Rectify the Spiraling Decline in Canine Health

If you have been around a few years, as I have, you may have noticed that the health of the world, both in people and animals, is deteriorating. When I was at school, I don’t recall anyone having a health issue that needed medication to be taken at school.

As a family, we had a lot of pets, but the vet was rarely visited because our animals just weren’t sick.

These days, school teachers need to be as adept at administering drugs as they are at teaching. Animal health issues are at an all time high with serious and previously unheard of diseases now becoming common. Pets don’t live as long as the did.

Allergies are so common almost everyone has them. Diabetes is on the rise in both humans and animals. Gum disease in cats is the most common problem I am asked about. Cancer is gaining momentum.

What’s happening to life on Earth? Health is spiraling out of control. And it will continue to decline until the causes are addressed.

They may be many causes, but I believe there are two important ones. Ones that can easily be rectified today. And these are diet and health care.

First, diet. If you, or your dog, are not eating quality, natural, species appropriate food, how can you ever expect to be healthy, to prevent disease? Dogs have evolved over millions of years. Do you really think that humans have managed to unlock the key to a nutritious diet in a few measly decades?

They may claim to have done, through clever marketing skills. But can you really pit us against nature? Could this claim have more to do with profit than health or truth?

The enormous growth of human junk food doesn’t come close to that which passes for dog food. As there are no laws (enforceable ones) that determine the quality of dog food, anything can be used with impunity. The enormous death toll of animals poisoned by their food is rising. Commercial pet food recalls are at an all time high.

So the first step you can take is to be responsible for the food you feed your dog. Really responsible. Buy all the ingredients and make it yourself. It’s not difficult.

Second, health care. If the common medical health care system was so good, would health be declining so fast? Surely, the health of dogs would be improving, not declining? Surely there would be fewer diseases, not more? Surely dogs would be living longer lives, not shorter? Surely diabetes, so rare in dogs a few years ago, would have disappeared?

To me, this shows there is a serious flaw in the medical system. It is not resolving problems, it is creating them. Homeopaths know that drugs suppress the body’s natural ability to heal itself. And this is showing up all too clearly in the health of dogs today. Suppression of one problem invariably causes the rise of another, more serious, one. However, it seems that only homeopaths, and other natural therapists, are able to see the connection.

There is a saying that goes something like this - there is none so blind as those who don’t want to see.

People don’t understand the innate ability every being has of healing themselves. People panic very easily. A dog choking on a bone can sound serious if you are unused to it, but this is a healthy response by the dog to clear the bone. Rarely will this be serious. Being frightened of possible (and normally rare) impending doom is encouraged by those who profit by your concern.

You can take responsibility for your dog’s health, by choosing to use homeopathy as the health care system of choice. Homeopathy works by supporting your dog’s natural healing abilities. It enhances it, clearing blockages, raising the immune system, creating ever more healthy dogs. This is true health care, when the patient becomes naturally resistant to disease, whatever the strain, whatever the micro-organism.

Want to know more about how to have a naturally healthy dog?

Natural Dog Health With Homeopathy and a Raw Diet

It’s hard to improve on natural dog health because it’s impossible to improve on nature. Dogs evolved on a raw meat and bones diet. Their system works best with this. Difficulties arise with:

•  cooked food (notice any cookers in nature?)
•  with the poor quality meat (in even the best commercial dog food)
•  the unnatural filler (melamine, sawdust, crushed nutshells as dog food?)
•  all the chemicals that give it acceptable (to humans) colour, preservatives to give it a long shelf life (despite the claims on the label)
•  the isolated and synthetic nutrients which are difficult to digest

Huge health problems arise when dogs are fed a diet of commercial dog food, most of which tends to disappear as soon as they are put onto a raw meat and bones diet.

However, some health issues remain, despite the best diet. Although most dog health problems are caused by an unhealthy diet, there are some which aren’t.

Grief affects dogs as much as it affects us. The loss of a much loved companion or human can create ‘stuck’ grief in dogs, that is grief they can’t work through and recover from.

Pets also have a tendency to take on our ‘stuff’. If we are stuck in grief, they can share the load, or take it on completely.

Grief that is unresolved can move into depression. A depressed dog is a sorry sight, as most dogs are happy and loving.

Dealing with problems such as these, with homeopathic medicines, can complete the natural dog health circle.

The homeopathic medicine Natrum muriaticum (Nat mur) is one of the most common medicines in the treatment of grief.

Other symptoms that may develop from the grief (or without grief) are:

•  a dry nose and dry mucous membranes
•  anaemia
•  abdominal ascites, dropsy or oedema
•  nephritis, or inflammation of the kidneys - urine is difficult to pass, taking time to come
•  involuntary urination
•  pain at the end of urination, which may be difficult to see
•  a great thirst

Nat mur is made from common rock salt. So if the diet has been high in salt (as many commercial dog food is), then this could have been the cause of the ill health.

Some Dog Health Problems are Easy to Resolve

Puppies are generally a delight to have around. As long as you can cope with the chewing up of garments and expensive items, the huge energy and the occasional soiling as they become potty trained.

But that’s a small price to pay for the enthusiasm for life they have, for the fun that infectiously oozes from them.

You love him. He loves you. All is well with the world.

Until he falls sick.

Then your world crashes.

The first thing that springs to mind is what caused it? Was it something you did or didn’t do? Is it your fault? Were you too vigilant or not vigilant enough? Did you overprotect him or did you let him roam free too much?

Well, chances are that it was your fault.

But only by virtue of the fact you were doing as you were told, probably because you thought someone else knew better than you. Perhaps if you had listened to that little inner voice you sometimes hear, but mostly ignore, which told you different, things may not be this bad.

It’s never too late to learn.

And animals have an amazing way of ensuring you do indeed learn, mostly from your mistakes.

So now your puppy has grown up and has a few dog health problems.

The first possible cause to consider it what he is doing every day.

Eating!

What are you feeding him?

Commercial dog food, as most holistic veterinarians have found, is the route cause of many, if not most, dog health problems.

Depending on the country, brand and era or manufacture, most commercial dog food looks something like this:

• low grade meat by-products, often from a rendering plant
• cheap, health lacking filler such as paper, sawdust, sugar, nut shells, melamine
• indigestible isolated and synthetic nutrients
• toxic preservatives not permitted in human food

Sounds pretty unhealthy doesn’t it? Even one of those ingredients may be contributing to your dog health problem, but what if he was eating all four?

Although there are as many causes for dog health problems as there are dogs, by far the most common is the food you are feeding him.

By virtue of its daily consumption, healthy dog food, similar to the food his wild cousins eat, will go a long way to making his immune system strong, strong enough to fend off most dog health problems for years.

If you’re worried about the expense, don’t be. Feeding real food to your dog is as cheap as feeding commercial dog food. It may take a little more time, especially in the early stages as you are finding your feet, but just consider the fortune you save on veterinarian bills! They don’t come cheap by any means.

Dog Health Questions With a Common Answer

As a homeopath, I understand what we call ‘maintaining causes’ of disease. In other words health problems can not only be caused by an event such as an accident or be hereditary in origin, but it can also be caused by something you’re doing every day.

Let me give you some examples. If you smoke regularly, it’s widely known that you’ll probably eventually get lung problems. If you’ve had a job which entails handling and cutting asbestos, you’ll probably have lung problems later on. If you regularly drink a lot of alcohol, you know your liver will eventually be affected.

Diet plays a crucial part in health. Most people realise that they need to look to healthy food to keep them in the peak of condition.

You are what you eat.

It’s not the only factor which can contribute to ill health, but by virtue of its daily consumption, food plays an enormous role in your overall health.

And it’s no less true for dogs.

What you feed your dog will reflect how healthy he is and how healthy he remains.

I have found, in my practise, that an enormous number of common dog health questions can be answered, simply by taking the dog off commercial dog food.

When I was feeding my pets commercial pet food, many years ago, I read of a remarkable life changing experience for a young dog.

She was only about three years old, but had developed such severe arthritis, that the vet recommended euthanasia.

The dog’s people were not happy with this recommendation and decided to look elsewhere. They searched extensively and eventually come across the notion that the food they were feeding her could be the problem.

So they stopped feeding her commercial pet food.

One day, a friend dropped by. One who knew the dog and the prognosis. As he crossed the yard to the house, he noticed an agile dog playing and frolicking about, as only young dogs can.

Assuming the worse, he started to give his condolences.

He was gobsmacked when he was told that this was the very same dog.

That’s when I decided to stop feeding my pets commercial pet food.

It really doesn’t matter what dog health questions you have. It could be anything. The first thing you really need to try is stopping the commercial dog food.

If you’re a bit unsure, try it for a month. After an initial worsening of symptoms (signally a clearing), especially in older dogs, your dog will start to bloom.

What have you got to lose?

It’s really pointless going for a medication or other form of treatment if the food your dog is given is the problem.

So lets have a look at some common dog health questions, which may all be addressed by stopping the commercial pet food.

My dog

• has a terrible skin or an itchy skin
• has arthritis
• is overweight
• has heart problems
• has spinal myelopathy
• is infertile
• regularly gives birth to dead puppies, or the puppies die soon after birth
• has kidney stones
• has hip dysplasia
• has tumours
• has cystitis

Holistic veterinarians has all been able to address the above dog health questions with a change of diet off commercial pet food.

Dog Vomiting and the Role Commercial Pet Food Plays

Someone says ‘dog food’ and the image of dry kibble pops into your head. As a society, for over fifty years, commercially manufactured bagged kibble and canned ‘wet’ food has been synonymous with those simple words.

Although the first processed dog ‘biscuit’ was first invented by James Spratt of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1860, it was World War II that spurred commercial manufacturers to first start pushing the ease of kibble and canned food onto the already stretched family unit. It was convenient, affordable and no one considered the quality of the food or the ingredients that went into this new time saver because it had to be better then the table scraps that domestic animals enjoyed at the time, right?

Wrong!

In fact, early commercial dog food manufacturers agreed that feeding dogs meat, vegetables and some grains was better for the dogs than the processed kibble they were making from meat scraps, meat- by-products, and factory waste, such as saw dust and grain husk. Convenient? Absolutely! Cheap - not in the long run. Healthy? You can excuse the early adopters but, generations later, dog diseases are near epidemic levels. In spite of the evidence that something is wrong, millions of people continue to give their dogs manufactured dog food.

For everyone involved, the commercial pet food industry was a win-win operation! Farmers sold off both grain and vegetable crops that were unfit for human consumption and slaughterhouses had a market for body parts they would normally have to pay to have taken to the dump. The manufacturers quickly worked out how best to market their products to unwary pet owners and Purina even developed a way to expand or ‘fluff up’ the kibble before drying called extrusion so consumers felt they were getting more for their money.

In 1964, without scientific basis, the Pet Food Institute began their massive media campaign against table scraps. Veterinarians throughout the world jumped on the bandwagon and by the early 1960’s, few people were feeding their four-legged family members anything but this wondrous, convenient and readily available food.

Commercial Dog Food: Buyer Beware
Forty years after the campaign to remove table scraps from your pet’s diet, pet stores, some breeders, and most veterinarians (who peddle the AVMA approved brand- as supposedly being “better”), continue to extol the virtues of manufactured dog foods in spite of the evidence. People who think outside the box are often demonized for feeding their dogs a more natural diet.

Nothing is ever that black or white.

In a society that lives on fast food and prepackaged meals, it’s no wonder their cats and dogs are being fed the equivalent. Everything must be fast, convenient and palatable, even if what makes the food ‘easy’ and ‘tasty’ is also slowly killing us. If this wasn’t bad enough, starting in the late1990s recycled restaurant grease (reused for days at carcinogenic temperatures) is sprayed on kibble! Why? Just to give this otherwise tasteless “dog food” some flavor!

The incidence of cancer, heart conditions and strokes are all steadily rising. Diet related illnesses, such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, colitis, Crohn’s disease and obesity are at the minimum common place, and some are epidemic.

Why should our animals be any different? If we cannot feed ourselves properly, what makes you think their pets are being fed responsibly?

Processed foods are slowly killing North Americans and their pets. Proof of this fact is the preponderance of people (and their pets) under medical care and medication. Some people might argue that humans and animals are living longer, but what about quality of life? People and their dogs are not only on more meds than ever, millions are on multiple meds!

Meds are akin to magic; they do not heal, they simply make the symptoms disappear from view by overriding your pets’ immune defense systems. Taken long enough, your pets’ immune defense systems eventually shut down, relegating the user to a lifetime of meds, and a lower quality of life.

Pet food manufacturers wrote the book on how to manipulate nutritional content; lists of ingredients and marketing to best highlight the ‘good’ while entirely avoiding the ‘bad’. Do you really expect a forty-pound bag of dog food that costs $12.98 to have any nutritional value? Consider this: Forty-pounds of human-grade corn meal (commonly used empty calorie filler linked to diabetes) used in commercial pet foods, costs nearly $120!

Can you imagine what is in your dog’s food if the human-grade ‘filler’ costs nearly ten times that of the entire bag of food? You do not want to know.

Commercial Dog Food and Vomiting in Dogs
Commercial dog food is the equivalent of McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s Popeye’s, Churches… but for dogs. Eye catching packaging, combined with multi-billion dollar Madison Avenue advertising specifically designed to appeal to the masses, does not change the fact that manufactured dog food should only be used during emergencies.

Have you ever seen Lemmings following each other off a cliff? None ask “Why?” they just follow the others! And the “others” have been bombarded with slick advertising campaigns for over 50 years! Just because your mother and her mother and her mother before her bought manufactured pet food doesn’t mean it was ever the right choice.

The cost to your dog’s overall health and well-being is not just expensive, it is heart wrenching. Today, it is all too common to find “older dogs” (dogs over 10 years of age) in poor health and on multiple meds, shells of their former selves.

The documentary ‘Super Size Me’ is based on what happens to the human body when eating nothing but McDonalds 24/7 for thirty days. Independent filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, was curious to know whether or not a diet based solely on fast- food is bad for you. He put himself on the McDonalds 24/7 diet. Doctors specializing in internal medicine carefully monitored him. He gained over 24 pounds in the thirty-day span – nearly an extra pound a day! He also suffered from mood swings, depression, lethargy, sexual dysfunction and potentially irreversible liver damage. He vomited on only the second day of this experiment and by the third week, was suffering from heart palpitations! The decline in his health was so rapid, that his doctors urged him to end the experiment after just two weeks.

How can this be? If you believe that the fast-food industry cares about your health, you are sadly mistaken! They are in the business of making money for their stockholders. It is your responsibility to learn what is healthy and what is not. Fast foods should only be eaten occasionally, if at all.

A steady diet of poorly balanced and over processed diets leads to an unhealthy digestive system, and is the leading cause of chronic illnesses and disease. ‘Super Size Me’ is proof of it in the human world; a day at the vet hospital proves it in the animal world. If you have wondered why obesity, diabetes and cancer are on the rise in dogs, you only need to look so far as the bag of dog food in the pantry.

The Royal Society of Medicine Great Britain states “Fully 90% of all chronic disease is caused by an unhealthy digestive system”. This is proof positive that we are what we eat. Your dog is at your mercy as to what choices you make for them.

You can read more of Robert Hart's pet health articles at www.vitalityscience.com

Dog Health - What is the Single, Most Important Thing You Can Do to Keep it?

It seems that dog health is on the decline. Depending on the breed, dogs can live to 20 years or more. Today, you’re lucky if they reach eight.

Why is this?

Years ago, dogs were fed table scraps, kitchen scraps and homemade food, as commercial pet food hadn’t been invented. The table scraps were more healthy then, as junk food didn’t abound.

Years ago, it was rare to take a dog to a veterinarian. Vets, as doctors, were only visited when deemed absolutely necessary.

And yet, still dogs lived longer.

Could there be a connection between dog health today and their diet?

In my opinion, the answer to that is a resounding YES!

As with most people, I’m sure you’re blissfully unaware of what goes into making your own food, let alone that of your dogs. When people are asked if they know, the frequent answer is “I don’t want to know”.

Obviously you suspect the worst.

But why don’t you want to know?

Is it because you’re caught out not knowing, so fear looking stupid?

I can understand that.

Or perhaps the knowledge of what goes into dog food is too revolting to consider. If this is the case, don’t you think your dog might agree with you? Maybe he thinks it’s revolting too, but if he doesn’t eat it, he fears he may not be offered an alternative. Even revolting food will keep you alive.

Well, now you have the chance of finding out what really goes into pet food, so next time someone accosts you in the street, you can answer with confidence. Not only that, you can change the diet of your dog to something he will love and that will keep him in peak condition, to boot.

There’s a saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Dog health IS dog food, by the very nature of its frequent consumption.

The pet food industry remains more or less unregulated in all countries. The little regulation there is, is poorly policed. It would require too much funding, which tends to be spent on human needs.

So the industry gets away with whatever it wants.

Low quality meat (called meat by-products) is the start of the slippery slope. While dogs can eat some low quality food (hair, beaks, feathers, intestines and contents, fat), they can’t survive on it. They need some good quality to maintain health.

Euthanased animals may be rejected by a more ethical company, but may be eagerly snapped up by those who are less so. The lethal injection forms part of the resulting food. Can this be contributing to poor dog health?

To bulk out the food, to make it more profitable, a filler is added. This can be whatever is available cheaply. It might be melamine. It might be sugar. It may be sawdust.

All pet food is cooked under high temperatures and pressures. This kills off enzymes, vitamins and other nutrients that are essential for good dog health.

To redress this shortfall, nutrients are added. But these are normally the synthetic ones as they’re the cheapest. Synthetic nutrients are not easily absorbed by the body. As most of them are also isolated, they are of little value. Dog health is all about getting complex nutrients in a complete and natural form, which are easily absorbed.

To give the resulting dog ‘food’ a long shelf life (which is good for business, but not for dog health), toxic preservatives are used, preservatives that would never be allowed in human food because of their highly poisonous nature. Poisons such as ethoxyquin and formalin.

Don’t be fooled by packets which maintain they use ‘natural’ preservatives, or are even preservative free. Ask yourself this - can meat be kept indefinitely at room temperature, without the use of preservatives?

It’s down to you to be vigilant in the quality of your dog’s food. To maintain good health, you need to be in control, which means you need to know the worst. Putting your head in the sand isn’t going to keep your dog healthy.