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"I can train any dog in five minutes. Barbara Woodhouse Natural
Nutrition for Dogs and Cats In
my 20 plus years training dogs and their owners, I have come to
understand the critical importance of proper nutrition in
maintaining the health of an animal. Not
only have I seen many examples of the health and nutrition issues
that my clients have faced, I have personally experienced the same
frustrating issues and challenges with the numerous pets that I have
shared my home with over the years. My
present dog, an Australian Shepherd, began to have seizures at age 2
½ and was diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy. As a result, I have
been forced to learn a great deal about an area that I was not
originally trained in – nutrition. I have come to understand the
critical importance of proper nutrition in maintaining the health of
an animal’s internal organs and body systems so that they can
repel disease and even repair damage from already existing disease.
After much research and consultation, I have come to the conclusion
that the foods that most of us feed our animals are not providing
them with the nutrition that they need, and in many cases the foods
have negative health effects. Natural vs. Commercial
Foods Animals need proper, species-specific
nutrition and the great majority of dog food manufacturers who offer
you and your dog complete nutrition “in a bag” aren’t even
coming close! Most commercial foods bear little resemblance to our
pets’ natural diets. One of the worst myths is that dogs
shouldn’t eat “people” food. This is just plain wrong! Who decided it was “people” food in the
first place? The idea that dogs would eat lesser quality, cheaper
food was first postulated in England in the 1850s when a miller saw
his dog eating leftover grain on the floor of his mill. (We all know
that dogs are omnivores anyway) He decided to market a meat meal and
grain “biscuit” food for dogs and an industry was eventually
born. This idea crossed the ocean to the U.S. in the 1880s and in
1922 Ken-L-Ration sold the first canned dog food – horse meat. Prior to that time, dogs either ate what they killed or were
fed a variety of meats, vegetables, fruits, etc by their owners –
i.e., whatever the family was eating. This new “dog food” diet, unfortunately,
was not the diet that dogs had evolved eating over thousands of
years. In general, dogs hunted for their food and ate what they
killed. They got their nutrition from all parts of that kill – the
muscle meat, the organ meat, the stomach contents and even the
bones. Eating chewed, partially digested vegetables from the
stomachs of some of their prey was important to their health, but a
dog’s system cannot digest whole, raw cellulose. They even foraged
for ripe fruit that had fallen from trees. However, they would never
search out grasses or grains or dig up roots or potatoes, or eat
cooked, prepared foods. But that is exactly the composition of most
dog food today! Today
our dogs have become a captive audience, eating the heavily marketed
commercial foods that we put in front of them. Once in a while, an
individual will eat poorly or refuse to eat this food and we wonder
what is wrong with them! Maybe
we should be asking what’s wrong with the food! As
omnivores, most dogs will consume whatever we give them, but
eventually they pay the price in their health – allergies, stomach
problems, tooth plaque and mouth infections, skin conditions,
cancer, epilepsy – to name a few examples. Their bodies are not
getting the nutritional support to fight disease. Respected health
professionals describe disease as either an absence of health or a
toxic reaction to some foreign substance. This is not to say that
our pets will never grow old or die, but if we get proper
nutritional information and use good sense, we can very probably
make their lives longer and definitely happier and healthier by
feeding them what they were designed by nature to eat. Raw
Food and the BARF Diet
I
was forced to leap headfirst into nutrition, an area I knew too
little about, when my own dog Bandit was diagnosed with idiopathic
epilepsy. I did every possible medical test, consulted every medical
specialist and gave him all the medicines recommended. He only
seemed to have more seizures with no pattern I could detect. When I
gave him more medicine to stop them, he had many physical side
effects like unsteadiness and a desire to eat anything and
everything and personality changes like uncharacteristic shyness and
a general lack of interest in normal life. For me this was almost an unbearable way for him to live. But, I eventually started to hear about the benefits of raw food, both regarding his seizures and many other health problems pets face. Because this was unlike anything I had ever done before, I was very hesitant to try it. This all changed when I met Dr. Ian Billinghurst at a seminar. Dr.Billinghurst is the veterinarian who founded the BARF Diet (“Biologically Appropriate Raw Food”) and authored three books on raw feeding. As I listened to him speak, it suddenly all became clear to me. He offered logic and hope for my dog’s seizure problem through a means that I had never tried. Bandit’s diet changed the next day and I never looked back. His seizures have dropped dramatically since then, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took several months to negate the effects of having been on a diet that included grain and starch. Also, he is a dog who is very sensitive to many environmental factors – chlorine in pool water, hydrocarbons in paint, or chemicals sprayed on the lawn, for example – but now, if he has an outbreak of seizures, I can generally isolate what caused them and be sure it’s not his food. Bandit’s
story is just one example of the problems that so many of our pets
face today, many of them unnecessary and precipitated by what we
give them to eat. And yes, it does cost a bit more to feed high
quality raw food – for my 60 lb. dog I spend about $3/day on food,
as opposed to about $1.50/day when I used to buy a large bag of
high-grade commercial dog food. However, when you consider what you
spend on your coffee each day at Starbuck’s or Dunkin Donuts, is
it really that expensive? Our animals trust us to take care of them
to the best of our ability and we need to justify that trust. Juice
Plus
Juice
Plus is another natural nutrition product that I believe in strongly
and which has a great deal of scientific research supporting its
effectiveness. My family and I have been using it for about ten
years to support our own health and wellness, and the company
developed a dog and cat version about eight years ago. This is a
powder that you can use with the raw diet or to supplement and
enhance whatever diet you currently feed your dogs and cats.
Basically, whether for pets or humans, this is a dehydrated powder
that contains the vital nutrients and enzymes of whole, ripe, raw
fruits and vegetables that contribute immeasurably to long-term
health. Obviously, the whole foods used differ depending on whether
we are talking about dogs, cats or humans! Numerous veterinarians
have noted the improvement with regard to allergies, geriatric
problems, immune mediated diseases, chronic skin and ear issues and
periodontal disease of animals after they began eating the Juice
Plus. Finally,
for those of you who want to “see the proof”, there is a very
good way to quantify your dog or cat’s health – a very
comprehensive and holistically oriented blood test developed by Dr.
Robert Goldstein. Whether you want to see how well he is doing on
your current food as a baseline or whether you have a dog or cat
with some disease and you want to know what his body is lacking to
fight the problem, this very detailed and helpful test developed by
a nationally recognized holistic veterinarian can put on paper for
you what your pet needs to be his or her healthiest. As
a result of the information I have accumulated, I have come to the
following conclusions:
To help pets and their humans get back and maintain their health, I have taken on two distributorships – the BARF Diet and Juice Plus (for people and for pets!) – and I encourage you to consider these products. Please call or email and I will be happy to give you whatever information you require. Also, you might try the following links as starting points for your own research: |
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