I started this company because I love dogs and I want them to be as healthy and happy as doggily possible.

It all began with my dog Zoe, who was terribly allergic to a number of proteins.

She was six months old when it started, and I spent the next several years hunting for treats and food that wouldn't wreck her skin and her stomach.

Here's the part that still gets me. For eight years I fed her what the vet recommended, and I thought I was doing right by her. Then I actually learned to read a label, and it was like, holy hell, I've been feeding this dog absolute crap. Meal after meal. Because somebody with a diploma on the wall told me it was fine.

She lived to fourteen. I've always wondered what she'd have had if I'd known at the start what I know now.

Then there was Scout.

We lost him to cancer, the same cancer that took our first German shepherd thirty years before. At the end I was feeding him with a syringe, and anything else he'd take. If he wanted what was on my plate, he got what was on my plate.

There's no version of this where you get enough time. But there is a version where you get more of it, and that's the one I've spent sixteen years working on.

Scouting for the Cure came out of losing him. It's a separate nonprofit, funding research toward a cure for canine cancer, and it's deliberately separate so it outlives this company and outlives me.

Here's what makes me angry.

Pet food gets designed around cost, shelf stability and margin, then marketed with a photograph of a golden retriever in a field. Vets aren't taught nutrition in any real depth, they're taught to treat what's already gone wrong. So a lot of us spend years doing exactly what I did with Zoe, following advice from people who were never given the training to offer it.

I'm here for one thing, and it's your dog getting more time.

Pay me now or pay the vet later. Your choice.

I made a commitment to create treats with a diversity of proteins, human grade ingredients, produced in the United States in USDA inspected facilities.

Which is a very tidy way of saying we make dog treats out of invasive fish and bug larvae.

These treats are so safe I eat them myself.

Except the carp eyeballs. 
It's a texture thing. And an eyeball thing. 
But dogs love 'em.