talk with us about your animal’s diet and history and we’ll help you develop a customized feeding plan to meet your needs.