Tips for Switching from Kibble to a Raw Diet

Just a reminder, in case you forgot, I am not a vet or a nutritionist. These are my own observations and ideas. Please consult with a holistic vet or qualified canine nutritionist before making any changes to your dogs’ diet, medications, and/or supplements.

The other thing to note when making the switch to a raw diet is “enteritis.” I somehow managed to never come across this term before I switched the dogs over to raw, and so when one of the dogs had a couple of bad episodes of diarrhea, I was about ready to give up. Luckily, a few encouraging people helped me stick with it, and I am proud to say everyone is not only surviving but thriving on the new diet.

Basically, for dogs that are used to eating processed kibble, you can expect to see some tummy upset to begin with. The way the body processes these two kinds of food is REALLY different, so give it a little bit of time. Sky and Lyla had always eaten RMB one or two nights a week and kibble the rest, so I thought they would transition fine, but when I pulled the kibble and put them on only fresh food, Lyla’s tummy rebelled (although I think one of those rebellions had more to do with eating an entire  Ziploc bag then the raw food itself).

The other area I messed up when switching, and probably the cause of some of Lyla’s tummy trouble was introducing too much too fast. I tried to start on that aforementioned menu the first week in with varied RMB, pork spleen, beef liver, beef heart, green tripe, etc etc. BIG MISTAKE! Because this new diet is such a switch for the body, start slowly. Variety in raw is important, but not at the beginning. To start, just introduce protein sources one at a time, and don’t move on to a new one until the stools are normal from the current one.

Brando is on kibble right now, but will be switching to a raw diet this month. As soon as this bag of food is gone, it’s on to raw we go. Much wiser from my previous mistakes, here’s how I plan to make the switch with Brando.

About a week before the kibble is gone, I will start feeding him probiotics/digestive enzymes. Two to three days before the kibble is gone, I will start feeding slippery elm bark (get at any natural foods stores). When the kibble runs out, I will fast him for one day. No food at all on that day. Then the next day I will start with a whole chicken, cut up (actually, in Brando’s case, he will eat more than one chicken in a week, so I will probably actually feed 2 or 3 chickens during the week). Throughout the week I will feed pieces of the chicken, starting with the meatiest portions first (ie, breast) and working my way to the bonier chicken frame. That first week there will be no liver, no heart, etc. If his stools are normal, then towards the end of the week I might try a little tripe because this tends to be pretty gentle on the stomach since it contains so many digestive enzymes already. If all is well at the end of the week/beginning of next week, I might feed a tiny bit of chicken liver (maybe 1/8 cup; liver is really rich, so introduce very slowly).  As long as we aren’t having any problems, I will take him off of the slippery elm bark and probiotics at the end of this week (these things just help prep the system to digest the new, fresh food, you don’t need to supplement them long term in most healthy dogs).

The next week, if all stool is solid and normal, I will introduce another protein source, probably beef. So during that week I will introduce ground beef, beef heart, etc. And so on and so forth until I’ve introduce several of the protein sources I plan on feeding. Once I’ve done this, I will start in with my “menu” and rotating all of my different variety of sources (pork, venison, rabbit, wild boar, etc, etc… get creative!).

That, in a nutshell, is how Brando will make the switch. I will be sure to post how everything goes on here.

Read Full Post »

Resources for Feeding a Raw Diet

I get asked from time to time about how I feed my dogs. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m kind of a research nerd, and this research has led me to be a dog food freak. Not everyone agrees with how I choose to feed my dogs, and that’s okay I suppose, but for those of you who are interested in feeding a homemade raw diet, here are some of the resources that I used the most before, during, and after the big switch.

Websites

Leerburg- Raw Feeding FAQ

Ruffly Speaking Blog

BARF for Beginners

Raw Meaty Bones- US

Raw Meaty Bones- UK

Grand Adventures Ranch Intro to Raw

Books

Raw Meaty Bones: Promote Health by Ian Billinghurst (this is really a science behind the idea book, not a practical guide for feeding raw)

Raw and Natural Nutrition for Dogs: The Definitive Guide to Homemade Meals by Lew Olson

Yahoo Groups: I am a member of rawfeeding and RawMeatyBones. Both are great to ask questions and just lurk around on to see what others are doing and what kinds of problems they are running into.

By far the hardest thing when I started to make the switch to feeding raw, was knowing what to feed to keep ratios and whatnot in balance. I wish that Lew Olson’s book had been out before I started, it is a great reference. Since I didn’t have that, I asked around and got “menus” from some people who had been feeding raw for a long time. From there I made my own menu (and now that I do have Olson’s book, I am pleased to say that the people I talked to knew what they were talking about, not that I doubted, and my diet fits within the book’s guidelines quite nicely). So, I will post a sample menu here, not because it’s the right way or the only way, but because I know when I started I just wanted someone to tell me how they did it in concrete terms. (Disclaimer: I am NOT a vet and I am not saying that this is the right diet for your individual dog)

Sunday: Muscle Meat

Monday: Raw Meaty Bones

Tuesday: Liver (or other organ meat- kidney, spleen, etc)

Wednesday: Raw Meaty Bones

Thursday: Green Tripe

Friday: Raw Meaty Bones

Saturday: Beef Heart

Raw meaty bones in the above “menu” are any animal part that has a combination of edible bones and muscle meat. What is an RMB for your dog will depend on your dog’s size. For my dogs it is a chicken back or leg quarter or a turkey neck, or any of the other “mid-sized” RMBs. For a large dog it may be pork ribs or half of a chicken. For a small dog it may be a chicken wing.

Muscle meat is anything that is just meat, not bone or organ. Muscle meat is boneless chicken breast, ground beef, beef trimmings, boneless pork chops, etc. One important thing to note is that heart and poultry gizzards are a muscle meat, not organs.

Organs are any organ that is not the heart. Organs should make up about 10% of the diet (even though they are icky gross) and at least half of that should be liver. Liver has lots of awesome nutrients in it that aren’t found anywhere else.

Green tripe is not a category in and of itself. It counts as a muscle meat in the above “menu.” Remember, this is not the bleached tripe you buy at the butcher’s or in the grocery store. You generally have to find green tripe somewhere “special” or ask for it because it is not allowed to be sold as “fit for consumption.” I like to feed the green tripe because the dogs love it, and it is one of the other foods that has a lot of good vitamins in it. The downside is it smells like nothing I have ever encountered in my life. It smells like cow poo, literally. I feed it once a week and I HATE tripe night, but, ironically, it is the dogs’ favorite night!

Coming Soon: Tips for making the switch from kibble to a homemade raw diet

Read Full Post »

Responsiblity in Breeding (and Breeding Stock) Choices

I had a discussion last night over fried cheese sticks and spinach-artichoke dip (yum!) with a friend of mine about the ethics of choosing to breed a dog. I was outlining this and that and saying things like “If I bred a dog that was XYZ, it probably wouldn’t crop up in a puppy but what if it did? Even just one puppy… am I willing to take responsibility for that one puppy with an issue?” Her eyes got kind of big as she listened to all the considerations I had just for a litter of cute, wiggly, puppies. I laughed and explained that’s why you were better off buying from a serious, responsible breeder, even if it costs more money, than some ad in the paper for cheap puppies… we actually care about these things (can I even say “we” when I’ve never bred before?).

All of this got me thinking about my own decisions in choosing a foundation bitch. Obviously if I want to only breed the very best, I need to start with only the very best. The problem is that sometimes the very best can take different forms. Take for example a litter of puppies I saw about a month ago.

They are from a particular line that has a reputation for producing really nice, really winning Aussies. The litter is actually from a different, smaller breeding program here in Oklahoma, but the pedigree itself is straight from this other really big name. The dam finished her AKC CH in one weekend with three 5 point majors (for those of you who don’t know dog shows that is a really big deal, and for those of you who do know dog shows but don’t know Aussies, a 5 point major for Aussie bitches in this region requires something like 27 bitches). The dam’s dam finished in a very similar fashion. The puppies’ sire also finished quickly and is one of the nicest dogs I’ve ever seen in person. Just gorgeous. The puppies look to have it all, structure AND type.

Someone in dogs who I respect very, very much once told me that when buying a show/breeding puppy to go out and find the nicest dog I could, who I knew would finish as fast as possible (now to be fair, she certainly never meant to do this at the expense of health, as we’ll talk about shortly). These puppies, the ones held back for show homes anyway, definitely would seem to fit that bill if they live up to their pedigree, which I imagine they will.

Here’s where the balancing act comes in. I asked someone else who I love dearly and very much respect, who has 10 years of experience in the breed of Australian Shepherd, what she thought of the pedigree. Her first response was, “I love those lines.” Then very quickly she picked two dogs out of the pedigree three or four generations back and said, “That dog and that dog will never be in my pedigrees. Too many health issues.” This got me thinking about a lot of things.

Let’s say the dog behind the puppies’ pedigree is Bouncer and the issue of concern is Syringomyelia, or SM (it is not, I’m just pulling something out of the air here that doesn’t generally affect Aussies). SM is a serious disease and not one that I would wish on anyone’s dog, and certainly not one I would ever breed into my puppies if it was within my power. I certainly would never breed a dog that I knew to have SM. The risk of passing it along would be too high unless we knew genetically exactly what to breed him with to avoid the disease, which we don’t.

Bouncer does not have SM, but according to good sources, it seems to pop up in dogs that he’s behind for some reason. On the other hand, Bouncer has been bred a lot, so perhaps it’s just how he matches up with certain other pedigrees, and SM is bound to crop up when you have that much breeding going on. In fact, Bouncer, or one of his close relatives, crop up in a whole lot of pedigrees, so to stay completely away from those genes would be hard. The breeders of this particular litter of puppies, when asked about the occurrence of SM in these lines, don’t deny that it’s there, but say they have never once had a single dog with it and think it may have more to do with certain medications being given to dogs.

So the question becomes, am I comfortable enough with the chances of producing healthy puppies because these particular breeders haven’t seen SM to take that risk, or am I going to forgo a beautiful dog because of something that might be lurking there? The answer is a tough one to arrive at. When I go back to thinking about that conversation last night, the question becomes, “Am I willing to risk that even one puppy could have SM because of me?”  Of course, nothing is ever a certain, I could avoid all dogs with even a whisper of SM possibilities, avoid Bouncer’s lines like the plague, and still inadvertently end up with it in my puppies. But with this knowledge I do have, what is the best choice?

Ultimately, I’m leaning toward the “I’m not comfortable with that” end of the spectrum. Health is very important to me, and I want every single last one of my puppies to have the best chance at a long healthy life as I can give them. I won’t lie though, if that puppy I loved so much when I first saw her showed up on my doorstep with a bow around her neck, I don’t know that I could turn her down. There are so many what ifs on both sides, but I keep thinking about that moment when I get a call from an owner I’ve sold a puppy to saying, “My baby, who means the world to me, just got diagnosed with SM. What do I do?” Maybe it would never happen, but what if it did? Am I ready to take responsibility for that?

Read Full Post »

Ethical Considerations for Vets (and patients)

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I have been thinking a lot about vaccines again the past few days. It just seems to keep coming up. And here is what I really don’t get, there is a lot of information out there telling us that giving the core vaccines (Rabies, Parvo, Distemper, and Adenovirus) annually is just plain UNECESSARY, and yet I’ve met very few vets who convey that to their patients.

And we are not talking andecdotal evidence where someone said “well, I had this dog vaccinated once and then took him everywhere with me and he met lots of dogs and never get sick.” No, this is evidence where a lot of really respected non-fringy vets at the university level are conducting studies that have to meet certain standards in order to be considered valid. And they’ve run them multiple times and still get the same results. So why do I still get a postcard every year reminding me it’s time for those shots?

I think there are two factors at work here. The first is that many pet owners have been told for many years by many people that they need to give the core vaccines yearly in order for their pets to be protected. And the truth is that unless their pet has an adverse reaction that clearly correlates to a vaccine or unless they stumble across some information that indicates otherwise, the vast majority of pet owners will never question giving yearly vaccines. If their vet were to say to them, “I have these two different vaccines, one you have to give every three years and one you have to give every year,” most owners will probably still opt for the yearly because it’s what they’ve always known.

For these people, I get frustrated that vets don’t do more education. For example, my vet, who is a wonderful lady that I truly enjoy taking my pets to, and I have had several conversations on vaccination frequency. She agrees with me. She reads the studies too and can’t wait for the day when more people become more enlightened and stop vaccinating so frequently. She does not continue to revaccinate her personal pets. She still offers yearly vaccines. Why? The funny part is when I took Lyla in to get her final Parvo/Distemper shot at 1 year old, she asked if I wanted the one year or three year shot, and then laughed and said, “actually, to be perfectly honest, they are exactly the same, just have different numbers on the bottle.”

Another friend of mine had been taking her animals to the same vet for a while and giving them yearly shots. After talking with me she asked her vet about vaccinating less frequently. He launched into all the studies on duration of immunity being much  longer than we thought it was, and yes, it’s perfectly safe for her to vaccinate less frequently. Why are they not sharing this information unless it’s asked for?!

I think the second reason some vets continue to not only offer but encourage yearly core vaccinations is because they are pretty old school themselves and think it is necessary. I can’t imagine being in a profession and not keeping up with the current research, but I know it happens. I had a vet tell me it was perfectly safe to give an Aussie Ivermec daily as a treatment for mange. When I questioned him he told me it was only Collies and Shelties that had to worry. I never went back to that vet again, but it just shows you what kind of stupid erroneous information can be transferred if the medical profession isn’t staying current, and it worries me.

And just as an aside, the American Animal Hospital Association is now recommending vaccinating for the core disease every three years rather than yearly, and the AAHA doesn’t change their recommendations on flimsy evidence.

(Now, I still don’t agree with every three years being necessary either, and the studies back me up there too, but I still think it’s a heck of a lot better than every year. )

Here is a direct quote pulled from a Schultz seminar: ” Recent vaccine trials have shown long-term immunity of more than seven years for distemper and parvovirus, more than three years with a canary pox-vectored distemper vaccine, and more than seven years for canine adenovirus with the second-generation vaccine product. Where studies demonstrate three years of immunity, the next steps will be to test for five, then seven.” (Note: the vaccine referenced as a 3 year DOI is the newest Recombitek vaccine and has not been on the market long enough to prove longer than 3 years. Testing for a longer DOI is still in progress and I will be very suprised if it comes back any shorter than the MLV vaccines).

I am including a link to Schultz’s paper/lecture here so you can read it for yourself. Don’t trust me, but do your own research. Read good, solid, scientifically backed up information (if you don’t have the desire to read the studies themselves, which most people don’t) and then go talk to your vet about it. Make a decision together, but make sure you are educated before trusting your vet blindly. I’ve found that more often than not vets will either do what they think their patients want without asking or they will not be as up to date themselves as they should be.

And just an FYI, if you choose to not vaccinate every year, it still doesn’t get you off the hook for going in for your yearly examination. I think this is another reason some vets continue yearly vaccines, it gets pets in to be seen. My dogs (and cat) go in every year for an exam regardless because my vet will catch things I don’t.

http://www.americanwaterspanielclub.org/pdf/Health%20and%20Genetics/What_Everyone_Canine_Vaccines.pdf

I’ve also noticed people seem to be extremely quiet on here. I’d like to hear some feedback. Leave a comment and tell me I’m crazy. Tell me you want to know where I’m getting this information from because you’ve never heard it. Tell me talked to your vet and it went great (or not so great). Tell me how your day is going… just talk to me! =)

 

Read Full Post »

What the Pharmaceutical Companies Don’t Want You To Read

There are two “hot button” dog issues that really get me going: food and vaccines. Why the vast majority of dog owners aren’t concerned with these issues given the massive implications they can have on the health and lifespan of your dog, and subsequently the vet bills you pay, I don’t know. Perhaps many just don’t realize or have never had cause to believe they might be being misled.

I am certainly no expert, don’t get me wrong, but I am a researcher by profession and by nature, and I tend to research things to death. I read very long, very dry journal articles and books for my own personal… “enjoyment” is too strong a word… “enrichment.”

Today I’ve found a new study out this year by Dr Shultz who is kind of my vaccine hero. His findings indicate what people have been saying/thinking for a really long time, and that is that dogs and cats that have been vaccinated for the core viral diseases (in dogs this is Distemper and Parvo, and Rabies too… but that’s a different beast thanks to legislation) after about 4 months of age, have a Duration of Immunity that lasts at least, AT LEAST, not at most, at least 9-10 years. Futhermore, Shultz goes on to say that elderly dogs and cats, unless they have never been vaccinated ever or were vaccinated at too young an age where the vaccine was nuetralized by maternal antibodies still present, do not become ill with or die from Parvo or Distemper.

So basically, I see this article as having two very real, very pertinent implications to breeders and pet owners alike. The first is that starting to vaccinate puppies at 4 weeks or 6 weeks or whatever your vet recommends that is really young, is kind of a waste of money and puts immature pups at a needless risk of vaccinosis. The maternal antibodies that are passed to the pups through the dam’s milk are killing that vaccine in the system, not mounting up an immunological memory of it. Shultz alludes that at or around 16 weeks is when the maternal antibodies are no longer doing their job, so to speak, and vaccination should occur.

The other thing Shultz’s research implies it that continuing to vaccinate throughout the lifespan is useless. And I want you to really think about this for a minute. You were probably vaccinated for measles as a child. Do you go in to the doctor every year to get your “measles booster.” Absolutely not. Do you go in every 3 years to get a “measles booster.” No. Why? Because your body has built up an immunity to the measles virus and continuing to be vaccinated does not make you more immune. You either have an immunity or you don’t.

Now you might argue that some vaccines you do have to get semi-regularly, such as tetanus. That is because tetanus is a bacteria and vaccines for bacteria or parasites are much more iffy and tend to not provide the same kind of results we can expect from viral vaccines. That is another beast and one I’m not going to go into here.

This is not the first vaccine study Shultz has done either. He has been consistently showing through scientific, reproducible studies that the Duration of Immunity for the core viral illnesses is really, really long, and probably the life of your pet.

All of this, on top of the knowledge that vaccines can do some really scary stuff to your animal that range from mildly concerning (fever, diarrhea, lethargy) to super scary (seizures, cancers at injection site). I don’t think that vaccine reactions are as rare as we might like to think they are either. I have two right in my own house.

My sweet little rescue cat, Izzy, came to me perfectly healthy. I fed her one of the better brands of cat food and gave her the yearly booster shots the vet told me she needed. I was a model pet owner. One year I took her to the vet to get her yearly vaccinations and everything was uneventful. Three to four weeks later my kitty was very, very ill. It took a whole lot of testing and two opinions to pin down she had Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Developed it out of the blue, just like that. Since it was several weeks removed from the vaccines she’d been given, I never put the two together until many, many months later when I began researching vaccines and learned IBD can, in fact, be triggered by vaccine reactions. Not only that, but vaccine reactions commonly happen several weeks or even a month or two after the physical shot is given, so most reactions are not reported or even attributed to vaccinosis. I can’t prove it was the vaccines that did it, but I would be surprised if it were anything else. Unfortunately, Izzy has to live the rest of her life with this disease because of my ignorance and the industry’s lack of scruples.

Sky’s story is a little less dramatic, but frightening all the same. Sky came to me at 9 weeks having already have 2 rounds of “puppy shots,” and at the advice of our vet he received 3 more by the time he was 16 weeks old (plus the Rabies at 16 weeks). Some puppies might be able to withstand that kind of assault on the system, but Sky obviously could not. Over the next 6 months he got every kind of bacterial infection you could think of. I didn’t even stop to think that maybe his immune system wasn’t working properly. On top of that, the vet prescribed antibiotics every single time. By the time Sky was a year old, whatever precious little immune system he had was gone. Since I still didn’t know the things I know now, he got his “boosters” at a year old and our battle with Demodex Mange began.

Sky is now almost 2 and a half years old and I have finally started to get him to a point I feel is healthy. He is on a 100% raw diet and it is doing wonders for him. The way I know this is actually kind of sad. You see, Sky never actually grew a top coat. He still has “puppy fur” (undercoat) everywhere but down the line of his back. If you look closely at some of the pictures I have posted of him, you can see how his back looks different than his sides. That’s because his back is the only place he has ever grown that long, coarse, water resistant hair that is supposed to cover his whole body. Since starting him on the raw diet he has started sprouting long hairs all over his sides. He looks like a porcupine if you view him from the side. That tells me his body is finally, after more than two years, healthy enough to start putting energy into producing a good coat. Sky’s actually due this month for his Rabies and I’m putting it off and dreading it like the plague because his poor body is still so fragile and every stressor seems to send us right back into mange.

So why do we continue to vaccinate like crazy people? I have a theory, but it sounds all conspiratorial, so I won’t go into it, but let’s just say a lot of people are making a lot of money.

If you are interested in reading the very dry but very interesting article, you can go here for the abstract (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19959181), and if you’re lucky enough to be connected to a university system like I am, you might be able to click the button to read the full text article.

Read Full Post »