Showing posts with label raw diet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raw diet. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Red Dog Blue Kat - Raw Diet Seminar
As a pet specialist, (I suppose that is my official professional title, since that is what I do for money) I often get to go learn about products which we sell. Usually, this ends up being a scenario of all of us specialists sitting on our butts while a marketing person from a given company tries to drill into our skulls the reasons for why their food is better than all the others and why we should recommend it. This sometimes, as you can imagine gets very tedious as we are told over and over again about factoids that we already know all the while blandly listening to the marketer dis all the other pet food brands (brands which are often better) whilst eating free food. It gets tedious and more than often than not, it's a struggle to keep from snorting in derision as these people try to convince you of some bull shit information that we know just isn't true or doesn't have a the slightest twinge of validity.
Red Dog Deli - or more commonly, Red Dog Blue Kat - was different.
First, they did not start by trying to convince us that raw diet was the best because we already know that raw diet is the best - it's just plain logic. Wolves and African Wildcats do NOT eat kibble. The argument that our pets may have 'evolved' to eat it in just a few decades is absolute bull shit! That's right- BULL SHIT! It takes THOUSANDS of years for evolution to take place, not a few measly decades. Eighty years ago, Fido was eating butcher scraps and Fido was a lot healthier than he is today. Eighty years ago, Missy the cat was doing her job catching and eating mice - she too, was healthier than today. That's because these animals are just plain not meant to eat kibble. It's dry. It's slathered in addictive flavours which the animal can't even digest like caramel. Kibble was created to be convenient, but the fact is, it was created so that big companies could make money off of the scraps of otherwise useless products from other industries using meat. Kibble is a money grab; nothing about it is for the health of the animal.
After Red Dog Blue Kat fed us some very good pizza from Deep Cove (three out of four of the pizzas were vegetarian - THIS is a company which has its nutrition priorities straight!) they took us on a tour of the factory, which was basically full of freezer rooms and a lot of temperature systems. It was very, very clean and sanitary and not really a place that I would want to work in, but I appreciated the lengths they took to keep things nice and cleanly, so that there was no possibility of cross contamination between the meats. (This is especially important for dogs, who are often allergic to a given type.) They even wash the walls and there are drains in every room. The entire place is sanitized every single day and veggies and meats are not mixed.
The factory was neat, but it didn't really impress me. Maybe it would have if some of the machines were actually running, but none of them were. What really impressed me, was how when we came back to the coffee room where the pizza was, there was an actual, honest-to-goodness holistic veterinarian sitting there waiting to talk to us! This lady, Dr. Julie was a real advocate of raw diet and she was ready and raring to tell us why raw is better - not just for our pets, but for all beings. I'm going to attempt to sum up what she told me, so that I might pass it on to you.
First of all, there's something known as free radicals which scavenge on living cells, aging us faster and basically making the body breakdown. To sum that - free radicals are evil. Bad. Get it? Good. The idea of these miniature things scavenging on my cells is frankly horrifying, so it's good that there's a knight in shining armour that can stop these demented little things, a knight in shining armour that you've probably heard of before in health blogs all out the wazoo - anti-oxidants. Now, I never really knew why the hell these things were important or healthy before today. Whenever somebody presented some case, like a miriad of wonder berries that contain these things, I shrugged my shoulders and thought "So? What's so special about them?" Well, what's so special? Anti-oxidants attack free radicals - thus slowing the aging process and keeping these nasty little beasties from causing problems in the body from their habit of scavenging our cells.
So that makes sense! The great news is that most food out there has anti-oxidants in it. The problem and the bad news is that once this food is cooked, such as when kibble is made or when we make a soup, those precious anti-oxidant super heroes are lost and so we lose the anti-aging advantage they would have given us. Now, keep in mind please - when I say anti-aging, I am NOT talking about skin - I'm talking about ALL OF YOU or ALL of your pet. Free radicals, when allowed to run rampant as they so often are in the modern processed diet, cause a whole host of nasty things from cancer to heart disease - probably all problems can be traced back to them. Wild animals do not have these problems because their diets are rich in raw foods containing anti-oxidants. It does not matter if you are a human, a cat, a dog or a horse or any other animal unfortunate enough to be domesticated - raw, unprocessed food is always better. Processing slaughters the anti-oxidants which so want to help us!
So, feed raw. But there's more to it than that!
Take a wolf or a lion - these are animals which everyone knows and accepts as obligate carnivores. These animals have very short intestional tracts which are extremely acidic - say, 1 or 2 molars of acidic strength, enough to melt pretty much anything. Since their digestive tracts are so amazingly acidic, they also have acidic saliva - so acidic that it's anti-bacterial which comes in handy when the animal gets a cut. By licking that cut, the animal is killing any bacteria in it, keeping themselves from getting an infected wound - amazing, isn't it? What's more amazing is that the acidic saliva also naturally kills the bacteria that causes plaque and other peridontal disease - why wild animals have such nice teeth and why they are seldom missing any! It's unnatural for any animal, including a human, to have to brush. Plain and simple.
What's also amazing is that the acid in a cat or dog's digestive tract has another super trick that it plays. For carnivores, by having a super acidic, short digestive tract, meat doesn't have a chance to spoil or ferment within the body like it does in a human's body. This means that a wild carnivore can eat bacteria ridden carrion and still be absolutely okay - whereas we humans would die from that.
So why don't cats and dogs have these remarkable super acidic properties that their wild counterparts do? It's simple - their food is low quality, processed junk. Raw meat has a higher acidity index than cooked meat and all meat in kibble as well as canned is cooked. Cooking kills anti-oxidants - I hope this is clear. Feed Fido or Missy raw and their conditions soon improve dramatically. Further, raw is especially important for cats, because they are desert animals and thus have not evolved to absorb water from drinking it - they can only get it from their prey, specifically from its blood. Because most domestic cats eat only dry food, they spend their lives in a state of clinical dehydration. Does that sound like fun?
No. I thought not.
Before going to this seminar (and in this I barely scratched the surface of what I learned - frankly I feel overwhelmed by all the new information) I was iffy about raw; mainly because I, as a modern human, am insufferably stuck in the mode of 'conveniance first' because this is what society has taught to me. Now though, I am seriously considering switching my cat to raw - and not just him. Lately I've suffered from intestional problems (diagnosed as Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and since everything I eat is processed in some way, even just by me cooking it, I feel that in the future (as in when I have my next paycheck future) I will be making a greater effort to eat raw food for myself. For instance, I liked daikon (Japanese Radish) much better raw than cooked, so I will eat that raw. I will also try to find other things that I can eat raw instead of cooked and my cat Copernicus will definitely get his first taste of Red Dog Blue Kat's raw products. (Speaking of Copernicus, he just pooped on the floor in front of his litter box, the little bastard! It's clean too!)
Here's a summery of things which raw diet can also help with your pet:
- It can eliminate hairballs and matting in the fur - healthier fur and a more acidic digestive tract. In the wild, carnivores like wolves and lynxes eat their prey fur, feathers and all - they never have any problems with all that hair because their digestive tracts are acidic enough to break it down, so they don't become impacted by it like our domestic kitties do. Also, with raw, the animal's hair is healthy, so it doesn't fray, causing matting.
- Bones - nature's tooth brush. Forget nylabone - give your dog (and cat!) a bone and see how it improves their teeth. Red Dog Blue Kat recommends chicken or turkey necks. If the pet turns its nose up at them, blanch them for thirty seconds in boiling water to make them more palatable to the animal.
- Eliminate disease and slow aging (anti-oxdidants!) Or better, feed raw to your pet to begin with and never worry about taking it to the vet again! A healthy animal should have no need to go to the vet - or a human to a doctor! In the wild, animals have no vets. They manage perfectly fine and predation/humans/serious injury are really their only enemies.
- Energy and enjoyment of food!
Remember, if you do decide to switch an animal to raw that in many cases it will be like you asking your grandmother who has always eaten cheeseburgers to suddenly eat a salad. Switching to raw takes time and patience. Unless your animal is a baby, don't expect it to happen instantly, because often times, your pet will be addicted to what it has already been eating, especially if it's been eating something especially terrible like Iams or Fancy Feast.
Please consider feeding raw if you have a pet and if you have access to it. (If not, you can always make it yourself!) Why? It's species appropriate and it's time this society started noticing that different species have different needs. Fido is not a human - he's a dog, a domesticated wolf. His DNA is 99.9% exactly the same as a wolf's. He's a WOLF and Missy the cat, as domestic as she might seem, is still an African wildcat also known as Felis libica. There's a reason that the scientific name for dog was recently changed to Canis lupis familiarus - dogs are a subspecies of wolf. Please remember that and please, if you ever get a pet or have pets - try to understand them for what they naturally are.
For more information on raw diets for pets, check out www.reddogdeli.com
I feel so much better after this seminar. I feel like in the future I will be better able to honestly recommend to my customers things which will truly help their pets. When a customer asks me what the best food for the puppy will be, I won't point to the Now or Orijin first anymore - I will point to the freezer and hopefully, their puppy, big or small, will be started off right. I want to help animals _ I don't want them to suffer for their human's societal concept of 'convenience.' Dogs are not humans and neither are cats. They should not have to suffer from our messed up ideas, especially when they have no power to protest them.
In the end, raw probably does not cost any more than the premium kibble that's on the market today. In many cases, if you make it yourself, it costs less. Hopefully, with this knowledge armed in hand, I can now go out and truly start making a difference - and you know - now I know a little bit better about how my favourite fictional carnivore, Ki works.
That's nice to know.
Red Dog Deli - or more commonly, Red Dog Blue Kat - was different.
First, they did not start by trying to convince us that raw diet was the best because we already know that raw diet is the best - it's just plain logic. Wolves and African Wildcats do NOT eat kibble. The argument that our pets may have 'evolved' to eat it in just a few decades is absolute bull shit! That's right- BULL SHIT! It takes THOUSANDS of years for evolution to take place, not a few measly decades. Eighty years ago, Fido was eating butcher scraps and Fido was a lot healthier than he is today. Eighty years ago, Missy the cat was doing her job catching and eating mice - she too, was healthier than today. That's because these animals are just plain not meant to eat kibble. It's dry. It's slathered in addictive flavours which the animal can't even digest like caramel. Kibble was created to be convenient, but the fact is, it was created so that big companies could make money off of the scraps of otherwise useless products from other industries using meat. Kibble is a money grab; nothing about it is for the health of the animal.
After Red Dog Blue Kat fed us some very good pizza from Deep Cove (three out of four of the pizzas were vegetarian - THIS is a company which has its nutrition priorities straight!) they took us on a tour of the factory, which was basically full of freezer rooms and a lot of temperature systems. It was very, very clean and sanitary and not really a place that I would want to work in, but I appreciated the lengths they took to keep things nice and cleanly, so that there was no possibility of cross contamination between the meats. (This is especially important for dogs, who are often allergic to a given type.) They even wash the walls and there are drains in every room. The entire place is sanitized every single day and veggies and meats are not mixed.
The factory was neat, but it didn't really impress me. Maybe it would have if some of the machines were actually running, but none of them were. What really impressed me, was how when we came back to the coffee room where the pizza was, there was an actual, honest-to-goodness holistic veterinarian sitting there waiting to talk to us! This lady, Dr. Julie was a real advocate of raw diet and she was ready and raring to tell us why raw is better - not just for our pets, but for all beings. I'm going to attempt to sum up what she told me, so that I might pass it on to you.
First of all, there's something known as free radicals which scavenge on living cells, aging us faster and basically making the body breakdown. To sum that - free radicals are evil. Bad. Get it? Good. The idea of these miniature things scavenging on my cells is frankly horrifying, so it's good that there's a knight in shining armour that can stop these demented little things, a knight in shining armour that you've probably heard of before in health blogs all out the wazoo - anti-oxidants. Now, I never really knew why the hell these things were important or healthy before today. Whenever somebody presented some case, like a miriad of wonder berries that contain these things, I shrugged my shoulders and thought "So? What's so special about them?" Well, what's so special? Anti-oxidants attack free radicals - thus slowing the aging process and keeping these nasty little beasties from causing problems in the body from their habit of scavenging our cells.
So that makes sense! The great news is that most food out there has anti-oxidants in it. The problem and the bad news is that once this food is cooked, such as when kibble is made or when we make a soup, those precious anti-oxidant super heroes are lost and so we lose the anti-aging advantage they would have given us. Now, keep in mind please - when I say anti-aging, I am NOT talking about skin - I'm talking about ALL OF YOU or ALL of your pet. Free radicals, when allowed to run rampant as they so often are in the modern processed diet, cause a whole host of nasty things from cancer to heart disease - probably all problems can be traced back to them. Wild animals do not have these problems because their diets are rich in raw foods containing anti-oxidants. It does not matter if you are a human, a cat, a dog or a horse or any other animal unfortunate enough to be domesticated - raw, unprocessed food is always better. Processing slaughters the anti-oxidants which so want to help us!
So, feed raw. But there's more to it than that!
Take a wolf or a lion - these are animals which everyone knows and accepts as obligate carnivores. These animals have very short intestional tracts which are extremely acidic - say, 1 or 2 molars of acidic strength, enough to melt pretty much anything. Since their digestive tracts are so amazingly acidic, they also have acidic saliva - so acidic that it's anti-bacterial which comes in handy when the animal gets a cut. By licking that cut, the animal is killing any bacteria in it, keeping themselves from getting an infected wound - amazing, isn't it? What's more amazing is that the acidic saliva also naturally kills the bacteria that causes plaque and other peridontal disease - why wild animals have such nice teeth and why they are seldom missing any! It's unnatural for any animal, including a human, to have to brush. Plain and simple.
What's also amazing is that the acid in a cat or dog's digestive tract has another super trick that it plays. For carnivores, by having a super acidic, short digestive tract, meat doesn't have a chance to spoil or ferment within the body like it does in a human's body. This means that a wild carnivore can eat bacteria ridden carrion and still be absolutely okay - whereas we humans would die from that.
So why don't cats and dogs have these remarkable super acidic properties that their wild counterparts do? It's simple - their food is low quality, processed junk. Raw meat has a higher acidity index than cooked meat and all meat in kibble as well as canned is cooked. Cooking kills anti-oxidants - I hope this is clear. Feed Fido or Missy raw and their conditions soon improve dramatically. Further, raw is especially important for cats, because they are desert animals and thus have not evolved to absorb water from drinking it - they can only get it from their prey, specifically from its blood. Because most domestic cats eat only dry food, they spend their lives in a state of clinical dehydration. Does that sound like fun?
No. I thought not.
Before going to this seminar (and in this I barely scratched the surface of what I learned - frankly I feel overwhelmed by all the new information) I was iffy about raw; mainly because I, as a modern human, am insufferably stuck in the mode of 'conveniance first' because this is what society has taught to me. Now though, I am seriously considering switching my cat to raw - and not just him. Lately I've suffered from intestional problems (diagnosed as Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and since everything I eat is processed in some way, even just by me cooking it, I feel that in the future (as in when I have my next paycheck future) I will be making a greater effort to eat raw food for myself. For instance, I liked daikon (Japanese Radish) much better raw than cooked, so I will eat that raw. I will also try to find other things that I can eat raw instead of cooked and my cat Copernicus will definitely get his first taste of Red Dog Blue Kat's raw products. (Speaking of Copernicus, he just pooped on the floor in front of his litter box, the little bastard! It's clean too!)
Here's a summery of things which raw diet can also help with your pet:
- It can eliminate hairballs and matting in the fur - healthier fur and a more acidic digestive tract. In the wild, carnivores like wolves and lynxes eat their prey fur, feathers and all - they never have any problems with all that hair because their digestive tracts are acidic enough to break it down, so they don't become impacted by it like our domestic kitties do. Also, with raw, the animal's hair is healthy, so it doesn't fray, causing matting.
- Bones - nature's tooth brush. Forget nylabone - give your dog (and cat!) a bone and see how it improves their teeth. Red Dog Blue Kat recommends chicken or turkey necks. If the pet turns its nose up at them, blanch them for thirty seconds in boiling water to make them more palatable to the animal.
- Eliminate disease and slow aging (anti-oxdidants!) Or better, feed raw to your pet to begin with and never worry about taking it to the vet again! A healthy animal should have no need to go to the vet - or a human to a doctor! In the wild, animals have no vets. They manage perfectly fine and predation/humans/serious injury are really their only enemies.
- Energy and enjoyment of food!
Remember, if you do decide to switch an animal to raw that in many cases it will be like you asking your grandmother who has always eaten cheeseburgers to suddenly eat a salad. Switching to raw takes time and patience. Unless your animal is a baby, don't expect it to happen instantly, because often times, your pet will be addicted to what it has already been eating, especially if it's been eating something especially terrible like Iams or Fancy Feast.
Please consider feeding raw if you have a pet and if you have access to it. (If not, you can always make it yourself!) Why? It's species appropriate and it's time this society started noticing that different species have different needs. Fido is not a human - he's a dog, a domesticated wolf. His DNA is 99.9% exactly the same as a wolf's. He's a WOLF and Missy the cat, as domestic as she might seem, is still an African wildcat also known as Felis libica. There's a reason that the scientific name for dog was recently changed to Canis lupis familiarus - dogs are a subspecies of wolf. Please remember that and please, if you ever get a pet or have pets - try to understand them for what they naturally are.
For more information on raw diets for pets, check out www.reddogdeli.com
I feel so much better after this seminar. I feel like in the future I will be better able to honestly recommend to my customers things which will truly help their pets. When a customer asks me what the best food for the puppy will be, I won't point to the Now or Orijin first anymore - I will point to the freezer and hopefully, their puppy, big or small, will be started off right. I want to help animals _ I don't want them to suffer for their human's societal concept of 'convenience.' Dogs are not humans and neither are cats. They should not have to suffer from our messed up ideas, especially when they have no power to protest them.
In the end, raw probably does not cost any more than the premium kibble that's on the market today. In many cases, if you make it yourself, it costs less. Hopefully, with this knowledge armed in hand, I can now go out and truly start making a difference - and you know - now I know a little bit better about how my favourite fictional carnivore, Ki works.
That's nice to know.
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