Note: this is a guest post by Kathryn Hawkins.

Locally-grown veggies and free-range chicken may be de rigeur on your own dinner plate each day – but not so for poor Fido, who has to settle for the mystery-meat sludge in his Alpo can (which looks suspiciously like what your cafeteria lunch lady doled out back in the day).

While it may not be too cheap or practical to set up your pet with his own platter of goodies direct from the farmers’ market, there are plenty of ways to make your companion’s life as …