Cod Liver Oil Question

[RawFedDogs]

Now everything you have posted is correct. Just remember a few things. Dogs are no longer wolfs. Not all dogs contain the same powerful enzymes required to fight off all food born bacteria.

Yes, dogs are wolves. Dogs fed a proper diet DO have the means to fight off food borne bacteria. Mine have been for years. You should smell some of the food they have eaten with no negative effects. You see, dogs fed artificial highly processed foods do lack the stomach and gut acidity. The acidity level of humans vary with what we eat. Lots of carbs = lower acidity levels. Lots of protein and fats, higher acidity. Dogs that eat nothing but meat, bones and organs just as wolves do, have the same chemical make up in their stomach. Kibble contains lots of carbs and keeps the acidity level down somewhat.

This is why you must be careful when switching a kibble fed dog over to a raw diet. These stomach juices must adjust to digest real food. It takes a couple of months for the dog to go through this process. But once the adjustment process is completed, they can eat pretty much anything they want without worry about food borne anything. I assume most of the research, testing, and experimenting has been done on kibble fed dogs which is an entirely different creature regarding the GI tract.

I know this all to well because the reason why I have entered this field was to cure my girlfriends dog 4 years ago. He had eaten food contaminated with salmonella. Not from raw food or home cooking, but from kibble.

Yes but my dogs eat salmonella laden food pretty often and have no problem. The tests I'm aware of say that 30% of kibble fed dogs and 70% of raw fed dogs shed salmonella in their feces. However they don't get sick. Neither do the humans that live with them. Don't know why your GF's dog got sick from salmonella but most dogs don't. Were tests actually run and salmonella bacteria found in running rampant in the gut? Or did the vet do like most vets do ... anytime a dog has an unexplained stomach upset, its attributed to salmonella automatically without tests?

I am happy to say he is now 14 years old and doing well.
I can go into more details later about the research ive done the last 4 years.

Cool

Again in a perfect world I would be feeding my dogs raw food. But after making food for clients dogs that have been recommended to me. I can tell you with absolute certainty that dogs are ceptable to food born illnesses.

Switch both your and your clients dogs to a prey model raw diet and in a few short months you will be singing a different song. I can promise you they won't be suseptable to food borne diseases. I can't tell you how many posts I've seen over the years saying "my dog had (colitis, pancreatitis, sensititive tummy, and other digestive diseases) and after a month on PMR diet, those problems went away." There are many people on this board that will tell you stories like that. Find the thread "success stories" and you should see plenty of them.

Bedtime for me ... see you tomorrow.

[RachelsaurusRexU]

One of the main reasons that dogs are not affected by salmonella from consuming raw meat is the rate in which their bodies are able to process it. From what I understand, that isn't so with kibble. Kibble, being as unnatural and processed as it is, has to hang out in a dog's system for much longer in order to be broken down enough for nutrients to be extracted, and digested. That creates a huge problem when dealing with salmonella contaminated kibble because the bacteria has an opportunity to take hold and multiply. With raw, it goes down the hatch and shortly thereafter out the other end without much lollygagging around in between.

I also believe that there's a huge difference in the general health of properly raw fed dogs and probably most kibble fed dogs. Let's face it, most of the kibbles out there are nothing more than junk food. If you eat nothing but junk, your general health will likely suffer. If your health is poor, you'll be more prone to infection from bacteria, parasites, etc.

Just my two cents.

[SerenityFL]

Gonna have to agree with Rachel and RawFedDogs on this one. Before I switched to raw, I did a whole lot of research and it wasn't just raw feeding forums and groups. I actually researched the dog's anatomy as compared to the wolf's anatomy.

We can change their temperament, we can change their outward appearance, but we have not changed their insides. As RawFedDogs said, yes, they are wolves. They've been domesticated, they've been bred to look different ways, but we sure didn't change their intestinal tracts.

What fascinates me about vets who attribute everything to salmonella and raw meat is that they seem to forget that kibble has not been around that long. People used to feed their dogs raw food all the time, before kibble came around in around the 60s.

I don't recall hearing about massive dog allergies from back then as I am now. (Same with humans, for that matter. The more processed garbage we eat, the unhealthier we seem to be, overall.)

I once worked for a vet at an exotic pet and bird clinic and he was the first to tell you, all that kibble, all that crap you buy at the pet store for your dogs, cats, birds, rodents, etc was complete and utter garbage. He said, "It's like feeding your child candy every night for dinner. Eventually you're going to have problems."

Birds that should have lived 75 years were dying at 20 years. But no one wanted to listen to the vet for those 20 years because, hey, the bird was alive all this time! The food must be ok. (as an example)

I've heard more problems with dogs health because of kibble than I've heard from raw feeding. (And these would be the PNW salmon, perhaps it could happen, or the bone was too small or they didn't chomp the bone and I guess some years back, pork was a bit of an issue.)

It was mentioned earlier that dogs will eat other dogs poo. My idiot hoodlums do this every single time we go out on walks. My neighbors do not clean up after their dogs and we walk the poo gauntlet every night. When I let them off leash, eventually they will find a pile and start chowing down despite my attempts to inform them just how disgusting that is. Some of these piles are enormous, look terribly unhealthy, yet there they are, grazing at the "snack bar". It has not affected them in the slightest. It's waste. One would think a dog would have a bad reaction to waste but they do not. It gets broken down in the stomach and doesn't spend enough time in the digestive tract to do anything.

In humans, it takes about 24 hours for us to rid ourselves of whatever we ate. This gives salmonella plenty of time to take hold and make us sick. In dogs, it's pretty much, "something goes in, something comes out" in a very short period of time. Salmonella doesn't have a chance to stay inside. It gets thrown out to sit in a pile, cold and alone to eventually die.

You are an expert with human food, something I wish I knew more about and I think what you know is fantastic. I'd love to pick your brain sometime. But what goes for humans does not necessarily go for other animals. We are different, we react to things differently. What some animals can handle, a human could die from. So it is different and cannot be compared.

[Artisanal pet]

Again I agree with everything that has been posted. I think we are getting off the subject slighty. I am for the raw diet. When I talk about bacteria and parasites, I am pertaining to dogs who are on a kibble based diet, not raw. None of my clients have there dogs on a raw diet. Once the sick dogs are healthy, I see no issue in trying the raw diet.
I am in complete agreement that a kibble based diet is wrong.

[RawFedDogs]

None of my clients have there dogs on a raw diet. Once the sick dogs are healthy, I see no issue in trying the raw diet.

2 reasons:

1. To keep them healthy seeing that kibble was the cause of the problem to begin with.

2. Because a raw diet is many times healthier than kibble any day by any measurement.

I am in complete agreement that a kibble based diet is wrong.

Then it doesn't make sense to keep recommending it, does it?

[Artisanal pet]

2 reasons:

1. To keep them healthy seeing that kibble was the cause of the problem to begin with.

2. Because a raw diet is many times healthier than kibble any day by any measurement.


Then it doesn't make sense to keep recommending it, does it?

I dont recommend kibble. I never said I did. I do home cooking for my dogs and clients.

[_Trish]

Reading through this discussion made me think of something when I tried putting my dogs on a raw diet. All of them responded really well to it, except for one. He started regurgitating his food, and vomiting bile, and foamy white stuff (I know, how technical). So this was because his body was used to digesting kibble, and his stomach was producing more acid to digest the raw meat? He also had HORRIBLE breath, I mean absolutely rotten. He would burp and it would smell like there was a rotting carcass laying in front of me. Even if he would just yawn in your face or try to give you a kiss his breath was just absolutely putrid, and this was not the case when he was on kibble. For what it's worth, he eats a grain-free and what I would consider to be a high quality kibble. He's on Acana, and I rotate between the Prairie, Grasslands, and Pacifica. I started feeding him raw for his AM meal, and kibble for the PM meal and that seemed to help with the regurgitating and vomiting problems, but did not stop them completely, so I ended up going back to kibble, and he immediately quit with the regurgitating and vomiting, and his breath returned back to normal and he no longer had the rancid burps.

[Kofismom]

This has been a fascinating read! Thanks for all those well informed posts!

I need lots of help on human nutrition, since my Kofi eats like the little queen that she is, while I have my salted, buttered pop corn and a martini....well shaken.