Bolt is almost four, a white Shepsky, with the most beautiful gold eyes that you can easily get lost in, and about 59 pounds of opinions. He's also extremely picky, with a stomach sensitive enough that he'd been living on sensitive-stomach kibble.
I never felt right about it. I try to feed myself well, and it nagged at me that his bowl didn't get the same care. The catch was a familiar one: switching him fully to fresh food just wasn't in the budget.
So I started small. Instead of an all-or-nothing change, I began adding Neighbor's turkey meatballs as a topper on his kibble. Turkey is easy on his stomach, the ingredient list is short, and for the first time I felt good about what was going in his bowl.
Then came the surprise. Bolt takes a daily pill, and we'd been tucking it into those store-bough treats made for hiding medicine, the kind with an ingredient list a mile long. They weren't even working. He'd eat the pocket and leave the pill behind, or bite through it and scatter powder across the floor. I starting hiding his pill in a turkey meatball, and just like that, the pill goes down with it. No mess, no leftover pills, nothing in there I can't pronounce.
Now the meatballs do double duty in our house here in the Seattle area: a topper that makes his bowl better, and the cleanest way I've found to get his pill down. Bolt is happier, his stomach is settled, and I stopped dreading dinnertime.
There's one more thing that makes me feel good about it. Neighbor is a small, Pacific Northwest business, and I love that every meatball I give Bolt supports a local company whose mission I believe in. I get to help my dog and a neighbor at the same time, one meatball at a time.
You don't have to overhaul everything to feed your dog a little better. Sometimes it starts with one good meatball.
Bolt belongs to one of us here at Neighbor. Always check with your vet before changing the diet of a dog with a sensitive stomach.
With love from the neighbor(hood).
- Cristal (Bolt's mom)