Further reasons for raw

Sorry for the lapse here... I've been out of town and tied up in the preparations for going and the return to civilization upon coming home. Finally getting to the nitty gritty of what we actually do/did is coming up... in the meantime, I appear to have left off with our other reason for the switch to raw:

Luna
When we found Luna she was 4months old, or so. Her skin was in such bad shape that I thought she had mange; rather, she was just allergic to everything. Fleas, pollens, you-name-it. And we could never get a solid stool. She had worms, was skinny, had ear infections, and her flea bites ALWAYS turned into pustules and staph infections, so she was constantly on antibiotics. She has a Shar Pei horse coat, and topical flea treatments didn't work on her. Her nails were brittle. She was a hot mess.

Hard to see how patchy she is, but you can see how red and just "off" she looks.

But because we had no idea how big she would get, and I was new to raw, we decided to put her on kibble until she was done growing vertically. I might do things differently in future now that I know more, but I wanted to err on the side of caution.

With growing puppies, the conventional wisdom has always been to make sure that the calcium content of the food is appropriate so that they don't grow too quickly for their bodies to keep up with their bones. We tried premium foods with grains and could never get a solid stool. Upon removing grains, the change was immediate. Solid stool, weight gain. We were good to go. Her skin certainly improved, especially after adding coconut oil and salmon oils to her foods, but she, too, had a UTI and crystals, and her allergies just never quite settled down. She still got staph infections; Benadryl stopped working for her and we switched to Claritin.

When she was nearly a year old, we made the switch. And we haven't looked back. We have only had to treat for fleas a few times in the last few years; when she does get a flea bite, it's a bump, but it's not the end of the world. No drugs required.

People who normally are plagued by the Shar Pei coat comment on how she is the only Pei or Pei/mix that doesn't make them itch. She still makes me itch on occasion, but it's nothing like it was. She's no longer patchy. She remains trim, but healthy and muscular. She generally has solid stool. Her nails are far less brittle (she broke 3 or 4 over the course of about a year, all of which required vet treatment). She is happy, beautiful, and energetic.

When she went for her check-up earlier this year, I made sure I didn't need to put weight on her or anything. No, he told me she was perfect condition, don't change a thing. He said we know what we're doing, so keep doing it. :)

She still struggles with seasonal allergies, but they aren't nearly as problematic as they were.

River
A word on River. We'd initially hoped the change to raw would help with her anal glands, which were needing to be expressed more frequently than I'd have liked. Raw alone didn't help, but other dietary measures did.

That said, raw has decreased her shedding by quite a lot. And because she is now 8 or 9 years old, I went ahead and asked the vet to run blood work for her. And it looked great. :)

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.

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.

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.