Over-do-er

Over-achiever seems like a very positive word to describe ourselves, both Victor and me; but I come to realize sometime Confucius was right --- do not do too much is good. Which this ancient chinese philosopher believes everything in moderation, it was good for the political control at that period of time, (about 2500 yrs ago) so whatever he said was endorsed by the King of Kings in China. At that time it was not one country of China, the region was splitted by Warlords and local Kings, people enjoyed the freedom of travel but they did not have the right to move away from where they come from / which Kingdom they belong to.

Anyway, I was reading these books about how to take care of dogs, decided I can do certain things to Samson, meanwhile he was taking a nap quietly on my chair, I decided to clip his nail on the dewclaw which is the dog thumb located on the side of the leg, not the actual paw. Sure enough I cut too much, I heard a high-pitch scream from Samson and there was blood on his leg!

I told him --- ok I am sorry, I am not going to treat him as my experiment anymore. I am not going to do too much to him. Just to feed him, walk him, pet him, play with him and clean him, do all the basics.

This one book I was reading was written by a re known Vet of the country, this Vet once approached the pet food companies to ask for funding of a research of chemical and preservatives effect on dogs. He was told "no one in this industry wants to know the answer", in order to achieve maximum amount of shelve life of their products, certain bad stuffs have to go into the dog food. As long as the level is low and not creating problem for most of the dogs then the companies are ok.

I was once involved importing food item from overseas, knowing there are so many codes to meet and the margin of error could be as big as 5%, that means if my label of food product say something, if the actual ingredient do not match it 100% it is ok, the FDA allows a deviation for about 5% after the first initial lab check. Afterward it is random check, could be one item per 5 thousand pieces sent to a lab.

This system is not that safe and give great window for food manufacturer to maneuver the content. My friend's boxer was sent to emergency room for food poisoning effect from eating a piece of chew jerky bought at PetCo a few days ago, the Vet said it was the artificial ingredients or preservative in that piece of dog snack that created all the problem. Well the mentality of the dog food manufacturer is if it hurts 4 dogs out from a hundred, it is ok.

not in my book though, nowadays companies are trying to make money so hard that the basic moral standard has diminished. Don't believe what the world tells you, most of the time you'd find out you'll get screwed 9 times out of 10!

p.s. samson is doing ok in dog food in the morning and home-cook food at dinner.