Keeping Your Best Friend In Prime Condition With Healthy Dog Food
You hear all sorts of advice on how to provide healthy dog food for your pet - from pet food manufacturers, your veterinarian, friends and family - but what’s the real story on giving your dog a diet to keep him in top form? We’ll look at a few basic recommendations and some options for snazzy home cooking for your dog.
First, if you purchase commercial dog food, you should keep some basic guidelines in mind. A ratio of 40% meat, 50% vegetables and 10% grain is ideal. Check the packaging label closely to ensure a similar ratio when purchasing commercial food. While you’re checking the label make sure that a meat protein is listed first on the label - usually chicken, beef or lamb. Keep in mind that buying cheap commercial dog food often results in cheap ingredients. Pay a little more for higher quality and your dog will thank you!
Many pet owners, concerned over the types of preservatives used in some dog food are resolving the issue by cooking their own pet food. Preservatives such as BHA, BHT, and oxyquin are believed to be toxic an large amounts. The problem is, how much is large and is the effect these preservatives may have on your best friend cumulative over time?
There are many sources for dog food recipes. Your vet may have some and the Internet certainly is a good source. Of course there are good recipes and some not so good. Follow the 50-40-10 ratios found on the packaged foods and you should be all right. Make sure the meat is fully cooked and free of bones. Brown rice and oatmeal are excellent choices for the grain component.
Once you know the basic ratios, you can experiment until you find a combination of ingredients that your dog will love. Remember not to salt the food, and that some ingredients - chocolate, garlic, onions, avocados, grapes, raisins and mushrooms - are actually dangerous for your pet and should never be used. Make certain that your healthy dog food is also safe!
What’s good for humans isn’t necessarily best for dogs. A vegetarian diet is generally considered to be a healthy one but a dog, being a carnivore, is used to meat in it’s diet and is apt to become bored with food containing no meat or a portion significantly less than the 50% ratio.
If you don’t feel up to standing over a hot stove to cook for Fido you might check out your local health food store. Many have organic dog foods in stock. The Internet is also a good source of organic or holistic pet foods.
Your dog’s health is primarily determined by it’s diet so make an effort to insure that diet is a proper one. There are many options ranging from checking labels to ensure a proper mix of good ingredients to preparing your own or looking to your vet or health food store. This extra effort on your part will pay big dividends to both you and your best friend.
How To Avoid Frustration When Learning Adobe Illustrator
New users to Adobe Illustrator often complain that they find the program “fiddly” and frustrating. When we run Adobe training courses, we recognise that part of our job is rid people of this perception of Illustrator as a difficult program to use. We have identified three main elements to making people aware that Illustrator is no more difficult or frustrating than any other program.
Firstly, we point out to people that they must be on the right tool in order to carry out a given operation. Secondly, we teach them to observe and interpret the rich visual feedback provided by the program as you carry out various operations. Thirdly, we always remind new users of the ease with which you can revert your drawing back to a state prior to the point where something has gone wrong.
If you a new user to a sophisticated program like Illustrator, you cannot be expected to avoid making errors: things may go a little awry or even get completely screwed up. The key thing here is to learn the power of the Undo command. For example, if you accidentally resize an object don’t try to manually change it back to the original size, simply go to the Edit menu and choose Undo or use the keyboard shortcut (Control-Z or Command-Z on Apple Mac). If you Undo too many times, you can always use Edit - Redo to move forward again. (The shortcut for the Redo command is Control-Shift-Z.)
The key factor in avoiding these types of errors is to keep looking at the various signals that the program provides, in particular those signals relating to the cursor appearance. For example, if you are attempting to resize a rectangle, you can only do this when your cursor changes to a slanted line with an arrow at each end (This indicates that your cursor is now in the correct position).
Another thing that new users find is that they are unable to carry out a certain operation because it is not permissible under the current circumstances or at that point in time. For example, you want to resize an object and you end up rotating or moving it instead.
A simple way of avoiding this kind of problem is to keep an eye on the many visual clues that Illustrator gives you and, in particular, those that relate to the cursor. Let’s take an example. Say you are attempting to change the size of a circle, you can only carry out this operation if your cursor has changed to a diagonal line with an arrow at both ends thus showing you that have positioned the cursor precisely over one of the resize handles.
When manipulating objects, Illustrator newbies will often forget to first highlight the Selection tool. For example, they will draw a shape with, say, the Line tool and then, while the Line tool is still highlighted, they will attempt to move or resize the line they have just drawn or perhaps click on the page to deselect the line. They are then bemused and cross when little lines keep appearing on the page or Illustrator’s shape dimension window keeps on popping up.
If your effort to create a drawing has gone horribly wrong, the best thing to do is to bite the bullet and choose Revert from the File menu. This is a way of saying “OK, this isn’t working. I give up!” The Revert command discards all of the changes you have made to the document since it was last saved and can be another useful way of avoiding unnecessary frustration.
