Going raw

The other two reasons for switching to raw, and the real tipping points, came in the form of out pit bulls-- Robin, our APBT rescue, and Luna, a pit/shar pei mix (best guess).

Robin
Not long after we found Robin, she had a series of urinary tract infections with struvite crystals.

We knew a bit about struvites because our cats had experienced them. Our male cat, Chester, had a complete blockage that required surgery and an open catheter for a week. A big cat with a constant drip of urine is a less than pleasant event. Some of the others had also had these crystals.

I'd read quite a bit about this and about the benefits of raw feeding for this condition from the CatInfo website. While the cause for these crystals is somewhat different in cats than in dogs (in cats, the crystals, which form in an alkaline environment and dissolve in an acidic one, tend to be a result of diets high in certain nutrients and low in moisture-- we'd fed the cats a lot of fish and mostly dry food-- sometimes accompanied by infection; however, with dogs, the crystals are a result of an infection that creates an alkaline environment conducive to crystal formation), the principles remain the same: more moisture means the UT remains flushed out more frequently, and a diet higher in meat creates a more acidic environment that is hostile to crystal formation. For more info on crystals, University of Minnesota's vet school has a whole center devoted to urinary crystals. A whole freakin' center!!

When Robin experienced her second or third run-in with the crystals, the vet pushed hard for us to feed her the prescription food. By this time, we've been feeding the dogs Taste of the Wild, Simon's been getting home- cooked foods, and feeding Robin a food where actual meat product was 4th on the ingredient list didn't sit well with me at all, much less all the corn (filler), brewer's rice (cheap filler), fat (flavoring), and very low protein. We had her eat it for a while, but we saw our once muscle-bound, athletic dog's rippling muscles wasting away. Plus, she hated it. Just hated it. She liked the canned version better, but it DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A MEAT LISTED. Only by-products.

I convinced the vet to allow me to try and find a diet that recreated a similar profile with better ingredients. We used a lot of the Natural Balance foods; California Naturals low-fat; Innova senior; some of the Castor and Pollux varieties. Even though it's not necessarily diet-related, we went with foods that had similar mineral profiles, just in case, and began preparing a raw meal for their evening meals. And voila. We went a very long time without crystals or UTIs.

After a while of this, I got busy. And lazy. They were only getting a few raw meals a week. And then Robin started hating her kibble. I had to mix wet food or cooked turkey with it to get her to eat. And even still, she would shuffle to the bowl, ears down, tail tucked, like she was being beaten. Seriously, like someone was torturing her physically to make her eat.

Then she had another UTI. This time, with crystals. We used the Rx food just long enough to dissolve the crystals and that was it. No more dry food. No more canned food. No more miserable meals.

A diet high in meat creates that acidic urinary environment hostile to struvites (not calcium oxalate, which are a different story altogether). A raw diet is also extremely high in moisture, so there's that flushing that we want to keep a clean UT.

So we switched to all raw. We have yet to have a UTI with crystals since then, knock on wood. And even if she did, it wouldn't warrant a change to the Rx food unless she had recurrence after recurrence like she was before--a UTI and crystals every 6-8 weeks. As is, she's had a couple of UTIs. No crystals, and the UTIs have been mild.

Best of all, this is how she is for every single meal. I should have started filming at the top of the stairs because she literally dances the whole way down... Look at that wagging tail.

Moving to home-cooked foods

As I mentioned before, there were several main tipping points for the move away from commercial foods...

Simon
Simon was our old man. He was extremely fearful, and due to some poor training and socialization (or rather lack of), he lashed out when he was afraid. Meaning he snapped. Or he just bit. We had inadvertently trained the growl out of him (a very bad thing. Please research clicker training if you have a fearful dog and APPRECIATE a growling dog) so his warning signs were subtle, at best.

He had become intolerant of handling by us as well-- primarily due to painful arthritis and neurological problems-- and he had some moments where we weren't sure he fully recognized us. The vet was fairly certain he had canine cognitive dysfunction (CCD), ie, doggie alzheimers.

I had read a study about "aggression" in dogs being related to high protein. The study dealt with the use of tryptophan, and studied the effects on dominance and territorial aggression. I knew that Simon's problems weren't really those things, but I thought it couldn't hurt.

One of Simon's symptoms from his neurological problems was also urinary incontinence. Grain-free foods had been touted to help, at least anecdotally.

So I put him on grain-free, low protein foods. We started with a formula from Pinnacle. We also went through a variety of the Natural Balance foods.

Several things happened.

Learning about dog behavior, canine communication, and becoming more hands-off with Simon took us much further in terms of his "aggression." Helping him feel safe in our home did much more than low protein ever would. His aggression was fear-based. Not "dominance." Not "territorial," though he had become a resource guarder (again, more than likely due to a history of having things unceremoniously taken away from him).

We noticed muscle-wasting from the low-protein. And several herbs for incontinence did more for that than grain-free had.

He also hated the food. Hated it.

I picked up a copy of Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health.

First and foremost, it is an invaluable resource for basic health and diet information for our pets. The recipes have been analyzed, so you can rest assured that your home-prepped food is supplying everything they need.

I started cooking some of the simpler recipes for Simon and mixing them with his kibble. The recipes here are much more grain-heavy than I was comfortable with (not for the incontinence, but simply because dogs don't need quite that much grain). So I leaned toward things like quinoa and whole grains like oats brown rice. We used turkey and ground beef and eggs; green beans, carrots, peas, sweet potatoes. And he got a spoon of canned pumpkin, because just like any other little old man, he needed his fiber to keep him regular. :)

As old as he was, and as green as I was at all of this, I was uncomfortable with raw. But he was immediately thrilled with his meals again. Happy to see his bowl, great appetite, and no more loss of muscle mass.

A note on protein:
This is my understanding; I will try to come back with some links to the research I did on this (again, why I should have been documenting all this from the start)...

A raw or cooked diet is very high moisture content-- I want to say 70% or more. Plus there's bone and there's fat. It's not a massively high protein diet, in terms of the base %.

However, when you get kibble, it does not tell you where that protein comes from, plant or animal; plant protein is certainly cheaper. It's also very low moisture. A higher percentage of protein that comes directly from an animal source with a higher moisture content is going to be more bioavailable to the dog. So even though it might seem like a lower-protein food %-wise, it might be higher than even a high protein kibble. It's not totally clear in most cases, given the information we have about the commercial kibble.

Guilty as charged

Earlier today, someone reminded me of the guilt.

Taking on the responsibility of forgoing commercial kibble and making your pets' food is so much about learning as you go and about problem-solving-- and when for whatever reason you are unable to provide what you wish you could, it's easy to fall into guilt. I feel it all the time.

Feeling guilty that you can't afford the highest quality sources, that maybe if you pinched a few other pennies elsewhere maybe you could...

Or that maybe if you just rearranged your schedule you could find more time to grind or prepack the food instead of using bonemeal or premade raw this week...

Or that if you could just STOP WORRYING maybe you could bring yourself to feed larger raw meaty bones...

Or that maybe if you stopped buying new clothes ever again, you could afford to feed raw at all.

One of the best pieces of advice that I was ever given was when my uncle, who is every bit as neurotic as I am (thanks, genetics!), told me that if I could just accept that every decision I make will be the wrong decision, I'd feel a lot better.

It sounds so negative, but it's not. He just meant that you can spend the rest of your life second-guessing the decisions that you make. If you can just accept that the grass is always greener, that you can play "what if" forever, then you can learn to stop playing that game.

I guess what I'm getting at is that we all just do the best we can right now. That can take so many forms. When I was reading about raw feeding, there was a lot high-and-mighty, snotty, condescneding talk to people who were choosing not to feed raw or, weirdly enough, who were choosing to feed raw a different way (the divide between grinding or not, and using supplements or not are the biggest ones)-- without acknowledging that perhaps those choices, including the choice to feed dry food or canned food or cooked food or whatever, is indeed the best decision for that person and that pet at that time.

In everything, do all the research you can, do the best you can, and don't worry when someone else tells you you're doing it wrong-- you already knew that. ;-) Take their advice as one more datapoint and learn when to say that this decision is one you can live with and when this decision is one that you can't. I would love to feed all organic; I'd love to feed all free-range. I can't right now, but I'm always on the lookout for new sources, and I know that whatever I'm feeding them will be better than the meat in their kibble. I can live with that. If I couldn't get any organ meats around here, it might change my mind. I don't know if I could make a complete diet for them without them-- that would take some extra research. Choose the battles you fight with yourself.

The bottom like is, there are countless ways to beat yourself up in this life; your pets' food shouldn't be one of them.

A Kibble Conundrum

Say cheese!

I so wish I'd started this blog years ago. We've gone through so many brands and types and combinations-- I've forgotten more than I've remembered. And each food we tried, each trial, each experiment nudged us one direction or another.

When we started kibble shopping, we were on a seriously limited budget, as well as a seriously limited knowledge base.

My primary goals were as few by-products as possible, and if they were there, they needed to be named. I also wanted to have a named meat source high on the list.

(I feed my dogs parts of animals that humans generally do not eat, so by-products in a common language sort of way aren't offensive to me per se. This article, however, gives a good overview of EXACTLY what it means when a label says what it says...)

We started with the Sam's Club store brand of lamb and rice. But after Birdie's miraculous turnaround, and River (the new dog) and her dry coat... we decided to go up a step. No corn, more whole grains.

We settled on Pro Plan Sensitive Skin & Stomach. Oh my gawd. It smelled like fish food. River hated it every bit as much as I did.

River had her own ideas about what she should be on the menu.

So I did a lot more reading.

If you feed commercial foods, I highly recommend the Whole Dog Journal's list of approved foods. It's a great place to start if you have no idea what you're looking at. Not only do they give their own recommendations, they have a guide on how to read the labels for yourself. In fact, I highly recommend a subscription to the journal in general. Twenty dollars gets you one year of current issues and searchable access to the entire back catalog. It's an absolute wealth of knowledge, worth every penny.

This was all going on right around the time of the large Menu Foods recall, and Canidae's formula changes.

We settled on Nature's Variety for a long time, going back and forth between the grain-free and grain-inclusive formulas. I still quite like the company and the foods, and I've put them in our rotation (we still use kibble in Kongs) off and on over the years.

We fed Simon various low-protein foods to alleviate his "aggression" (that's a whole other blog post and discussion).

When trying to eliminate chicken, we tried Taste of the Wild Sierra for a while.

We happily chugged along on TOTW until a few things eventually tipped the scales.

We'll do whatever works...

That cute little pink nose.

It used to be black. A total black crust of snot. Birdie wheezed and sneezed and snarffled and snuffled and snotted all. the. time. Even after all the vomiting had stopped. She also had a patchy, dry, dandruffy coat. She reacted to most topical flea treatments.

At that point, I thought, "Well hell. Getting rid of corn stopped the vomiting. I wonder what losing the rest of the grains would do?"

I assumed their coats would improve. And we got that. But we got so much more.

One day, I suddenly realized that Birdie wasn't snot-filled, and lo and behold, she had a pink nose. That "chronic respiratory infection" that she would never be able to shake, according to the vet, was gone.

Since then, she's been fine. Perfect. She has so far been fine with every totally grain-free food we've tried-- Pinnacle, Merrick, Solid Gold... And she has gone back to snotty and awful within a couple of days on any other foods with grain, even the "high-quality" ones, except Wellness Salmon. The rice and barley seem to treat her fine, so I suppose it's not a totally across the board grain-related issue. We've never done a dedicated food trial with her because just finding something grain-free has always worked so well, along with this Wellness variety that we'd resorted to when she was being picky. So we're happy with that. Someday I'd like to get everyone on raw, but I'll save that for another day.

At any rate, Birdie has been the barometer for the importance of diet. Our little guinea pig of a cat.

Alice's Adventures in Pet Food

My sister-in-law called it the rabbit hole when I asked her what she recommended we feed our new dog. She gave me the option to stop right there and go no further... but I didn't listen.

Our dog Simon was elderly, to put it mildly. He had arthritis and was developing some Canine Cognitive Dysfunction. And he was extremely fearful of people.

But dogs, he loved. He communicated better with them than with people. He was happy with doggie friends. He couldn't physically handle a puppy, but an adult dog that could just be a companion in his old age seemed appropriate. The idea of having a dog that we could be more active with appealed to us. And the prospect of a silent home when it was time for Simon to call it a day was more than I could bear to think about. I picked him out of his litter when I was 15. I'd had him roughly half my life.

We'd always fed him whatever was on sale at the store-- Beneful, Kibbles n Bits, Dog Chow, you name it. And at 13 or 14 years old, it seemed to have worked for him.

But we'd recently learned it wasn't the best, thanks to our cats.

This sweet gal, Birdie, threw up daily. Multiple times a day. She was healthy, according to our vet. I'd had cats all my life, and they'd always thrown up. But this was the first time I'd had a strictly indoor cat, and I was tired of cleaning up vomit constantly.

With a little research, we learned that corn doesn't sit well with cats' stomachs. This was 6 or 7 years ago. I can't even remember where I learned this, what websites I visited, what books I read. I know I did a lot of research (catinfo.org is my current go-to site for cat nutrition information).

This was also before the big trend of pet foods without corn. It was almost impossible to find one, especially to find one we could afford. We were poor.

But Petsmart's house label made one. And sure enough, it worked. It worked. Immediately. No more vomiting. No more cleaning up piles of half digested kibbles.

It was my first clue that what we feed our animals really matters in a tangible way-- that it's not just raw fuel for energy. It is important in so many ways.

That's when I fell down the rabbit hole. It's when I started asking an awful lot of questions about what was going into the food that I gave my animals. It was when I really understood that I'm in charge of that. My animals have no choice in that. It's all up to us humans (as if we don't have enough on our plates... ;-). It's when I started looking at what I could do to extend Simon's life and what I could do for the newest member of our family, River.

A raw deal

River waits patiently for her supper.

I get asked a lot about why/how we feed our dogs-- how we came to that decision, how we knew what to do, where we get what we feed, and just why go to the trouble.

It's true. Raw feeding is not simple-- although it is a very stripped down, basic way to feed. I mean that unless you have a lot of money to toss around (and if that's the case, let's be friends!!), you don't just go to the store, buy a bag, and dump it into their bowls. And even buying premade raw requires safe food handling practices, washing their bowls after every meal, and planning ahead since the stores that carry those premade formula's aren't open 24hours a day like your neighborhood one-stop-shop.

And once you've made the decision to feed raw, there are countless permutations to wade through.

Yes, there are premade formulas. If you decide to do these, you still have to find out what is available to you locally or that can be shipped. There are formulas that are "complete and balanced" and others that are a base formula to which you add your own supplements. There are formulas that may include various proteins or single proteins. And then you may want to find out where these proteins are sourced from, what THEY are fed, what their living (and dying) conditions are like if that is something that's important to you-- and if it's something that you can afford (I'm sad to say we have not yet found all humanely sourced meats that we can afford yet).

Heart, kidneys, tongue, sweetbreads.

And then you can also go the route of DIY. At this point, you have to learn how much of what you need to feed. How much bone, how much fat, how much organ meat, how much muscle meat... and you have to find sources for those things. For many people, chicken livers are about all the organ meats that are available. If that's the case, how do you make up what's missing? Where can you get affordable kidney, sweetbreads, pancreas, etc. And the same questions of sourcing apply here.

And then there's the question of grinding or not grinding. There are benefits to both.

There's storage space, packaging and portioning.

That River dog. She is so patient!

There's a lot to think about. And it's not for everyone. It's not for every dog, and it's not for every household. Our choices have changed over the years, as the dogs' needs have changed, as our finances have gone up and down, as our sources and knowledge have changed, and I'll details a lot of these changes and the research we did throughout the coming posts, particularly for those of you who are interested in learning more about it.

And that is the beauty of it all. You have control. You make choices. You aren't bound by what's in the bag. And as much as you wish you could just feed kibble sometimes, you are hooked on that control.

And seeing the results in our pups... I am glad for every minute of this. It's a learning curve, a journey. So far, it's been good for us.

Kibble detox

This. This is why I like a low carb diet.

Trust me. I love energy in a dog. We do dog sports. We like to play. But when a dog has no "off switch" it's miserable for everyone involved.

Dre's been off kibble for a few days now. After some hard wrestling with his sister this evening, he is now able to relax. When he's on kibble, this is much harder. Imagine the carb-loading you might do for a long run... Imagine that all the time. Or how you feel after that one too many cups of coffee.

Being capable of relaxation should be a human- and canine- right.

The menu

Poor Dre has changed foods more times than he's changed underwear.

Dre dog waits patiently for his turkey to boil.

We started by feeding him Nature's Variety; he never had solid stool and had a lot of gas. We even tried adjusting the amount with no luck.

We eventually started feeding him Taste of the Wild; it was better, but not perfect. But I noticed that he had a lot of excess energy-- lots of mouthing, jumping, chewing, pawing, wild eyes, and licking, licking, licking.

Luna, our shar pei /pit mix, experiences this excess energy when she eats kibble. And since it was clear that Andre was staying with us, we started switching him to raw. Plus, once you're used to cleaning up after a raw fed dog, cleaning up after a kibble fed dog is a major shock.

I'm pretty sure this was after the first surgery...

Started with raw chicken breast. Started adding in ground chicken leg quarters and he had a flare-up. We thought it was coincidental and more related to all the sticks he was eating.

Andre's flare-ups consist of lethargy, and either one or both of vomiting and/or liquid stool.

We tried again after he recovered, beginning with Bravo! frozen chicken, and he had another flare-up when we tried to add in the ground leg quarters again. He'd had so many rounds of antibiotics, anti-fungals, surgeries, was still underweight... we thought perhaps the bacterial load of raw was too much for him right now. I was hoping to get his immune system strengthened, get some weight on him, and then try again.

During each recovery period, he was given boiled chicken breast and either rice or starchy vegetables.

We went to kibble-- Wellness Core-- but, again, major case of the crazies.

Went to home cooked (chicken breast and vegetables), but it was so expensive. We tried adding in boiled leg quarters, another flare-up.

Back to kibble-- more crazies. We settled on a mix of kibble and boiled chicken breast with occasional veggies and bone meal.

He has done well on this for several weeks. However, he had several days of incontinence following dramatically increased water intake. It was likely stress of moving to a new house. But we're all keeping it in the backs of our minds.

And he never really gains any weight.

While Dre is currently healthy, I have gone to the vet and discussed a game plan. He felt like the most common thing it might be is a food intolerance-- perhaps chicken fat specifically, since that is what we've tried to increase each time he's had a flare-up.

We decided to start with a food trial. I have eased him off of kibble and onto boiled turkey. Tonight I began the switch back to raw-- Bravo! Turkey. We'll keep turkey kibble for Kongs and turkey treats. If he does well on this, we will try adding fats. If he handles other fats well, we'll try chicken fats and see if he tanks.

If he does NOT do well on the turkey, our next step is most likely round one of testing: the pancreas.

Fingers crossed.

The long and drawn-out saga of the Dre Dog: backstory

A lot of you reading this will know much of the story already. But for those of you catching up, here is how we got where we are with Andre.

Back in December, my husband sent me a picture of a very cute puppy while I was at work-- not just at work, but about to go into a meeting where I wouldn't be able to check my phone for a while. I asked who the puppy belonged to. "Don't know." Ok... well, I asked, what are you doing with it? "Playing mostly." Mind you, we already have 3 dogs, and a number of cats in 1400sqft-- certain of the dogs have their own issues that I'll cover at a later date, and life had JUST settled down.

No more dogs, I'd said. No. More. Dogs. I wanted time to work with the ones we already had.

No more dogs.

Well, cut to the chase, of course this dog ends up at our house. He was very sweet, but had no manners.  At least he was smart and easy-going. I was determined to find a home for this guy and not repeat our performances with the last 2 strays that made it past the threshold (ie, they stayed). I was pimping that dog to everyone I knew.

Vet thought he was between 1 and 2 (WE think closer to 10mos, but he had tartar on his teeth, so...). I just can't believe he's an adult...



After a couple of weeks with us, right before Christmas actually, Andre didn't seem to be feeling too well. My step-daughter and I were making Christmas cookies. Next thing we know, he's throwing up and lethargic. Two corn cobs came up. We don't compost corn cobs and hadn't eaten them in god knows how long. So suffice to say, he got into them sometime during his time on the streets and they stuck around.

For those of you who don't know, those things hang around. They can slosh in the stomach for months. They are BAD NEWS.

Anyway, he had no appetite, was staggering, was just... not right.

So we took him to the emergency vet (because of course it was the holidays). They didn't feel anything else in there. They gave him a shot for nausea and said that if he didn't feel better over the next day or two to come back.

Well, next day, threw up more, and this time really couldn't walk. So back he went. And this time, the vet could feel what was wrong. A THIRD corn cob had moved further down into his intestines.

So our big man had surgery on Christmas Eve. With a snow storm blowing in.

Luckily, they didn't have to cut into his intestines and were able to manually work the corn cob out.

Christmas day, he was back with us and begging for food with the rest of them.

But within a week or so, he had another vomiting episode with staggering-- back to the E-vet (this time it was over the New Year's holiday). IVs, supportive care, antibiotics. He appeared to have an infection. He also developed an incision site reaction.

Once he'd recovered, we tried to ease him onto raw foods like the rest of our crew eats. He was doing well, but by the end of January, he seemed completely blocked and vomiting. Again.

This time it was his own intestines causing the blockage. He had been eating sticks and whatnot in the yard, caused punctures, developed nasty peritonitis, his irritated bowels had folded in on themselves. He had to have a couple feet of intestines removed because they had necrotized.

Total mess.

So now we know the corn cobs weren't a fluke. He will eat anything and everything.

We are now up this poor dog's butt 24/7. We again tried to ease him onto different food-- another vomiting episode (from which he recovered quickly). So we tried home cooked food, and at one point, he developed fully liquid diarrhea. We thought it might be the raw food, but after he had problems on NOTHING but boiled chicken... the concern is that he may have a problem with fats (I'll get into the details of this later...).

He does not gain weight. But has a ravenous, almost feral, appetite.

He also (especially when eating kibble) has crazy amounts of energy, like cannot control himself and doesn't like it levels of energy.

He has the bad teeth and breath.

Gangly puppy legs and puppy uncoordination.

But he's a good dog. Sweet as can be and smart.

We are trying to find a diet that does not give him the crazies (one that doesn't "carb load" him), but that his system tolerates... and if that can't be found, we have a game plan for testing with our vet. I'll go into all of these details in later posts and why we want to get him to raw, or homecooked, or as close as possible.

We also want to find out if there is an underlying cause to his frequent eating of inappropriate things along with all the other things. We don't want to just treat symptoms, but try to address any underlying problems.

What we're working with

It would figure that the picture I choose for the banner of this blog wouldn't include the main reason for creating the blog in the first place. That reason is new to the family; we don't yet have the albums upon albums of photos documenting his every cutesy-wutesy move; I just happened to think that photo represented a nice calm, stress-free afternoon-- the kind we hope to have again. the kind that lead to healthy, happy animals (human and canine). We honestly haven't had a lot of time for that lately.

This is the reason. This is Andre. I also just like this photo of him, though he's goofier than this.

He's usually more like this.

Andre has had his fair share of medical drama, and not the kind that includes George Clooney. I'll detail his problems in the following posts; and while documenting our journey with his care was my main driving force behind writing everything down (keeping it straight in my head was becoming far too complicated), I will also be detailing the many things we have tried for his "siblings," past and present.

Over the years, we've become more and more convinced that a holistic approach is the best approach for our animals. The name of the blog comes from our choice to feed them a raw foods diet, which we think has been front and center with helping in a number of ailments; but it's also in reference to wanting to find the cause of a problem, not merely treat symptoms; to find "simple" solutions, even if they seem more time-consuming; and the constant growth of our body of knowledge, be it from anecdotal accounts from other pet owners, input from our veterinarians (who though they aren't entirely holistic practitioners, they not only humor us, but help us), combing through clinical studies, attending dog professionals conferences.

Holistic medicine-- for humans and animals-- is not well-supported financially. It is not always viewed favorably. It is not researched like pharmaceuticals. Trust me, we are grateful for modern medicine, and we use it when we need it. But what we've learned outside of that, we have had to piece together. And I'd like to share what we've learned, where we learned it, what we're trying, and the various good and bad results to hopefully give someone else additional data points to add to their own raw materials.