Raw Diets For Dogs

I'm a label reader, and the ingredients in commercial dog foods disgusted me. I also watched my very first dog, a Brittany, decline in old age while being fed a Hill's product formulated for geriatric dogs prescribed by my vet. It contained ground peanut shells among other things I felt could not possibly be good for even a facultative carnivore, but I followed what I was told. My dog paid the price.

Then my aunt's dog started losing function in her rear legs and we took her to Iowa State's veterinary teaching hospital. There, the chief of neurology diagnosed her with spinal myelopathy and said there was no treatment. Brandy would continue to deteriorate with ascending paralysis until euthanasia would become necessary. Again, we followed what we were told, and that's exactly what happened.

Then I stumbled across an article describing Dr. Wendell Belfield's successful treatment of this same "fatal" condition. I read, and learned, and changed the way I fed and cared for my dogs.

By this time I was up to my eyeballs in Greyhound adoption and vice-president of GPA's Midwest Chapter. A Grade-A running Greyhound owned by a friend who was the chapter president started having problems just like my aunt's dog. He went to ISU and was diagnosed by the same board-certified neurologist with spinal myelopathy. My friend called me to say that Conway couldn't stand up by himself any more and they were going to put him down. I told her to start giving him high doses of vitamin C, and that I would take the dog and see if he could get better.

I called Dr. Belfield's office, and he was happy to advise a local vet on a treatment protocol. No vet would cooperate, so I tried a less-aggressive regimen involving oral vitamin C to bowel tolerance, other supplements, homeopathic support, chiropractic adjustments, and a raw diet. Long story short, Conway got better. He got back up, and except for some minor incoordination between his front and rear ends remained happily chasing tennis balls for the rest of his life. His breeder/racing owner saw how well he had recovered, and I gave Dr. Sharon Willoughby, his chiropractor, copies of both his and Brandy's patient files from ISU. He was also the star of a number of Dr. Willoughby's teaching seminars in Illinois.

Seeing how diet helped Conway convinced me that raw food was definitely the way to go for dogs. I don't feel qualified to address cat nutrition, because I've never successfully transitioned a cat to a completely raw diet. Their tendency to go into hepatic hyperlipidosis has always scared me off taking the hard line of not offering the commercial food the cat will eat to force them to eat the raw stuff they're refusing.

Fortunately, dogs aren't so fussy or stubborn, and generally love raw meat and bones. Most of my dogs' food is exactly that: raw meaty bones. Ten-pound bags of chicken hindquarters are a staple. Pork neck bones and pigs' feet are another favorite -- modern farming practices have made trichinosis a thing of the past. The rest of the diet is a glop of "green slime:" raw vegetables run through a juicer with the juice mixed back in. Sometimes we change it up with some canned mackerel, cooked but still better than dog food. None of my dogs like raw fish, unless they can hide it long enough to get nice and rank. Then they roll on it.

Harriet in particular likes to bury food, then dig it up and eat it later. Doesn't bother her in the least. I certainly don't encourage it, but canids are predator-scavengers, and a healthy dog can handle carrion just fine.

Once in a while, I throw in a multivitamin on general principles, half of one of the caplets I take myself. Everything my dogs ingest regularly is sold for human consumption. Which vitamin formula? Doesn't matter. What are the dietary proportions? Doesn't matter. Does every bite we eat have to be "complete and balanced for growth and maintenance?" Of course not. Same goes for dogs.

There are plenty of raw diet plans out there that are wonderfully complicated. I started out that way, and over time learned it wasn't necessary. Probably 95+% of what my dogs eat is raw meat and bones. The rest is green slime, or a blob of canned pumpkin if I don't have time to mess around with the juicer. Notice the total absence of grain products. I used to feed whole grains, but not any more. The dogs do far better without them.

Periodic fasting is also good for carnivores on a natural diet. They'll even fast themselves with absolutely no ill effects. One day every week or two on water only is a good cleanout.

Feeding raw may be a bit more expensive than quality dog food, but you'll more than make it up in vet bill savings.

There is way more information available on raw feeding than I can link to individually here. There are also lots of holistic vets around now with whom you don't have to play the "don't ask, don't tell" game.

I take a team approach with my animals' health, with holistic and conventional practitioners. My conventional small-animal vet once told me, "If an average client asks us about raw feeding, we'll advise against it since they're not going to take the time to do it right. Your dogs live longer, healthier lives than theirs do, so whatever you're doing, keep it up."

Works for me.

Remind Me Again Why I Have Dogs II

When I went to do dog chores yesterday morning, I smelled blood. Never a good sign.

Since Greyhounds are fast and active with tissue-paper skin, surface injuries are common enough. Whether from running into a branch, snagging themselves on the fence, or each others' teeth when they get carried away while playing, the results are the same. So I check them over and find nothing.

Maybe somebody ate something nasty and had a bloody blowout in a corner somewhere. So I check the floor thoroughly, with a flashlight in the dim corners, and find nothing.

Okay, so who caught something outside and killed it? But there are no signs of a struggle, no blood, no hair, no leftover body parts, indoors or out, and no fleas on any of them. Wild game that can fit through the fence and get into the turnout always comes with fleas.

By this time, I really need to get to work, so I figure I'll run the same drill when I get home, only more so.

But last night, despite crawling around indoors and out with my LED headlamp and reinspecting every square millimeter of every dog, I find absolutely NOTHING. Of course, by then the blood smell was gone.

Yes, I know what blood smells like. Between working in a morgue and a slaughterhouse at various times in my nefarious past, I so know what blood smells like.

Another one of life's little mysteries? I'm getting pretty tired of 'em.

Small But Mighty

Rhennie

(P's Raising Cain - AY's Dana)

July 9, 1997 - November 12, 2008

About ten and a half years ago, a local racing Greyhound breeder called me about a puppy who needed a home. The puppy had been less than half normal size at birth, and the breeders had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep her alive even though they knew she could never race. Now, at ten months of age, it was obvious the little dog was going to stay too small and fragile to stay on the Greyhound farm. I agreed to take her.

About the size of a tall Whippet and weighing less than twenty-five pounds when her littermates grew to weigh in the eighties, she was a very large dog in a tiny package. So the name that suited her the best, of Celtic origin, was "Rhennie" meaning "Small but mighty."

Dwarfism is essentially undocumented in the racing Greyhound since most breeders cull them at birth. She had structural abnormalities but never let them slow her down. We had doubts about how long she might survive, but she had her own ideas.

Life with Rhennie was never boring. When she was younger, she loved to chase feet, trying to grab your ankles with her front paws. Her bone structure was abnormal, and she once snapped a front leg like a carrot just stepping out of the back seat of the car. She was too fragile for a conventional cast so external fixation was recommended. Nothing a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and about $1,600 couldn't fix.

She ran around the house for four months with a tinkertoy on her leg, healed flawlessly, and I never let her go up or down anything remotely resembling a step under her own power ever again.

Rhennie remained oblivious to her congenital defects, helping herself to anything I was foolish enough to try to eat while sitting on the couch, and sleeping on my feet every night. She would only play with raw food, but loved Merrick's many flavors of gourmet canned dog diets. She ate from two to four cans a day without ever gaining an ounce. We joked at the vet's office that if they could bottle her metabolism and sell it, they'd be millionaires.

Her spinal structure was never normal, and over the last few months she developed a severely calcified disc in her lower back. Medication kept her hindquarters more or less working, but last weekend she got much worse. The verdict at the vet on Monday was a probable stroke.

I took her home and we spent Tuesday on the couch together, wrapped up in a comforter, watching DVD's: Rhennie's very favorite activity. She had all her favorite foods, roast chicken, poached salmon, boiled shrimp. When she needed her litter box, I carried her over and held her until she was done. It was increasingly difficult to move her at all without pain.

Then Wednesday morning, I wrapped her in Godiva's blanket from Circle Of Grey and took her in to the vet so she could be free of the body that had become a prison.

Goddess-speed, Rhennie, until we meet again.

With Experience Comes Wisdom

Kittens aren't the only dangerous, vet-dismembering monsters among us. Twenty-odd years ago, when I first got involved with Greyhound adoption and brought dogs from the track to my local vet clinic for heartworm tests and rabies vaccinations, the vet there said it was a bad idea.

Greyhounds are vicious, he said. Greyhounds aren't suitable to be pets, he said. Greyhounds are killed after they're finished racing for a reason, he said. Of course, I ignored him.

Fast-forward a few years. By now, I've brought a few hundred Greyhounds through his doors. When I arrived with three new dogs in tow, the client ahead of me had brought in a Cocker Spaniel puppy for a nail trim. A puppy-mill Cocker Spaniel puppy, recently bought from a shopping mall pet shop.

The vet ushered the lady and her little dog into an examining room, closing the door while my Greyhounds and I stayed in the waiting area. Interesting noises soon followed.

They included much banging and crashing, barking and screaming, assorted bad language, and a call for the assistant -- who normally was only needed on farm visits to help with cattle. The reinforcements arrived, and the noises were repeated. Finally the door opened.

Puppy-mill Cocker was by now blowing enraged spit bubbles out the side of a gauze muzzle and had his nails trimmed, all right. The saucer-eyed owner was cowering in the corner. The walls, floor, and table in the examining room were liberally splattered with blood and, ah, other things. One whiff confirmed the puppy had let go with bladder, bowels, and anal glands. I was truly impressed by the amount of ick that could come out of so small a dog.

The blood was the vet's. He excused himself to wash up and bandage his arms. The assistant was left to clean up the mess.

After Cujo Junior was gone, the vet came over to draw blood and vaccinate my three brand new racetrack rejects. As usual, they stood perfectly calm, wagging their tails, through the whole thing.

And the vet said, "I wish they all were Greyhounds."

I just smiled.

Decades of Dogs

That GPA twenty-year anniversary really got me to thinking. If I count my time with REGAP before GPA, it's been more like twenty-five years in Greyhounds.

I adopted my first ex-racer in 1983. Duffy came from Sodrac Park, and years later I'd look at him and say, "Just LOOK what you started." They're habit-forming, you see. We call it "chipping," because as with potato chips, you can't have just one.

Twenty years. Hundreds of dogs going through my home. I used to mark each dog's dish with his or her name on a piece of white electrical tape. When the dog was placed, I'd remove the tape and stick it on the wall over the sink in the food prep area. The whole wall was eventually covered with those name tapes.

Twenty years of getting more holiday cards from Greyhound adopters than family members and friends. Adoption follow-up calls like the sweet little old couple who told me after they got a Greyhound they couldn't walk around the house naked any more because of the cold nose at just the wrong height. Talk about TMI.

Twenty years of keeping every dog that nobody wanted for the rest of their lives. Some of them made it very clear why nobody wanted them. I kept them anyway, even if they weren't very pleasant to have around. They're why I'm the pet cemetery's single largest client.

Twenty years of hands that perpetually smelled like Clorox and old-style, cauterize-your-sinuses Adams Flea-Off Mist. I remember thinking whoever invented Advantage should get the Nobel Prize.

The dogs from the early years are all gone now, but others have taken their places in my life if never in my heart. To be honest, I even miss the obnoxious ones. I cherish every toothmark in my furniture and every indelible spot on my rugs. And I know full well that every time I get a phone call or e-mail telling me a Greyhound needs help RIGHT NOW for the next twenty years, I'm going to just keep doing it again and again . . .

Now I Feel Old

I happened to hit the Greyhound Pets of America main website last night, and saw that GPA was twenty years old last year. The site had a picture of the founding members who created the organization at a meeting in Boston back in 1987.

And there I was in that picture, standing on the right end of the group.


Ouch.

Another Hound Joins The Wild Hunt

The wind shakes the house in the darkness, branches lashing the windows. The Wild Hunt is running tonight. And tonight, the Hunt has one more hound in the race.

Gable Godiva
(Gable Dodge - Franks Scootem)
July 28, 1999 - January 24, 2008

Gable Godiva was a retired racing Greyhound. She was really too good on the track to be "petted out." Her last race at Corpus Christie was Grade A, and she won it box-to-wire. Harlyn and Janna Goebel, though, are committed to doing what's right for their dogs, so Godiva was placed in an adoptive home by Heart of Texas Greyhound Adoption.

Family circumstances changed, and they didn't want her any more, saying she was aggressive. Since she was no longer in Texas, I got the referral and found myself with another Greyhound. She turned out to have an extremely strong personality, and with a history of "aggression," I figured it was safest to keep her.

We all come from the Goddess
And to Her we shall return
Like a drop of rain
Flowing to the ocean

In my group of misfits and rejects, she took being an Alpha Bitch to a whole new level. She was my door guarder, sleeping next to the dog door so she could terrorize the other dogs as they came in the house. My three-foot-tall, hundred-plus-pound Scottish Deerhound is still afraid to come in by himself.

I ducked out the dog door once just to fix the rubber mat on the steps. Once out there, of course I got distracted, picking up poop and destroyed dog toys. When I stuck my head through the door to crawl back in, Godiva had forgotten I was outside.

I heard a roar -- not a bark, a roar -- and felt canine teeth on either side of my cheekbones. Fortunately, Godiva was paying attention by then, and realized her error before I needed a plastic surgeon.

Never the spirit was born
The spirit shall cease to be never
Never was time it was not
Ending and beginning are dreams
Birthless and deathless and changeless
Remains the spirit forever
Death has not touched you at all
Death though the house of you seems

When she came in limping on an icy day, I took her to the vet figuring she'd probably slipped and torqued something. Her radiographs were clean, so we thought it was a strained brachial plexus. But a week later it was worse.

New radiographs left no doubt. There was cancer present, and we knew amputation was necessary. Her lungs were still apparently clear, so she came home a tripod to wait until it was safe to start chemotherapy.

On January 24, she had an appointment for her first chemo treatment. But at 1:30 in the morning, she woke me in distress. I gave her a tramadol and stayed with her until the vet's office opened. I carried her to the car, because every time she tried to walk she would cry and fall down.

They radiographed her again. There was a new primary tumor in the distal radius of her only remaining front leg. Her lungs were full of metastases.

Do you know who I am, she said
I'm the one who taps you on the shoulder
When it's your time
Do not be afraid
I promise that she will awake
Tomorrow somewhere
Tomorrow somewhere
(Tori Amos, "The Beekeeper")

The only consolation I have about having to make The Decision is that when life is no longer possible, freeing them from that life is the last gift I can give them. So I held Godiva while she received the injection, saw her last breath, felt her last heartbeat. She is now buried at the pet cemetery with all of my others who have preceded her, dogs, cats, two amazing horses, and where I will eventually be buried.

My tradition sees all souls as the same, whether they choose to inhabit a human or a Greyhound on any given turn of the Wheel. We have all been here before, and we will be here again. Many times, we travel through our many lives in groups. Two of my current dogs have been with me before in other bodies. Others drop in from time to time, often during ritual, just for a visit. And when the wind howls at night, many of them run riot with the Wild Hunt.

So until we meet again . . .

I call the Wild Hunt
By Herne and Hecate
By horn and hound
By wind and storm
And wreck of winter
I call us home
(apologies to Laurell K. Hamilton, "Mistral's Kiss")