Hot on the heels of Evangers being accused of stealing 2 million dollars worth of electricity and natural gas comes new accusations – that they are intentionally mislabeling some of their premium canned dog foods.
Petal the cat says she prefers raw mice
When you feed raw, it’s sometimes easy to get sidetracked by all of the debates and infighting that can take place in any insular community of like minded people. Arguments swirl around just what is (or isn’t) the “right” way to feed raw, with every party equally convinced that their method is the only correct method.
Then again, we sometimes run into a story that puts everything into perspective, and which makes us realize that it’s the essential core of what we’re feeding – raw, unprocessed meat, bone, organs, fruits and vegetables – that really matters.
Just before Christmas, I was contacted by a Veterinarian who had recently started exploring the concept of raw feeding. She had switched her own family dog over to raw, and he was an enthusiastic convert. She was now thinking of changing over some of her clinic cats, but had some concerns, since almost all of them had really specific health issues, two of them seriously diabetic. I told her that, while she would of course know better than I do about the medical management of diabetes, I did have numerous stories from pet owners who had told me that their own cats had experienced a total reversal of their diabetes when put on a raw diet.
Understandably, the Veterinarian was skeptical. I can be accused of having an ‘agenda’, I suppose – I don’t just feed raw, I work for a raw pet food company, and so my motives can’t be considered pure. My intent, however, was, and I did tell her that I could not claim that feeding her clinic cats would make any change in their diabetes – I could only suggest she try it, monitor their condition, and let me know about the results.
Christmas and the holidays came and went, and I received an excited phone message from the Veterinarian – she had some news for me about her cats, and she wanted to speak to me about it as soon as possible. When I returned her call, she started by telling me that she simply “stunned” at what she had seen happen with her cats since she started feeding them raw. Of the two diabetic cats in her clinic, both of them experienced completely normal blood levels within one week of being put on a raw diet.
Let me clarify something, first. Both of the cats she was telling me about had diabetes severe enough to require daily insulin. One cat was receiving seven units per day, the second was receiving eight, and even that was not adequately controlling his blood sugar. In the case of the second cat, all of the clinic staff believed that this was a cat looking at a slow but sure death sentence, since they simply did not seem able to get his diabetes under control.
In both of these cats, regular daily testing of their blood showed a stabilization within a week – one cat within just four days. Both cats, both severely diabetic, and both completely and totally off of insulin within the first week of eating raw. Both cats showed additional changes, as well – reduced volume of urine, formed stools, weight loss and glossier coats.
The changes that took place in both cats are so remarkable that the Veterinarian in question is now working on an article which she plans to submit to a Veterinary Journal. She’s been convinced of the benefits of feeding raw, and is now a vehement raw diet convert. These results – verifiable, tangible and, for the pets in question, life changing, are what brought most of us to raw feeding in the first place. It’s sometimes good to have a reminder of that.
Celebrity fitness guru Jack Lalanne just passed away, at the age of 96. Over his many years in the spotlight, Lalanne always practiced just what he preached – healthy food, lots of exercise and a positive outlook on life. Making regular appearances on his television show was Lalanne’s big white German Shepherd, Happy, who often performed tricks for the “kids in the television audience” who might be watching alongside their moms.
Lalanne was a pioneer in fitness, and he was also a pioneer in the realm of raw feeding – long before many of us had ever heard of it, and before some of us were ever born.
This YouTube clip from Lalanne’s television show details Happy’s diet, which Lalanne thought was the ‘key’ to Happy’s fitness and long life. Jack Lalanne – fitness and health pioneer, and one of the original ‘raw feeders’!
Rebecca Hosking, with a picture of her collie Dave
In a nice change of pace, a major daily newspaper has actually published an article that is pro raw feeding.
Excerpt:
Vets tell you: ‘Live with canine epilepsy, not for it.’ Good advice, but much easier said than done. We went entirely the other way and buried ourselves in research, starting on a journey that would take us far beyond canine epilepsy.
A concerted internet trawl through scientific journals, veterinary publications and pet-owner forums revealed a huge and growing incidence of dogs with diseases of the joints, internal organs, immune system, eyes, ears, skin, teeth and nervous system; not to mention cancers, behavioural disorders and, yes, epilepsy. And, this being the internet, the suggested treatments encompassed everything from fancy pharmaceuticals to collective prayer.
There was one piece of advice, however, that cropped up far too often to ignore – ‘get your dog off commercial pet food’.
At the time we were feeding Dave what we thought was a high-quality dried food or ‘kibble’. According to the description on the side of the packaging, it was ‘rich in meat’ with ‘wholesome ingredients’ and ‘100 per cent complete and balanced’.
But the ‘ingredients’ section on most petfood packaging is notoriously vague and misleading. Manufacturers don’t really want you to know what’s in there. After some serious delving, I could understand why.
In all probability we had been feeding Dave the waste by-products of industrial grain processing, vegetable pulp (and possibly woodchip), a grounddown mix of non-nutritious animal parts, along with used fats and oils, possibly from restaurant fryers and industrial food-processing units. This mixture is preserved with powerful antioxidants banned in the UK for human consumption and linked to liver and kidney damage, stomach tumours and cancer.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315145/Is-pet-food-poisoning-dogs.html
A recent comment on a Pet Connection post regarding the Blue Buffalo pet food recalls brought up a frequently repeated pet food article of faith – the “slow transition” theory.
“Slow Transitioning” posits that, whenever we change a dog from Kibble Brand “A” to Kibble Brand “B”, we need to do so sloooowly, usually over the course of a week or so. Specifically, we are advised to do so when switching from a lesser quality dry food to a higher quality one – or when switching to raw from kibble. In a few cases, I’ve seen ‘experts’ advise taking as long as a month to change a dog from one food to another. One of the reasons given for why we need to introduce foods so slowly is that the better quality ingredients in the food we are switching to will ‘overwhelm’ our dogs’ digestive systems.
This ‘overwhelming’ can manifest itself as diarrhea or other digestive upsets. We’re also told that this enhanced nutrition can result in our dogs undergoing something called “Detoxification” – Detox, for short. Raw foodies, in particular, say that we can expect our dogs to undergo detox when we switch them from dry kibbles to raw food.
Descriptions of the detox process vary, but the central idea is that your dog’s body will “flush” itself of all the toxins it has accumulated from being fed a dry diet. This ‘flush’ will be noticeable externally, via a long list of symptoms – vomiting, diarrhea, mucus pouring out of their nostrils and coating their stools, runny eyes, hives and even seizures (!). Pet owners are told that none of these symptoms are anything to worry about – that it is simply their dog’s immune system ridding itself of toxic poisons.
In one of my favorite descriptions of the detox process, the author writes that “dogs experience this (detox) process because their bodies have to build all new healthy cells to replace the old ones”. Isn’t science wonderful?
I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of detox. Over the years, I’ve switched literally dozens of dogs from dry food to raw diets, and in almost every case, I’ve done so cold turkey. No ‘transitioning’, and no signs of anything like detox.
In my experience, switching dogs from one food to another should be a relatively simple process, and particularly when switching dogs from kibble to raw. Take weaning, for example.
Anyone who breeds dogs has had the unpleasant experience of the weaning runny poops – puppies weaned onto dry kibble, no matter how ‘premium’ the brand, tend to get diarrhea for at least the first few days. As the puppies acclimatize to their new diet, their poop becomes more solidly formed, and their diarrhea ends. Like most breeders, I just believed that this was all a natural part of weaning, although I don’t know why – we don’t automatically accept our that our (human) babies will develop raging cases of liquid poop when we switch them to solid food, so we do we accept it for puppies? My wake up call came when I first starting weaning puppies onto raw. The change from nursing to solid food was seamless – no diarrhea, no upset stomachs, no reluctant eaters.
Most recently, I’ve changed the diets of our two foster Frenchies, Harley and Peanut, from dry kibble to raw. In both cases, I switched them almost instantly, and in neither case did they suffer from ‘transitioning’ issues or detox symptoms. If anyone should have, it was Harley – he came to me eating an overpriced Vegetarian Kibble with potato protein as the main ingredient, and with a diagnosis of severe protein allergies. You’d think that switching Harley over to a high protein raw diet would have thrown him into a state of detox panic, but instead he threw up once from eating too fast, and then settled down to being just another happy, raw fed dog.
Christie Keith on Pet Connection put it best –
I wonder if you’d find it odd that every time you ate a different food or, you know, changed brands of cereal, you got diarrhea.
OF COURSE THERE’S A PROBLEM!
If switching your dog’s food causes him to start pouring out mucus and diarrhea while having seizures, there’s a problem, and you need to get him off the new food and to a veterinarian, pronto. If switching your dog between brands of kibble causes him digestive upsets and diarrhea, there’s a problem – and if this happens no matter which ‘premium’ brands you switch him to, maybe it’s time to rethink your entire feeding policy and switch him to raw.
It’s just a matter of common sense, really.