DECEMBER 2014 HEALTHY ANIMAL UPDATE

Healthy Animal Update December 2014   

The end of another wonderful year. My 90 year old step-mother says she finds many things to do and to be happy. My 91 year old mother-in-law has plenty of card games but struggles with getting around.  Both are amazed to be still alive.  A friend of mine’s dog died this year – at 19 years old (a Tibetan Terrier). We all want to have our family live long lives and we all know that food is one of the keys. What to eat? What to feed? Having finished the heavy holiday eating season (my fridge is now back to normal), we will look this month at what to feed your animals.

Please let me know what you would like to learn about, how I can best help you heal your animals and yourselves while healing our planet. Prior newsletters can be found on my site, www.MyHealthyAnimals.com

The RSS feed is now working.  Go to any page of the website and click on the RSS icon. Then when I make posts to my blog, you will be notified.  I frequently post briefly on the blog and give links to other resources.

December 2014 index

  1. Classes so you can heal your animals
  2. Holistic Perspectives and Treatments – food, glorious food
  3. News
  4. Classes so you can heal your animals

Baltimore Maryland – at the World of Pets Expo Jan 23,24,25– lots of great speakers – check out their web site. I will be giving the class you have been waiting for – tailored to just what you want to know. Register by emailing me at HealthyAnimals@aol.com. $30 for the newest in holistic health for your pets and all your questions answered (not, of course treatments for each animal). I will refund your money if you do not save that much in the next year in pet care costs.

Not sure I have spoken about a great web resource for holistic health classes. There are ones for veterinarians and for pet parents. Go to http://www.civtedu.org/ and look for “courses for everyone”. The wonderful Dr. Barbara Fougere heads up this wonderful endeavor.

  1. Holistic Perspectives and Treatments – food, glorious food

We all keep learning about foods. First some philosophy, then some practical suggestions. I chose to be an omnivore because I felt that plants were sentient, too. Decades ago I read about Findhorn, a farm in Scotland where they talked with their plants and they grew to huge sizes. Then I read various books about plants including the ringing Cedars Series where Anastasia in Russia would water plants in the evening with water she had washed her feet in, and their produce would help heal the person.   Machelle Small Wright, of Perelandra fame, Molly of Green Hope Farms and Dr. Jean Hofve all spoke directly to plants, as more and more of my friends are able to do. Then I saw a film about Damanhur, an incredible community in Italy. With research starting in 1976, they can hear plants “sing” and have recorded concerts with trees and other plans. http://www.damanhur.org/en/research-and-experimentation/the-plant-world and listen to the music by searching for music of the plants Damanhur.

More recently, reading a great book, Source Field Investigations, I heard about the Backster experiments in the 60s where plants were tied to a polygraph machine. When cut, chopped, eaten, picked – they screamed!  If they were prayed to and thanked for giving their lives, they did not scream.  I am 40% better now at praying over my food during cooking and after, and when I put food down for my cat, Ed. My goal is to be 100% in the moment to thank the food and be grateful.

Well, now you have lots of reading for the chilly winter nights when you are not gardening. And there are so many more wonderful spiritual books about animals, insects and plants. Keep sharing on my blog (comment at any post) the books that connect you to the natural world.

Now for more reading – on diets for dogs and cats!
In the fall issue of the Integrative Veterinary Care Journal (www.ivcjournal.com), Dr. Alinovi writes of foods for the older pet. Since we all know people and animals who are super healthy until the day they die, we know that each of us may need something different to stay healthy. She always addresses foods with every client. She agrees with me that the best quality is what you control yourself – buying the ingredients and making it. This is easy – really!

Since the years do take a toll on health if we have not fulfilled the unique needs of each pet, we often are looking at inflammation in the body – arthritis, renal and liver dysfunction, stomatitis and more. Dr. Alinovi suggests simple diets that reduce overall inflammation. Recipe one is Beef and Sweet Potato. She suggests lightly cooking the beef and liver, but in the text she says raw is fine. Then she adds baked sweet potato, tomatoes, spinach, flax seed oil and calcium. For a cat – beef, pumpkin, ground sunflower seeds, flaxseed oil and calcium. She suggests using bone broth for cats in renal failure. I have frequently suggested this (from Anitra Frazier’s book, I have frequently suggested this (from Anitra Frazier’s book, the Natural Cat) when cats are not eating, but now will suggest it more often. I also love her practical approach to food warnings on the internet – most are not really true. She agrees with me – chocolate [only high quality stuff], grapes and raisins [we still do not know why dogs started dying from this, even organic ones, though most are still eating them and doing fine], raw onion (a fair amount of it – ok to give if a little is in the leftovers) and zylitol.

To cook the meat or not to cook the meat? The Chinese Food Therapy approach. Dr. Ihor Basko wrote a very practical book, Fresh Food and Ancient Wisdom, that begins with one of his dogs stealing his macrobiotic meal when he was answering the door bell. Within weeks his Airedale’s skin problems cleared and all his dogs were less aggressive, less hyperactive, had no gas and no “doggy odor”. [Many of you know that doggy odor is one of the Early Warning Signs of Internal Imbalance and healthy dogs don’t need bathing.] He goes on to describe what is good in different foods:

  1. Foods beneficial for different organs
  2. Yin and Yang foods and when each may be indicated
  3. Foods for different climates and seasons
  4. Proteins – quality, different types and qualities
  5. Grains – some dog breeds evolved with grain eating people while others only got a small amount of wild grains seasonally in the intestines of their prey. When to feed and when not.
  6. Starch Vegetables
  7. Other vegetables – critical to health – what they are good for and nutrient content
  8. Hmm – maybe this would be useful for each of us to be healthier, too!
  9. Spices, fruits, fats (more about fats and aggression later in this Update).
  10. Raw or cooked meat? [he goes more cooked – we each have our preferences]

Then he gives lots of recipes – 80% of which I may try for myself. Ok – there are lots of recipes, but you need only pick a few and mix and match. It can be fun to try a new one a month to see the benefit for your pets, but they are ok with what may bore us modern humans.

Dr. Cheryl Schwartz also gives food guidelines by individual type in her famous book, Four Paws, Five Directions, an awesome guide for you to treat your pets with Chinese food therapy, acupressure and herbs. While she does not give recipes, she relates foods to the five elements ( water, fire, earth, air, and metal), gives specific suggestions for each ailment covered individually, and has an entire chapter on food therapy including:

  1. directions – up down, in or outward!!
  2. flavors – sweet, sour, pungent, salty and bitter
  3. Meridian – food relationships (that were in the earlier chart)
  4. Thermal nature – warming, cooling, hot, neutral
  5. Yin and Yang
  6. Seasonal balancing
  7. Great dog and cat success stories

New learning came to me recently while editing an article by Steve Brown (author we have discussed before – Unlocking the Canine Ancestral Diet and the earlier See Spot Live Longer) for the winter 2014/2015 issue of the IVC Journal. Steve points out that we may be causing some aggression in dogs when we feed fresh meat diets with too high a fat level. If you are feeding (and this could be adding ground meat to a kibble diet) meat that is more than 85% lean, there could be too low protein and more importantly, not even half the recommended amount of tryptophan. Some studies have shown that low tryptophan amino acid can cause, or increase aggressive behaviors.

The best diet base is to feed 85 – 90% lean beef or rotate the less expensive 80% ground beef with chicken necks (removing the skin and loose fat). I am still learning more about Steve’s extensive research on this topic.

Finally, I will report later on some new learning about why it is better to cook meat for very compromised animals – that it is actually more digestible. I have not yet digested [chuckle] this information yet, so it will appear in later issues.

I feed my cat a mixture of chicken necks/backs in 2-3 inch chunks and a ground beef heart and muscle meat (no idea of fat) from locally raised pastured animals, pureed liver and vegetables and fish treats and some supplements. Takes 3 hours every 2 months and then I freeze it. Costs .50 per day or less.

If you cook for a family you can include the dog and cat meal as part of your meal shopping and preparation – no extra time at all.

Now, if you want to start with a prepared frozen raw, one to try is BARF (yukky I know – stands for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food). The ingredients for one flavor are ‘BARF® Chicken Patties & Nuggets 
Chicken, Finely Ground Bone, Chicken Liver, Egg, Broccoli, Celery, Spinach, Carrot, Ground Flax Seed, Dehydrated Alfalfa Meal, Apple, Pear, Grapefruit, Orange, Dried Kelp, Cayenne Pepper, Cod Liver Oil, Garlic, Vitamin E Supplement, Zinc Oxide, Manganous Oxide”

Now, if you were not grinding the chicken and bone, does it seem too hard to do yourself?

Please post any of your comments on diets after this newsletter on the blog, or email me.

  1. News

This is a not to be missed article – https://www.thedodo.com/dog-runs-first-time-3d-print-881600572.html

Derby was born without front legs and his first owners were going to euthanize him but the shelter kept him going. A local businesswoman fostered him and built a cart that helped him move around. Tara Anderson is director of 3D Systems so then she thought they could make front leg splints for him.  (http://www.3dsystems.com/) Now in a forever home, you will love how joyfully Derby runs around.  Hard to wrap my mind around making things from “paper”.

Often now is the time people get puppies – right after Christmas – so think about gifting the Healthy Dog Journal to start your friends on the holistic path.

Happy New Year to all and may you be more and more joyful regardless of your circumstances.