I'll draw the line at personalized dog towels, but other than that, "Eco Dog: Healthy Living for Your Pet" is a bright, fun collection of ideas of how to take your dog green.

The authors have put together wise advice on food, bedding, grooming, toys and home car\e to help pet owners treat their companions better and healthier. It's not as difficult as it might seem and it certainly makes sense in any home where the environment is of growing concern.

If, after all, going green is good for humans, shouldn’t the dog benefit, too? This book offers a range of ideas, some very simple, some more complex. It’s up to the owner to decide how far to go.

Last year's petfood scare was the last straw for me. I'd been buying store-brand cans of food for my Lab for some time because I found the name brands to be ridiculously overpriced (as are a lot of pet products.) But clearly the dog wasn't thriving, based on, shall we say, the difference between what she consumed and what her body actually used. You can guess what I mean.

After reading about the sickened and even poisoned pets, I completely switched over to making our own pet food, mostly using what we humans eat. This, it turns out, is pretty much what the book recommends. It notes that the ideal dog diet is 30 to 60 percent protein (meat, fish, eggs, beans, tofu); 30 to 60 percent carbs (grains, potatoes, corn), 10 to 30 percent fresh vegetables (almost anything except onion, grapes and raisins), and a calcium supplement (such as cooked eggshells, yogurt or cottage cheese.)

We mix in meat, gravy, potatoes or pasta, vegetables (she’s particularly fond of carrots, cooked or raw), bread, sometimes whatever is leftover from our table, and sometimes a mix made just for her. It doesn’t look particularly appetizing to me but heaven help anyone standing between her and the dog crate where her food dish is when she knows a meal is on the way. If very occasionally she seems to snub a food already in the mix, we simply spoon the gravy or meat juice over it and poof, it’s gone in a flash.

And although grapes, raisins, chocolate and onions are bad for dogs, our Lab has accidentally (from my perspective) ingested them all and seems none the worse for wear. Before we realized how aggressively she would seek out food, she managed to grab and eat a package of chocolate bars with zero negative effects; similarly, she got her mouth on a piece of meat with onion bits and she was fine. I don’t recommend tempting fate, of course.

On grooming, the authors recommend avoiding most commercial products and making your own. Lemon, for example, is a great clear product. The authors suggest peeling a lemon, letting the peel and lemon steep over night after boiling them and then applying the solution to the dog’s coat. Similarly, they suggest making a flea powder of eucalyptus, rosemary, lavender, fennel, yellow dock and pennyroyal (or any combination of the products you can find), applying to the dog’s coat and then putting the animal outside so that the fleas depart to the yard, not your house.

Other topics include putting together an emergency care kit for the dog, generally greening your house so that toxic chemicals can be eliminated from all the occupants’ lives, using recycled denim to make a dog bed, recipes for making jerky or simple snacks and making sure your dog gets enough exercise to be healthy overall.

And none of these ideas are meant to replace good veterinarian care or love and attention. The effect of some of these ideas is to make us pay more attention to what is happening to our lovely, crazy Lab.

As far as the personalized towels: for those with more time on their hands than I have, the authors explain how to embroider towels with the dog’s name so that they aren’t mixed up with those used by humans. We have a simpler method: the dog gets the older, torn towels that never mix with ours.

There is also a handy list of companies offering natural pet products.

Recommended: Yes