What’s Your Dog Eating?

Have you ever noticed that dogs tend to develop growths after a decade or so of eating commercial pet food? My sister’s dog has a couple of growths on his leg that are developing their own personalities and arguing with each other. It’s fascinating in a grotesque sort of way. And did you hear about “Gus, the World’s Ugliest Dog?” He must be seen to be believed. He had some tough competition, too. Poor Gus is missing one eye and one leg and will be spending his prize money on cancer treatment.

OK I’m getting predictable in my refrain “It’s all about the food,” but doesn’t that make a heap of sense? Modern industrial commodity pet food is literally the garbagey by-products of our industrial meat system, which isn’t that clean or palateable to start with.

Our dog Tenzin started growing growths on her face and body last year and that’s when I made the switch away from commercial dog food. (Her growths have stopped growing.) Also, she is part husky and blows out her undercoat in the spring. Every year it was getting earlier and earlier, until at 7 years old, she started losing her undercoat in the coldest part of winter: February. We switched to natural dog food (more on that below) and this year she didn’t start losing her undercoat until May. It was a really conspicuous change in one year.

According to the Animal Protection Institute, we should “avoid foods that rely on by-products as the sole source of animal protein. By-products consist of organs and parts either not desired, or condemned, for human consumption…. (Another) potential problem with commercial pet food is pesticide residues, antibiotics, and molds contained in pet food ingredients. Meat from sick animals may be loaded with drugs, some of which are known to pass unchanged through all the processing done to create a finished pet food
(such as penicillin and pentobarbital).”

Click here to read their list of recommendations.

First we switched to a brand of natural dog food called “Solid Gold.” It’s from Germany and a bag of it costs about the price of a small car in Euros. We went along on that for quite a while, til Tenzin started getting stiff and achy. She’d been vaccinated and treated for Lyme’s disease before, so I called her vet to inquire about getting another Lyme test. They said not to worry about it. But she was uncomfortable, so I sought out the advice of one of the coolest new resources to this area: A holistic vet that does acupuncture.

Full Circle Holistic Vet Clinic

Lee Herzig, DVM
81 Belmont Ave
Belfast, ME 04915
(207) 338-6700

Dr. Lee just moved here from out west, where this sort of thing isn’t quite so novel. He suggested that the grain in Tenzin’s diet might be causing some inflammation in her joints, and she might need something a little closer to an ancestral diet. I have experienced that myself, so it made sense. He suggested two options:

1) The BARF diet (ooh, yeah, as appetizing as it sounds.) It stands for “Biologically Appropriate Raw Food.” In this scenario, I would make my way to Mainely Poultry in Warren to stock up on some raw chicken mix, which I would keep in my freezer and then don my full body haz-mat suit to handle while feeding the dog. God forbid she EVER go to kiss me after eating that food.

2) Try one of the quite good selection of grain-free natural pet food that are available through Critter Outfitters in Camden.

Since Warren is on my way to exactly nowhere, I found a handy excuse to avoid the whole haz-mat approach.

Critter Outfitters has Solid Gold, Merrick, BG, Natural Balance and EVO, all with grain free options. My only gripe: Did they have to ruin it with canola oil? That is ancestral food to not one mammal I know of. All of them had some refined oils in them, which is partially what I’d suspected to be the source of the wierd growths and poor Gus’s cancer.

As it turns out, Tenzin really doesn’t like the Solid Gold grain-free variety, so we’re still sampling. She’s lost weight, isn’t sore any more and has a healthy, seasonally appropriate coat now, so I think we’re on the right track.

Plus I figure she won’t win an ugliest dog contest (isn’t she gorgeous?), so it’s better to invest up front in her health than have to pay all those vet bills later on.

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