Dr Zoolittle

A clanger has been dropped on Conor before we started off. Uh, hi guys, we are Raw Pep Medics. Uh, thanks to you guys for joining us. You can hear us everywhere— YouTube and Facebook, anywhere you get your podcast. And if you are listening to us on podcast, please give, please give us that vote. It does matter. We see the ratings at the end of each month and it helps us get more listeners. We're also on patreon.com, it's coming up across the bottom of the screen. And that is where our supporters can donate the price of a cup of tea each month. And if you can afford that, that's great. And if you can't afford it this month, that's cool too, and we get it. So we'll be here anyway because we love doing this. And before we introduce Penny Wood again, because this is not your first time here, Penny, and what's been happening with you, Brian, the last week? Anything you need to report?

Uh, no, I've been very busy. A lovely busy time. Uh, everybody's getting ready for Christmas, so they're all, you know, quickly zooming animals in, getting all their, you know, making sure they're all fit. It's one of those sad times, it can be. And I think in the next week or so we're going to do a little bit about, you know, how we come to terms with those elderly animals at this time of year, you know, what it is to say goodbye, do all of that. So, but not to make it too down, but just how to judge quality of life, okay? Especially with loads of people coming to visit the family, can be really stressful. And it's really personal to me at the moment because one of my dogs has just recently had some spinal issues earlier this year, suddenly come up with a serious TIA, so was nursing her for 2 days to get her back on her feet. She's now just got a very pleasant cocked head, but you know, it's really interesting that we have to nurse her up and down the stairs just because if she turns around, she loses balance.

It's just an age thing, is it?

Yeah, she's, you know, getting older, 13 and a half. Getting on. You know, she's had a back injury for a while, a bit like your duds.

Yeah, that's it.

And so, you know, it's one of those that you've got to come to terms with how you assess that quality of life and making it the right time for you as a family. So look, it's not necessarily the end. It's a serious conversation, something to be had. And a lot of people make it at the very last ditch, you know, just as everybody breaks up for Christmas to say Well, that's it. That's time. And that could be very rushed for a lot of people. So I think it's time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Makes you feel like your vets stop working over Christmas though. I mean, what do you guys take a— you take Christmas Day off? Take Stephen's Day off? Is that a better—

uh, Stephen's Day? You know, St. Stephen's Day.

It's like Boxing Day. You don't say that.

What do you say as an ex- colony of Britain.

Do you say St. Stephen's Day or Boxing Day?

I'm afraid it's Boxing Day. Sorry.

Good old Penny. This is— we are getting off to a bad start tonight. This is dire. I mean, even Nick doesn't disagree with me as much as this. This is absolutely shocking. Anyway, that's going to be a good topic because that is, that's at the top of my list really, as I see Duds. Duds has a few lumps on them, and the last time I checked them was maybe 2 or 3 years ago. I was told Uh, they were fatty lipomas, and that did me fine. And in the last 2 or 3 years, I'm not sure what I'm feeling now as a fatty lipoma. And now I don't really want to get down and find out. Typically Irish, it's like, just hide it under a pile of coats and just ignore it. But I can see him and I'm feeling it, and it's on his chest, and it's like, so, uh, I need to go down and get that checked, but I'm not going to do it before Christmas, so I'll just put it off for another 2 or 3 weeks and do it in January. I'm sure it'll be fine. Probably not the most responsible advice for everyone out there, but I can sympathize with people because it's it's hard to face that reality, you know what I mean?

All diagnosis, you know, we all fear the big C, you know, and I think it's so important that we talk about, you know, getting a diagnosis for some of those, because some of the lumps can be really innocuous and perfectly benign and not to worry about, and it can actually give you a lot of relief about that. Getting a diagnosis can be really important if you're insured, because actually it could mean that you're totally covered, something totally different to any other previous diagnosis that's been there. So histology is an important part of that with the Big C, certainly. But, you know, that's, that's for next time, not now.

No, let me just say this. Julianne Lee from the Adored Beast Apothecary has been doing a deep dive, like, I think she spent about 4 years in association with one of the universities over there diving into Big C and dogs, and she's got some phenomenal information to share about that. So just, I just put that out there as a thing. So if anyone is worrying about that, or for yourselves Following up with—

is she chatting about it at the moment? We should bring her on.

She is, she is.

Yeah, we're all against a great guest. We'll get that on. That's a— but that's a topic we don't hit enough. I mean, so impacted, impacts so many people. We only touch on it once a year maybe, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's quite a sad thing, isn't it? Anyway, look, let's bring the— you know, Christmas is coming, we've got to do the other thing. We've got the wonderful Pennywood on to talk about other stuff than, you know, really depressing stuff. What about you, Conor, before we go there? What have you been doing this week? You know, relaxed December.

Yeah, this is my relaxed, I'm just gonna grow a beard and eat food and have a couple of beers. And yeah, I was very clean for November. I'm gonna have a very clean January and February. And so I think I'm gonna be quite naughty in December and I can feel, so I've just stepped off the gas and it feels amazing. I was thinking, as you step off the gas with your own business, you can see things just come down, they're not thriving as well. And you go, okay. But the advantage is I'm nearly having a holiday, and holidays come with a slight cost, and that is you can check in with the clinic. You're not getting paid by the hour, so you drop off your consults. I've knocked my consults down by 75%, and it feels great. I have to say, this just feels amazing. It's like a new me. It's like if I could just have enough money doing nothing, I'd be really, really happy. I am a very lazy person, so I'm loving it. This is the first couple of weeks off I've had in this respect with my own business for 10 years. I often thought that I'd be able to do, you know, get the business to a point where I'm just swanning around and taking days here and there. Yeah, right. That just doesn't happen, you know. And then you have kids and they ruin everything. So it's just, uh, it's just high octane. But not the last couple of weeks, I'm really enjoying it. So, uh, yeah, I haven't been doing very much is the answer. But look, let's bring in Penny. Penny, how you doing? Thanks for joining us, uh, and bringing your zoological knowledge to the—

well, I can actually bring a voice with me this week as well, so it's great. Yeah, I could barely hear you last week.

It just sounded like a very strange type of machine talking on WhatsApp. Slightly scary, actually, to be honest.

It was a bit scary.

Yeah, much better now anyway. So I'm glad, glad you're feeling better. But, uh, how— what did you do in the zoos, Penny?

Oh, what didn't I do in the zoo? Um, I mean, I was a zoo consultant, but that— before that I was a keeper, and before that I was a volley, and before that I was doing ethograms. And like, I mean, I've just tried to put my fingers in as many pies as I can over there because it's it's just so exciting just watching how we can improve the welfare of these animals. So, I mean, I've worked in the education side of things at the zoo. I've helped with visitor engagement, the design of the enclosures, because of course I've got an interior design background as well as the science and the medicine and the neuroscience. So, I mean, you know, I like to play in a lot of areas. But being able to bring interior design elements that sort out the keeper, sort out the the visitor and sort out the animal. That's, that's a tricky thing to do. You get 3 separate different needs of what this space is required to do. And so from the animal's point of view, you know, traditionally it was just this concrete thing, the concrete box with some bars, because that meant it was really easy to hose down and that made everyone could see the animal. But of course that was dreadful for welfare. So we now build habitats, right? We build little ecosystems in there and do all kinds of things. And now even you know, engagement between the visitor and the animals, you know, is being encouraged for various welfare reasons as well. But it's a really exciting space for maximizing welfare over sensory abilities that they have, cognitive abilities, their social interaction. So it's a beautiful space. But nutrition is another area because, you know, I mean, hardly any zoos actually have an in-house nutritionist. And you think about it, It's really one of the most basic things about looking after an animal is feeding them, right? But the vast, vast majority of zoos do not have an in-house nutritionist. So when a consultant comes in, that's one of the areas that is, you know, we sometimes, you know, work with. Sorry, go ahead.

I thought the zookeepers would have been given, right, you're on cats and you're on these 3 big cats and you learn up about them. Here's the textbooks, here's the manual, here's exactly what they need. And we expect you to do a certain amount of CPD each year. Is that not the way a zookeeper is kept on top of things?

So keepers are given resources like that. Resources come through from someone like an accrediting body like BIAZA or AZA or, you know, these are, you know, so an accredited zoo will meet the criteria of a high-performing zoo, a good welfare zoo, right? And so that accrediting body has a huge amount of material that they can then disseminate and share across all institutions. So there are species survival plans, there are breeding, captive breeding programs, nutritional information. So those resources filter down to a keeper, but that doesn't necessarily mean the keeper's had a lot of training in it. They're just seeing an instruction list. And if you have, if you're not an accredited zoo, then unfortunately you don't have access to those things. So it might be a bit more cobbled together. It might be a bit of word of mouth. It might have been what the keeper 50 years ago used to do. So it's not necessarily going to be best practice in instance, and only a few zoos will have the in-house nutritionist who is specialized in that, you know, discipline to really stay ahead with the research and other things that mean that we're current with that. So it used to be, for example, it used to be that we gave the primates a lot of fruit because that's a huge part of their natural diet. But the big problem with that is cultivated fruit which is what we eat and what we buy in the grocery store, right, is very different from wild fruit, especially in terms of its sugar ratio and fiber ratio. So that's much sweeter when we eat it than it is in the wild. So we unfortunately gave a lot of primates diabetes and, and teeth issues, dental issues, because they were eating fruit that was hyper-sugared. So we've rectified that now, and they mostly get vegetables. But, you know, it needs someone who is looking at those kinds of things and saying, why are we suddenly seeing this epidemic of diabetes in the zoo? What, you know, when we're supposed— we're feeding the correct diet, you know.

So today, did you get into that? We put in supplements to correct some of those issues with what you'd buy over the supermarket shelf versus, you know, ready, you know, wild foods. Was that the way that you dealt with it? Was there anybody out there daring to give kibble to wildlife, you know, captive wildlife in these parks? Did it all go horribly wrong? What was the outshot?

I mean, zoo nutrition's got a bit of a dark past, really. I mean, used to be fed cream buns to the elephants, you know, you could just give them like, you know, the whole menagerie type of thing in the zoo. Oh, just give them this and, you know, they just had people food. It was right. And then of course, when they first started collecting animals and sort of yoinking them from the wild and bringing them across on a ship and putting them in a zoo, they didn't have the faintest idea what they would eat. You know, they just found some exotic-looking creature out in some expedition and said, well, that's fascinating, let's bring it home to study and stick it in the zoo. And they typically died after a year or two because they just, they weren't getting the right nutrition. So nutrition's come from, you know, really the Dark Ages through to sort of like people foodie things, through to then it had a very big kibble phase. And there's a whole thing of zoo kibble, like Missouri is the, is the zoo you know, nutrition company, if you like. But they're under the same umbrella as Purina. So there's this big parent company called Land O'Lakes, and then they've got Purina, which deals with pet food, and Missouri that does zoo kibble. But they, they do other foods as well as that. So there are supplements in their range, and then there's slabs of meat and things like that as well. So if you're ordering, you know, a box of chicks, for example, which is standard food for most reptiles and a lot of smaller carnivores, then you would go through probably those channels as well. But yeah, kibble exists in the zoo, as much as we wish it didn't.

Yeah, okay.

What about, like, what about on the back of that sponsorship? Like, you don't see when you're in the zoo, as cash-strapped as they are, like, it's not an easy thing to make money out of, it never has been. And as they ramp up these enclosures and make things better, and Dublin Zoo has doubled in size, and, you know, it's harder to see the animals. Bloody hell, you know, they could be half a kilometre down in the African plains that they have this new place, But that all costs a lot of money, and gate fees only get you so much. So all zoos— it's not a very pro— you wouldn't— if you had a few million, you wouldn't open a zoo to make cash, you know. It's, uh, so it must be tempting for zoos to jump in and get some sponsorship, but I don't see any sponsorship in Dublin Zoo. I don't see any company names, nothing on the hoarding, all those fences. Like, who— do you see much of that in many of the zoos? I'm sure some zoos fall for it. I mean, they have to keep the lights on. I can understand.

You know, so there's a few ways around that, and, and sponsorship is one of those things. And that you see a lot more of that in North America, for example, you know. I mean, in, in very, very broad terms, the North American zoological community and the way they do things is probably about 10 years ahead of what we see here in the UK. It's just, you know, and that's not trying to be disrespectful to an industry that I adore, but for whatever reason, it's just slower to take root here or to come across. Or to be recognized, whatever. But sponsorship is a, is a very positive way of doing that because you get a win-win situation. Zoos can also increase their income, if you like, beyond the gate fees through visitor experiences. So be a keeper for a day, be a zoo vet for a day, be a zoo trainer for a day, those kinds of things. Or come and stay at the zoo, do a Snore and Roar for example, or, you know, so you stay overnight, you get to do a midnight walk to go see the lions and what they're up to in the middle of the night, wake up in the morning, have breakfast with the meerkats. You know, that— those type of experiences, like mini safaris inside a zoo, are good ways for the zoo to increase their revenues but also create this incredibly emotive, inspiring experience to encounter those animals in a way that most people don't get the chance to see. And there's a bunch of other things as well. There's, you know, Brew at the Zoo and all these kinds of things to encourage.

Brew at the Zoo sounds amazing, but they won't bring that to Ireland. That must be a real Australian thing. It's like, have a barbecue at the zoo. It's like, we don't have any of that. We're not gonna bring food into the zoo because people just throw them at the ducks. Yeah, you know, I remember, I remember there used to be so many wild— not wild birds, but so many birds on the lake in the middle of Dublin Zoo that you couldn't get around if you had your sandwiches, like, you would have geese and swans and various types of large birds chasing you down for your sandwich. That was the '80s, so the zoo could be quite terrifying at times.

Just go on the seafront for that now.

We actually have a bunch of swans just in the next town up called Bray, and there's— are they salty swans? They live in the sea, they live in the harbor, and they don't— right at the bottom of the river. And, uh, you don't mess with those swans when they come up to you. If they've if they sense you've got food, I mean, they will come right up into your face. Quite intimidating for little kids. But anyway, that's my problem with swans. And so listen, with the feeding, actually, just coming back to the dentition bit just before I leave this, there was a famous British zoological dude called Coiler. I think his name was Sir Somebody Coiler. And it's like 100 years ago, and he was obsessed about why the animals, when they yoinked them from the wild, as you said, and popped them in the zoos, they died very quickly. And he was convinced it was because of the state of their teeth and their mouth. And he was the guy that made a massive change in how at least captive meat eaters were being fed. And he said, look, there's a big problem with the way you're feeding these animals because you're just feeding them stewed up goo, and that's not what they eat. They eat meat on the bone and that kind of stuff. So this guy created 100 years ago a 700-page text called Variations and Diseases of the Teeth of Animals. He looked into thousands and thousands of cases and he came to the following conclusions: the disease is caused by an alteration in the animal's diet characteristics as being either a physical or a chemical nature. In other words, by a departure from natural diet and conditions. Isn't that very interesting for the way we're feeding pets? And there's two more points: foods of firm consistency will increase the number, distribution, and tone of the capillaries in the gingival tissue, which in turn improves the metabolism and vitality of all the supporting surrounding structures. And 3, the degree of keratinization is improved and there's less injuries in mouths when the animals are fed meat. So he was the guy that came in with feeding the meat on the bone and then leaving the hide on the outside of it. And then there's been a couple of other PhDs, a number of PhDs done this, but they started doing experiments of leaving the hair on or taking the hair off the horse leg. And they're doing studies of cheetahs, this girl Sarah DePauw, and they said the difference in colitis and gut issues they were feeding just beef chunks to the carnivores and they were having quite soft, squiddy poos. But when you start giving them the cartilage and the bone and the ligaments, very hard to digest, and then the hide, they had much firmer, larger poos and then all the gut issues evaporated. So like, as you said, like in just 100 years they've made leaps and bounds and what they're promoting for the meat eaters in the zoos today sounds very much like what we're trying to promote for meat eaters at home in our house, you know. So it's funny, the evolution is— the zoos are keeping up with nutritional lectures, you know, it's a pity we didn't, you know, so I thought that was interesting. What about the feeding of cats, like, do they feed like chunks of meat, are they feeding an actual leg? I don't see many bones around the enclosure of the big cats.

So there's a little bit of a challenge that you find with this, with feeding, excuse me, with feeding carnivores is that you've got the zoo public who don't necessarily like to see how it's done.

Yeah, this is so people that don't know where their food comes from, right?

They're probably in the zoo. So zoos will get around this various different ways. They will do the big feed, so they'll do the carcass feed after business hours, so that the lions— or for example, just say lions— so the lions have something very stimulating and enriching to occupy them for a chunk of time after people have gone. But then the zoo visitors don't sort of look and see, you know, Nelly the horse in there being massacred. I mean, obviously it's dead first, but I just want to say that. But yeah, live enrichment feeding. So live— on that point, live enrichment feeding is obviously fantastic for the receiving animal, but it removes every possibility of a sporting chance for the prey. So in, in the UK, we're only allowed to do that for invertebrates. So if you are a meerkat, you can receive a live cricket that you have to chase around the enclosure and catch that tried to get under a log and all those kinds of things. But for anything vertebrate, you're not allowed to do that. So that differs in other zoos. So there are places in the U.S. where they can give the bears live fish. So they'll put live fish in the bear pool and the bear can go in and catch their fish as if they would in the wild. But the ethical restrictions here in the UK are stronger, so they say no, nothing with a backbone can be live prey. But going back to the cats, so carcasses feeding. So there's a couple things that— so they'll give the whole carcass or they'll give a big portion like a haunch or something like that, but they'll put it on top of a pole or on top of a bungee or on top of something where the animal really has to— the cat has to really work at it. So if you're a tiger, you're a stealth hunter, you're doing it by yourself, you're going to use enormous amounts of power to take down something very muscular and who's going to fight back. So if you just put a piece of dead something in the enclosure for the tiger, tiger, yes, they're going to get a meal, but they're going to miss out on all of the enrichment and all of the prowess that their body has to work with that. So when we have a feeder pole, which is really just a great big long telegraph pole and then a hook at the top that connects the big piece of meat, and then that can be on some kind of a bungee thing as well, so there's a little bit of give and take as if the animal is kind of wrestling a little bit. So now the cat's got to go up there, they're using all of their upper body strength, they're using their claw strength, they're using their mouth strength to grab hold of that and maybe they'll pull the whole thing down, but maybe they'll just have to hold, hang up there for a while and really bite away at pieces, so it's really giving them a workout because they didn't get to do the hunt itself. So things like that are really positive ways of enriching the feeding experience for animals and making it take that timeframe or a similar timeframe as it would in the wild rather than just going, there's a bowl and it's now this thing that took me 8 hours of my day has taken me, you know, 80 seconds or something. You know, we're really depriving them of the whole experience if we don't do that. So you do see it, but some zoos will just hide it a little bit because visitors will go, I don't want to see that.

I never thought about that. I never thought about that because we have down the south there in Cork, we have Fota Wildlife Park with the cheetahs, and they've got one of the biggest cheetah colonies, or certainly from a reproducing point of view, they're reproducing like mad. They put a mound at a certain height so they could see the prey, and once they could see, they started breeding because they're like, oh, look, there's food over there. But if they couldn't see the prey, they don't want to breed because what's the point? There's no, there's no meat around. So I thought that was an interesting thing.

It's also linked to anxiety as an actual fact. So cheetahs are a really small cat in terms of body mass, but they're big. We should think of them as a big cat because they're bigger than a, like, a savannah cat, for example, or a caracal or something. But they're actually a pretty small lightweight cat, they're really delicate, so they're quite nervous if they can't see who's coming. When you elevate them and give them this mound, they can now see where the prey is and can come up with their strategy of how they're going to get dinner, but they can also see the hyena pack that's milling about over there that's going to come and rob them the minute they catch something. So if they can't see, and they've actually got really specialized receptors of the eye, so we have a focal spot, which is a spot, right? And they've got this linear, highly acuity focal point— I'm not saying it correctly— but across the midline of the eye, because the horizon to a cheetah is far more important than one focal point. So they've got a specialized eye providing the information to the brain, which then makes the decisions about how am I going to hunt? I'm going to wait for those hyenas to nick off first, then I'm going to go after that impala. But if they're sunk down in a hollow, then they're nervous. And when you're nervous, your stress goes up. When your stress goes up, your reproduction goes down. So there's a whole lot of things involved in the welfare of cheetahs that can be solved.

Um, yeah, they had those cheetahs— those cheetahs were fed on a long line. And so that was the first and only time— I don't know if they're doing it anymore, but I saw—

they work on a lure line, so they've got it on a pulley that just whizzes around the enclosure real fast.

The animal's just like, zoom, and it's gone. You don't even see the cheetah running. It's like, you're surprised, like 80 kilometers an hour. I'm not sure how quick they can get up to that speed, but to see the thing catching the prey is just— and, and the little ones, the adults sat and they watched the little ones make a mess of it. Like, they just couldn't quite get it, but the adults are sitting there watching the babies kind of mess around, almost like they're letting them have a shot before— it was so interesting. I can't believe they would take that away from people. We're such— we're so soft that we can't even give the animals what they want because we don't want to see them eating meat. It's like, well, you know, you want to see the lions and tigers, that's what they eat. It's, uh, yeah, I can understand why they keep it away, but it's a pity. Yeah.

So we're gonna pull you back a little bit because there was a stream of questions that people wanted to know. And so actually, I'm going to come back to, um, this one. So how do you determine what animals should be getting when they're in the enclosure? Do you have a method?

Enrichment and design?

In terms of food, let's stick to food.

Okay, so in all the work that I do, which is with— I almost exclusively work with animals under human care because the ones out in the wild don't need a human to give them a hand. They're fully adjusted. They just need their wildlife area preserved so they can get on with it. But when they come under our care, we make a lot of decisions for them. And so unless we're making the right decision for them, their welfare is seriously compromised. So animals under human care can be domestic, obviously, with the pets. But I'm working with the zoo as well. We've got, we've got effectively a wild animal in their physiology, but they're not a wild animal in their mental capacity. Now, they haven't been domesticated. But they're no longer a wild animal because all they've ever known, for the vast majority of zoo animals, all they've ever known is a captive environment. They didn't ever live out there. So they've got a different set of expectations, a different way of problem solving, they're just tweaked a little differently. But their biology on the inside in terms of what they eat is the same thing. So to answer your question, I look to what is a wild version of that animal doing? What is— and there's loads of beautiful literature that people do out in the field in behavioral ecology and the natural sciences of the animals, a lot of analysis of scat, and they're really getting it down to very fine detail about this percentage of terpenes and stuff. It's not even like, oh yeah, there's a leaf in here. It's like, you know, micro, micro. So we've got a lot of information for a zoo nutritionist to jump in and say, okay, well, let's then replicate that. So that's really the best model. But we also want to bear something in mind that is so often forgotten. In the captive environment, we feed every day, or almost all of us feed every day, and the same quantity every day based on what is healthy for our pets' or animals' body weight and so forth. That's not how nature works. Nature is challenging. There are days when you don't eat, okay? There are days when you only catch up as much. And so the body goes through feast and famine. There are also seasons, seasonal changes. This is available now, now it's not available, now it's available here but not over there, now it's you know, so those kinds of changes are something that an animal really should be experiencing rather than the same thing every day.

So is that becoming more popular now? Are people starting to catch on to that, or are they still, no, we feed the same thing every day because we're too worried they might not eat because of illness?

It tends to— I mean, there are exceptions. So if you're an animal that can sustain a fast day, So particularly some of the big carnivores really are often given fast days in the zoo, and that's excellent. But what tends to not happen is this more gradual feast and famine wave. And what you find is you get a sex skew when you have feast all the time, when there is abundance of resources and everything's peachy keen, you have a skew towards male birth. When you have a famine type of environment, there is a sex skew to a female birth because in the wild males are less important than females because one male can typically look after fatherhood for many, many females, right? So we need less boys, more girls when the population is at risk. When the population is not at risk because it's a time of feast, then we can have more boys because they can just go off and play in the forest and do cool things, right? And, and then fight, and it doesn't matter if some of them die. And what—

the boys, you can just have boys and they can just go play in the forest. What are you useless?

I now worry that Conor was starving his wife when he had children.

Yeah, I want to go play in the forest. Very interesting. I didn't know that that happened.

So what, what tends to happen is the zoo community, because they're looking for how can we preserve the species, how can we do conservation breeding and so on, they typically want girls, right? But they forget to do a feast— excuse me, they forget to do a famine type of environment so that you get a stronger chance of females. So we have what we call in the zoo surplus males, right? So you'll often have right, one enclosure that has the breeding pair or something like that in there, and then offshore or around the back of the zoo somewhere, there'll be the bachelor herd where there's like 50 more boys that all just mill around eating grass, or depending on what they are, right? Because they're like—

they didn't say behind the bike sheds, right?

Because they're kind of like, well, they've already been represented in the collection, they're not required for breeding.

Yeah.

We don't want to— I mean, depending on the zoo that you are, that we don't want to do a cull, right? That we've got some ethic about saying, well, we, we have a responsibility, duty of care to make sure you have a good quality of life and all those kinds of things. So, but you just kind of like this surplus. So if a zoo would remember to create safe but mimic the, um, the feast— so I keep saying the wrong way—

mimic the, the, the famine environment How, for example, give me some examples of how you would do that for the animals.

You can easily cut down their caloric intake on a daily basis by 25%, no problem, for the vast majority. I'll be careful how I say this because if you're a little tiny one with a really fast metabolism, then you're not going to be able to. But if you're a big carnivore, um, or a big herbivore or big something else, right, then you can afford to have caloric restriction. Not only is that going to be really good for your autophagy, which is your, your programmed cell death. So you're going to speed up the eradication of old, poorly functioning cells and get replication of new cells. So it's an anti-aging strategy for welfare and long-term viability. So you get that bonus, but you'll also then get more of a natural representation of the, of the sexual output of the babies. Because you— so you can do that for— you could do that easily for 6 months and create a season a season of famine within the zoo environment. Now, we're not starving the animals, we're not destroying their welfare, we're not giving them a hard time. We're just making their bodies work a little harder and to change the way that their body is deciding what to do with its resources.

Anyway, people are getting really excited now. They want to know where's that study and does it work in dogs for breeders that want to breed more females or males?

Animals.

This is what they're now asking.

I, I haven't seen a paper— excuse me— applying this to the domestic breeding, but that's not to say it's not out there. It's just my focus has typically been on the wild animals. Um, um, but logically, if I just had to shoot an opinion off the cuff, I would say yeah, of course it would work, because that's biology. I've spoken about this to a fertility expert in the human space, and she says that it works with humans, so why wouldn't it work with domestic animals?

Yeah, yeah.

Does your cat need something there, Brad?

I mean, not mine.

That sounds like it's feasting on something.

So, so you asked this question there for, you know, have you got any other studies when you're looking at nutrition about improvement of dental health for these big cats, or, you know, it's gut health and things like that. Because we've seen this paper with regards to the alternate fibers for big cats in, I think it was, was it Zimbabwe and South Africa?

I think, look at that study.

So we sort of occasionally come across these, but you surely come across this a lot more than us when you're looking at these, you know, food things. Or are they quite rare?

There, I mean, there's a lot of studies done on zoo nutrition, but typically that is asking, answering the question, what is it that this animal is supposed to eat, rather than saying, how can we use nutrition as a tool to improve a health outcome? So those ones are more rare. But Dr. Adrian Tordiff, who is a phenomenal researcher, PhD doctor, He's been with the Cheetah Conservation Fund out in Namibia and now is with another organization, but he did some fantastic research in cheetahs. Again, they make a really good model because they're a pretty easy small cat, a big cat to look after. But cheetahs in the wild don't get chronic kidney disease. It's extraordinarily rare. And yet you can talk to almost any vet and say, what about cats and kidney disease? They'll go, yeah, it's probably the number one thing, and it's pretty normal, and we could expect that after they get to a certain age and blah blah blah. So we were seeing the same thing happen with cheetahs. Captive cheetahs would get chronic kidney disease, yet the wild ones would not. And so Dr. Adrian Tordick did this very thorough investigation into the nutrition of cheetahs, the requirements of what is it that's causing that disease to manifest. And the bottom line is it comes down to collagen. The cheetahs in captivity and most cats that we look after don't get sufficient collagen. And if you couple that— and I'll come back to that point in a second— but if you couple that then with kibble, you've got the dehydration factor going on. So their entire life is spent in chronic dehydration. So their kidney every single day is working harder than it should. So of course it's going to run out of steam first. So that's what we see as the, as the typical thing. But in parallel with that is looking after the amount of collagen that is, is put into the diet. I forget the bio, the, um, the biochemistry of why that was so, but I can look that back up and I certainly shoot those papers across to you. Um, but that was— and when they increased the, the collagen in the diet substantially, like it should be about 30% of the bowl. So when I say collagen, I'm talking about connective tissue, I'm talking about skin. I'm talking about the gristly bits and the weird ligamenty stringy stuff that we typically go, well, that's pretty grim, we don't want that. But that's the factor that they need. And arguably all cats need more so than dogs.

Definitely, yeah. There's studies of domestic cats being fed collagen. Collagen is the— it's like the structural protein in meat. You think about it like the way you would see plant fiber fiber, you know, and cellulose and that sort of stuff, hard to digest bits that give plants their rigidity so they can grow tall. But animal collagen is very hard to digest too. It's why cats and dogs can only— and also we can only digest a certain amount of the steak. We can digest, say, 70% of the steak. I think dogs and cats maybe 80%, but there's still quite a chunk of a steak, which is a very digestible piece. So even you can eat the whole thing, but you don't. Poo out quite a lot of that, and that is animal fiber, that's collagen. It's hard to digest. You can digest it. Cats are brilliant at digesting it. Cats can digest all sorts of tough bits compared to dogs, but they need much more collagen in their diet. So yeah, credit to you because I think there was two studies of cats where they were using, feeding them quite large doses of collagen. The more they fed them, whatever factor they're going after improved. I'll find those studies but do send me what you have on cheetahs because that's new. That's, that sounds great. Yeah, interesting. People don't consider it.

And that then connects in with what you're talking about before with the dentition, with the dental health, is if the teeth have to punch through, right, because I'm using these incisors here, excuse me, canines, because they're the punching teeth, right, hole punching. They've got to punch through that. They're not only getting cleaned from doing that, but you'll keep keeping the facial musculature nice and strong.

Flossing the teeth.

You're using the masseter muscle here, which gives the facial structure, which allows then breathing passages and things to be operational. So everything's connected, you know what I mean? Yeah. But then, so you get the teeth. But interestingly, cats have amazingly special teeth. The canines are ever so slightly flattened so they can actually push in between the vertebrae because cats do a break-the-neck, uh, mode of killing most of the time, whereas dogs—

well, you've got my cat, he just plays with it until the dog comes along and finishes it off anyway. But that's—

oh yeah, that's interesting. So they use the fangs to get between the vertebrae to sever the cord.

Exactly. So they actually paralyze their prey instantly so their prey doesn't then feel anything else. So they're very humane. Compared to a dog that does slash and burn kind of thing, right? Yeah, hamstringing, and they're ripping bellies open while the animal's trying to run. I mean, it's pretty gruesome to be got by a dog. You'd much rather have a cat go at you because they're just gonna— it's just gonna boom like that. There goes your spinal cord, and now you don't feel anything.

So when we're out in South Africa, I'll go for the big cat enclosure, you can go for the hyenas. There we go.

Yeah, it is a diabolical end because they're hunt and tire. And so eventually when that thing falls over, this large animal, dogs just don't have the ability to kill. They don't have the death bite. They've no— they've no— they're not packing all this muscle up the front like big cats. They're not ambush predators, you know. They are hunt and tire. And then when you fall over, they start eating from the butt because they don't want the hassle of being kicked in the face. I mean, it's, it's a tough end. I'm assuming by that stage you're so full of, um, what's the thing that you're full of? Adrenaline. Adrenaline, yeah, whatever switches it was off the pain, I'm hoping, because it is barbaric. People don't want to see that, but it's a, it's a tough way to go. Yeah, you definitely want the big cats. What about cheetahs? Do cheetahs go for the neck as well? Do they have the force to, to do that paralyzing bit that you're talking about?

Yeah, but you'll often see them as well, they'll clamp the mouth. So if they're going for, if they're going for a hare or some rabbit or kind of, you know, something that's significantly smaller, then they can do the quick job, right? But if they're going for an impala, that's going to give them a little bit more work, um, then they'll go for the muzzle snuffle and, and just let that—

that sounds lovely, but it's not.

The kiss of death, you know.

Bloody hell. And isn't it interesting that in the wild, uh, so many— we're so spoiled with our nature programs that we think, oh, they go for a hunt and then they kill, but they miss of them. I mean, what is it, 1 in 8, 1 in 10? And they're of the ones that they don't spook. The 1 in 8 or 10 that they go for, they, they, they get. So that 1 in 10, that is an exhausting long day, uh, if you catch something that day. So yeah, a lot of misses, a lot of energy burns. Can you imagine trying to run 80 kilometers an hour from nothing?

You know, the most successful cat is actually the rusty spotted cat, who is about this big. You know, they've got a success rate of hunting at somewhere around 80%, I think, but they're considered the most deadly animal because they've got such a high hunt rate. But that goes back to enrichment, what we were talking about before, is that animals really do spend an enormous amount of their time— let me say that because the herbivores spend even more time gathering their food because grass is so nutritionally poor compared to meat, for example. Right? So they've got to eat all day to power that ginormous body on half a calorie per blade of grass sort of thing. Where when you're a carnivore, you spend an awful lot of time to get the hunt, but then once you do, you've got calories for days, if not weeks, you know. So you can then take the rest, but the time investment to go around getting the hunt and being, being successful takes a lot of time. So replicating that both at home with doing scatter feeds, treasure hunts, things that go outside of the bowl to make the animal work for their food, that's so much more rewarding than just receiving in a bowl. It's actually called contra-free loading. So freeloading is like something for nothing, like the free lunches. That's what pets getting all the time is a freeloading kind of life. You could call them a parasite in some ways, and there's articles that mention that. Yeah, but contra-free loading, contra-free loading is where we run tests and say, "Animal X, would you prefer to work for your food or just get it?" And they go, "Oh, no, no, no, no, let's work. I want to work for my food." There's a really strong bias for this contrafreeloading. So when we allow the animal to solve a puzzle, go and find it, unwrap the thing, problem solve, strategize a thing, work cooperatively, whatever it is, we're actually rewarding them so much more than when we make life easy for for them.

Yeah, I'm sure that's what Lee Carroll's saying with that study on rats and looking at if you gave them sugar— or was it you, Conor?

I can't remember. It was a rat park. It's very popular here.

Yes, you were looking at the sugar versus drugs versus giving them occupation, and they went for occupation every time.

They would go for it as long as they have access to good food and mates. They're totally distracted with that and they're not thinking about getting obliterated. But what the point of of the whole study was like Rat Park. If everybody lived in, in this sort of paradise, they wouldn't be taking drugs. Drugs are a symptom of, of, of, you know, of malaise and, and all the other stuff that goes with it.

But, uh, yeah, it's escapism from chronic boredom. Yeah, chronic boredom is usually the biggest problem.

So yeah, you know what I mean? Hell, if I was in a zoo and I always had some shit surroundings and I wasn't being looked after, I would want drugs, you know what I mean? To that point, back in the day they surely would have used tranquilizers, antidepressants on zoo animals and stuff. I imagine the good zoos these days don't use such things. I mean, if you're needing to use tranqs and sedatives, you're probably doing it wrong. I assume that that's not done in the better zoos anymore.

What do you think? It depends a little. Sometimes you need to. If an animal escapes, then there's a tranq gun, right? Because you need to put them back in. Pretty quickly. But there's this whole field called cooperative care, which I'm so passionate about because it's involving the animal on a cooperative voluntary basis in their own medical care. So rather than back in the bad old days where you'd say, okay, we need to do a blood test on this gorilla, we— someone's got to go in and dart the gorilla, tranquilize him, then we've got to cart him out of there, take him across to the medical facilities, do the thing, and then bring him back and then wake him up. And there's a whole procedure with that. And the problem with that is not just for the individual who has to go through that experience— the risk of anesthesia is really high in wild animals, more so than domestics— but you muck up the social circle, the social hierarchies as well. Because you could be top gorilla, you could be silverback, but you've now just been put back into the enclosure in a compromised fashion, smelling of humans and medical clinical kind of, you know, anesthesia. And the other gorillas go, well, you're weak now, so I'm going to challenge you to be top dog. And so you disrupt an entire social strata and cause chaos for the entire group because of the way that that was managed. So what we do instead is cooperative care, which is to say, hello gorilla, welcome to our zoo. From early on, we're going to train you on how to be proactive actively, cooperatively, voluntarily involved in your medical procedures. So let's train you to stand up nice and tall against the thing like that, and then we're going to be able to do an ultrasound or a photograph or a radiography, whatever it happens to be, right? Or we're going to train you to put your arm, your shoulder up against this section of the, of the bars behind the scenes where we can actually give you your insulin injection voluntarily. Without having to tranquilize you in order to do so, or we're going to ask you to give a blood draw, or whatever it happens to be. So all of these behaviors are now taught in great zoos for the animals. So the animal gets to go to class every day and learn something, be rewarded with positive reinforcement training. They're, they're getting that cognitive enrichment, they're getting the social enrichment with their favorite people, uh, they're acquiring a skill that then becomes useful for them down the line because it means cortisol and adrenaline goes down because they're so used to doing it. There's no stress, so you're getting good biomarkers for a read of the actual samples that you're taking. And you don't have that messing around of the risk to the body with anesthesia and the risk to the social structure by putting a compromised animal back in. It's also massively time-saving because we don't have to then cart them from A to B and bring them back again and wait for the waking up. You can get it done in like a fraction of the time. So Cooperative care is phenomenal.

Love that. Yeah, it's something for them to do as well. I mean, I can't imagine them being too against that. I saw the elephants, or possibly rhino, I'm not quite sure, it was one of the two, being brought in, being called in and standing there, and she's holding her foot up against the cage and the guy, the vet, was looking at the nail on the foot and she'd turn around and put her feet backwards and then they'd be picking off the muck from her nails to have a look at the nails. I thought, that's a great way of looking at your feet. So she totally knew what to do and then she just walked off. She had her feet cleaned and off she went. Yeah, it was amazing.

We've got— we could talk to you for hours and literally we're going to have to get you back again from this. But it's coming up to quarter to. We've got a few more questions, some more from Conor as well that we'll carry on over if we can grab you for 15 minutes on Patreon and have a chat to you over there, which you don't need to do much. We've just got a few things to ask. Ask here first. Firstly, you know, come on Penny, what's going on with your latest projects? You sort of seem to go in, you know, fits and starts with Dr. Zoolittle. I see lots of courses and then there's a little bit of a gap, you know. What's going on? What are you throwing yourself into now?

Well, that's the problem when your mission is to change animal welfare globally, right, for all animals under human care. Like, it's a big ask, right? So Sometimes I'm in the Zoom and sometimes I'm in with the pets and so on. But really what I've discovered is that I need to clone myself. Everybody's asking, you know, where's your book, right? Where's the big course that I can take? Where can I actually train and learn and do the things that you do? So that's a big part of what's coming up in 2025 is basically a fully accredited year-long program where you can basically learn everything that I know. Um, and, and then be, you know, fully accredited with that. There'll be a book hopefully that comes out alongside that for everybody who doesn't want to do the course but put the same material in there. But really, I've, I've been working a lot on, um, what I call the Perfect Puppy Program because what I noticed was this huge trend in— I'm seeing over and over and over again the same health and the same behavior issues in pets that if we just did a different way of caring for them at the front end, if we just did something for the first 83 days that they're with us, which takes them from the 8-week mark to the 20-week mark, right? If we overhaul that just 83 days, just do exactly what I tell you to do kind of thing, then you will not get behavioral issues, you will not get the health issues, you will not get all the typical problems that come up because we miss these developmental critical periods of learning. We don't do socialization, desensitization properly. We don't do the health, the setting up of the, of the 7 pillars of animal longevity correctly. And it's all so easy to do that if you just spend those, those, those— what is it, 8 weeks? 8 weeks? 12 weeks? 12 weeks is all it takes to set them up for life. So that's the Perfect Puppy program that I've got. That then graduates into Perfect Puppy Finishing School, where we then take you through adolescence, because then there's another whole bag of tricks that goes on with that. And then from there— I've got my visitor here— then from there we have the Dream Dog Finishing School, which is then taking you through all of those 7 pillars of animal longevity for every animal, if they didn't get it when they were a baby. Because let's be honest, I mean, this one's not a baby anymore, right? And probably most of them aren't. So how can we set them up so that we prevent those things from happening? So anyway, that's the main thrust.

And so is that the link that you've sent us there for everybody who's watching tonight? They can go through and have a look at that guide. What's the—

That's actually a new book that I've just written that helps people with the 7 Pillars of Animal Longevity. So that's a free gift that if you've never heard of 7 Pillars of Animal Longevity, which broadly speaking, is just the most simple way of condensing sort of, you know, 20 years of medical information. I've just realized my computer's about to die.

Power lead.

Can you put that link on the Facebook page as well, Brent? I will just share the study on the— somebody was looking for the studies on them, the dentition stuff in zoos, so I just shared that as as well.

Great, okay, so keep a lookout for posts on our Facebook page, see those from that side. And if you— and while somebody's just sorting out their power—

yeah, I didn't have my earphones in for the first half an hour, Ben. Pete is going to be cross. Oh no, you forgot to remind me.

Oh yeah, there goes Max. Penny was giving you the big giveaway.

I know, I know. And I was laughing at her with her giant earphones, and here I am with no earphones. Um, anyway, I'm furious at myself. Penny, do you, um, um, so that link, we'll put it up on the Facebook page for the 7 Pillars of Longevity. That sounds awesome. I like that idea of preemptive, the preemptive strike. It's definitely the way to do it. We don't talk about wellness at all. Richard and Morkel from Wiley Vets are always pushing that. It's like nobody talks about wellness. Honest, you just, you just let it go and then you go into this shit in the last 10% and it's too late then. You got the disease, dummy. You could have done so much and, and so much stuff we come— I get 1 and 2-year-old dogs where the issue has been cooking for like 6 months, 8 months, 9 months since puppyhood, and it's like now you have a chronic issue that you're trying to get over when so much stuff can be avoided by getting that puppy started off the right way. And people, there's so much information out there today, people are just totally bamboozled. The vet says this and the internet says that, and it's very confusing for people. Back in the day, you didn't have so much instruction. You had 2 or 3 or 4 things you had to do and you did them. And now it's like there's so much that they can't see the wood for the trees. So this will be good. This will be very useful.

So if, you know, this is a big time of year, loads of people— and no, it's quite sad because we shouldn't be doing puppies for Christmas— but loads of people will be getting out their new puppies and kittens. Where will they find your link for your information? Will it be through Dr. Zoolittle? Is it.com, or is it where they're gonna find access?

It's drzoolittle.co. But if you— if anyone is grabbing this Seven Pillars book, the links to the puppy program are all at the back of the book there. You can also find it on my website, or you can just direct message me as well through either Instagram or just write to me at penny@drzulidil.co. But, um, they— if, if you want this, um, Seven Pillars book, which will introduce you to the ways that you can actually slow the aging process, improve quality of life, and it's so incredibly simple, um, then all that information is in, is in the book there as well.

That's cool. I think, I think you're looking incredible for 70, Penny. So you're attracted to this longevity buzz. Uh, listen, I've We're going to jump over to Patreon. You don't have to move, uh, Bren will do all the technical stuff. I am going to leave you with a question and you can give us the answer in Patreon. Dublin Zoo is one of the oldest zoos in the world, um, oh, I can't remember the date, something like 1830, uh, Dublin Zoo opened, uh, and but it's not the oldest zoo in the world. Do you know where the oldest— you do know that? Oh, well, Bren doesn't know. At least I have one left The oldest zoo in the world. Where was it? When was it opened? And we will reveal all in Patreon.

Literally. Okay, see you over on the other side, everyone. Thanks for tonight. God bless and you take care. We'll see you all next week.

Thanks, Penny. That was awesome.