You can boost your pet's health profoundly by making one simple decision. All you have to do is to change his diet from unhealthy, commercial-brand fare to something you may never have imagined giving him: real food!
Think about that a minute, and then gauge your reaction. Chances are, the notion of feeding a pet "real food" seems peculiar to you, or foolish, or just plain wrong. Chicken stew for your Afghan, madam? A T-bone steak for that hungry-looking Lab? The vegetarian plate for Miss Fifi today? Yes, it does sound odd, And yet what could be more natural than an animal eating…food?
There's a lack of logic here, and it isn't accidental. Over the decades, the pet food industry has grown to be a powerful force in America's economy. We've been taught by it to believe that pet food comes out of a can or package--period. Advertising leads us to believe that the only question before us is which well-known commercial brand to choose over the others. Supermarkets reinforce the perception by offering the major brands--all highly processed, low-quality fare--and nothing else. Even the few newer brands of relatively good-quality prepackaged pet food are almost never found at mainstream markets. Partly that's because major brands monopolize shelf space. Partly it's because small manufacturers can't afford to supply the chain stores: pet food is too heavy in bulk, and has too narrow a profit margin, to be transported in anything less than huge volumes, thanks to the way the majors have defined the business (low-quality food at low cost). As for finding fresh pet food at the market--forget it. There is no such thing. Though in one sense, none need be added: the fresh food you buy at the market for yourself is the food you should give your pet, too.
The pet food industry appears s to be a cynical one, focused mainly on the corporate profits its prepackaged product lines bring. The very idea of animals eating fresh food is, to put it mildly, not one it seems to encourage. But it's not the only culprit in the Great Pet Food Conspiracy. Another is AAFCO, with its standard that all of a pet's dietary needs--proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals--be present in every meal. AAFCO means, of course, to aid pets by assuring they get the nutrients they need. Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect. The quality of nutrients isn't there in prepackaged foods to begin with, since oversight is nill. The food that isn't nutritious but appears to be thus becomes a pet's incomplete meal day after day after day. And the pet food industry gets to sell the greatest possible volume, can by can and box by box, with the least real variety.
AAFCO's guidelines are misleading us when they suggest that standard pet food can fill a pet's dietary needs, but also its fundamental premise is wrong. There is no such thing as a meal providing "complete and balanced nutrition," either for pets or for people, because the nutritional needs counteract one another. Mix proteins and fats in the same meal, for example, and the oils from the fats coat the walls of the stomach, keeping the stomach's acids from breaking down the proteins so that they can be used by the body. The way a pet should eat is the way we too should eat, ingesting different ways, they supply complete nutrition in the aggregate, with the nutrition of one food not blocking out that of another.
In their own way, that's how dogs in the wild ate, too, a long, long time ago. Like wolves, wild dogs would hunt down their prey in packs. But unless they were starving, they wouldn't eat the dead animal in its entirety at once. Instead, they'd open its belly and eat the contents, along with the internal organs, then bury the carcass. A few days later, when they grew hungry again, they'd dig up those parts and have another full meal: leg of lamb, loin of pork, or whatever other savory haunches they'd hunted. The time between courses enabled the dogs to digest these very different kinds of nutrition without having them block each other out. (The meat of their prey contained fat, but in a raw, natural form that did not get processed in the stomach and thus did not block the digestion of protein.) And because the carcass had been buried in warm earth, it would have fermented by the time they dug it up, which would have increased its enzyme content and thus made it more nutritious. Today, the only vestige of that behavior--and diet--is a dog's instinct to bury a bone.
If dogs survived well enough in the wild, they also seemed to cope as pets in more recent centuries, before prepackaged pet food. So, for that matter, did cats. And yet the conventional wisdom among most veterinarians remains that pets should never eat table food. Pets in nature ate table food; they just didn't have tables.
The foolishness about table food underscores a larger point: that veterinary schools are the third culprit in the Great Pet Food Conspiracy. When I was in veterinary school, the whole issue of animal food was addressed only as one of percentages: what percentage of a pet's (unvarying) meal should be protein, carbohydrates, fats, and so forth. Quantities were stressed; quality was all but ignored. Switching my brother's dog Leigh from Gaines Burgers to a macrobiotic diet was the first step we took toward questioning our teachers' approach.(Although this new diet did contain various combinations of food, its quality and wholesomeness were such a step in the right direction toward proper nutrition.) Soon enough, I realized that the ideal diet for a pet was the polar opposite of what he gets in a can or box. It's what he ate in the wild! After centuries of domestication, of course, dogs and cats have evolved into tamer creatures incapable of hunting as they once did, much less eating their prey, and their systems have changed accordingly. But with a little experimentation, I found I could give my pets a diet ideally suited to their present-day constitution. And it sure didn't come out of a can.
When I tell an owner that a change of diet can affect her pet's health in a matter of days, the first reaction is usually delight, sometimes even exhilaration. Toss out the prepackaged food, I say. Soon, symptoms you've grown all too accustomed to--or tried in vain to dispel with antibiotics--may improve dramatically. Everything from skin irritations and dull, matted fur to bad breath and digestive problems to lethargy and lack of appetite can be alleviated. All you have to do, I add, is to start preparing your pet's meals yourself.
At that, the owner swallows nervously. A guilty look comes over her face. I know what she's thinking. Cook for my pet? When I (a) don't' even have time to cook for myself, or (b) already cook dinner for my spouse and children as it is, or (c) don't know how to cook at all? Let's face it: the fourth culprit in the Great Pet Food Conspiracy is probably you.
Feeding your pet from a can or box is easy, quick, and seemingly cheap: the reasons the pet food industry rose up in the first place. And cooking or preparing for your pet may seem like one extra burden you don't' need in your life. But it can be easier than you think, certainly easier than it appears from the few available holistic pet care books that list dozens of complex recipes and all but order you to become your pet's haut chef de cuisine. Consider what I do for my pets every Sunday morning.
First, I take a raw free-range chicken and put it in a pot of good water (i.e., purified water!). I throw in a little garlic and a pinch of salt, boil the water, then let it simmer for perhaps fifty minutes. (That's for a bird of about two and a half to three pounds.) Then I take the chicken out and put in about a pound of organic brown rice, cooking it on low heat for an hour or so, or millet for about half that time. (For both brown rice and millet, figure two and a half cups of water to one cup of grain.) Just before the grains are done, I put in a 12-ounce bag of frozen vegetables. Suffused with the taste of chicken, the cooked grains and vegetables will be especially appealing to my crew. Meanwhile, I will have removed the chicken meat from the carcass and added it back into the mixture. Refrigerated in plastic containers, the grain-and-vegetable mix and the rest of the chicken will last my (mostly small) pets several days if interspersed with two or three other home-cooked meals. When I use an especially big turkey that yields more containers than I can use in a week or so, I'll just freeze the rest.
Simple as that recipe is, it raises complex issues. Not forgetting that the recipe is simple, let's consider them one by one.
First of all, the food is cooked, not raw. But if we're trying to put our pets on a more natural diet, how does cook food square with that scene of wild dogs of yore, eating freshly killed prey? Strangely enough, it does. The animals brought down by wild dogs were herbivores--deer, for example--who ate grains and berries. When a wild dog tore open a deer's belly, the food he found inside was already chewed, further decomposed by saliva, stomach acids, and enzymes, then heated to about 102 degrees Fahrenheit by the stomach's natural warmth. It was, as a result, processed enough to be considered cooked.
Ah, you say, but when the wild dogs finished what was in the deer's belly and moved on to the deer itself, the deer was raw meat. So why cook the chicken?
Excerpted from The Nature of Animal Healing by Martin Goldstein Copyright© 2000 by Martin Goldstein. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Dr. Martin Goldstein earned his B.S. and D.V.M. from Cornell University. He has written numerous articles about holistic veterinary medicine and alternative therapies for many magazines, journals and related publications. He has many happy and healthy dogs and cats, all of which are living proof of the philosophy contained in his book, The Nature of Animal Healing.
The information provided here is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be relied on as medical advise for your pet, or in lieu of consultation with your own veterinarian. We urge you to always consult your veterinarian for specific advice and diagnoses concerning your pet.
