A Chinese Crested Hairless from Miami with opinions louder than his bark. Show champion, professional skeptic, the pickiest dog his human has ever met.
Halim was born on September 12, 2020, in Vladivostok — a port city on Russia's Pacific coast, about six thousand miles from our apartment in Miami. He is a Chinese Crested Hairless. And he made most of that journey alone.
None of this was the plan. My wife Irina wanted a Pomeranian. I wanted a Yorkie. We'd agreed on one thing: whatever we got, it had to come from a serious breeder. Then a friend of Irina's in Vladivostok mentioned a litter of Chinese Cresteds.
I pulled up photos of the breed on my phone — not photos of the puppy, just random Cresteds on Google — and said, out loud, never. Every image looked rough. Patchy skin. Thin, uneven hair. Something almost unwell about them. What I didn't understand at the time was that Chinese Cresteds require a completely different kind of grooming and skin care than other dogs, and most of the photos online are of dogs whose owners hadn't figured that out yet. A properly cared-for Crested looks nothing like that. But I didn't know any of this in the moment.
I just said never. Irina kept talking. I kept looking.
Somewhere in that conversation the "never" quietly disappeared, and a few months later we were wiring money to Russia.
The breeder named him. That litter was on the letter H, and Halim is what stuck. His grandfather, Olegro Katrin Naruto, is a GRAND Champion of Russia. His siblings are now scattered across Italy and the rest of Europe. He is, in other words, a seriously pedigreed dog who happens to live in a condo in Miami — and who, for all his aristocratic background, is allergic to chicken. Not because he's fussy about it; chicken allergies are common in the breed, and Halim drew that card. He'd happily eat it. We don't let him.
At nine months old, he was loaded into a climate-controlled cargo hold for the flight to Moscow. A handler met him at the airport, walked him, let him rest for eight hours, and put him on the next plane.
We picked him up in Miami on June 29, 2021. We filmed the moment he came out of the crate — small, tired, blinking at the Florida heat, wondering what on earth had just happened to his life.
Irina is his person. She feeds him, walks him, bathes him, shaves him, grooms him. Chinese Cresteds are what people politely call high maintenance — most professional groomers take one look at a hairless dog and quietly back away, so Irina learned to do everything herself. Skin care, nails, the whole business.
When he's properly groomed, we can't walk a block in Miami Beach without a stranger stopping us to say something. I don't remember the last walk where nobody said anything. I'm Halim's dad, and he loves me — the wrestling, the cuddles, the long walks — but when Irina walks into a room, my existence temporarily ceases to matter. That's just the arrangement.
In March 2022, barely past his first birthday, Halim entered his first AKC show here in Miami. He walked out with three first places — puppy class, breed, and group for his age. We went in hoping he wouldn't embarrass himself. We came home a little stunned, holding ribbons.
He's also, as it turns out, deeply, relentlessly picky about what he eats. Which is how this whole website started.
This site didn't start as an affiliate blog. It started as a product.
Halim's human — Boris — spent three months developing a homemade beef liver treat in a Miami apartment. Single ingredient, slow-dehydrated at 170°F, obsessively tested. The idea was to sell premium treats to other dog owners. There was a logo, packaging, a sample program.
Then came the research phase — reading about pet food regulation, safety standards, liability, the thousand ways homemade pet products can go wrong. And a lesson worth a full story on its own.
The product plan was shelved. But the goal stayed the same: help picky-dog owners find treats that actually work, without the marketing theatre and paid reviews that dominate this niche.
So now Halim tests the treats other people already make. We tell you what works, what doesn't, and what the reviews on Amazon aren't telling you. If you want the full origin story:
Read the full story →Brands can't buy a positive verdict. If we like a treat, it's because Halim liked it. If we don't, we say so plainly.
Every treat we recommend is one Halim has actually eaten — or refused. No reviews written from spec sheets.
If a treat is overhyped, we say so. If a bestseller flopped for Halim, we tell you, and we recommend what to buy instead.
We earn a small commission when you buy through our Amazon links. It doesn't change the reviews. It keeps the lights on.
Most "best dog treats" articles online are written by people who never fed those treats to a dog. They're generated from ingredient lists and Amazon ratings.
Here, every review has a test subject with opinions. Halim doesn't know what an affiliate link is. He doesn't care which brand paid for placement. He either eats the treat, or he walks away. That's the whole rating system.
It's not scientific. It's not a substitute for your vet's advice. But it's honest, it's specific, and it's more useful than a generic top-10 list scraped from bestseller data.
Start with the reviews. Halim has already done the refusing for you.