Guest Vet Wiktor Sandecki

Yeah, we are the Raw Pet Medics and we have Victor Sandecki, who is from Sweden. We've just been learning about his, his father's Polish and he fell in love with a Swedish girl on the way through to Canada and hence he was born in Sweden. And he is, he is a leading light in the Swedish raw food industry and he's come to talk to us this evening. We're really, really excited to speak to him. We have got Dr. Brendan Clarke, we have got Dr. Conor Brady. I'm Nick Thompson, and we are on, uh, we are on the Patreon. If you want to follow us, uh, please do. For the cost of a price of coffee every month, you can be part of the in-crowd who gets a little extra on the side every week for 10 minutes after the show. You get the stuff that the other guys don't, uh, but We really, really, really are grateful for your support. The other thing that I'd love to say is thank you to everybody who follows us on YouTube. Please smash that subscribe and follow button. That really, really helps the, the, the whatever, the elastic bands like that stuff. They wind up really tight and point everybody towards us. And we're on your podcasts. There you go, guys. That's me. I'm done. I'll see you later.

All right, I'll just mute him now.

I'm gonna shut up now.

Yeah, well, welcome, Victor, and thank you very much. You're going to enjoy our pronunciations of so many things tonight and us trying to get it right. But I think we should start off with talking a little bit about the company because it's— we've got what, Sund Hund Mat, is that right?

Oh yes, yeah, that's true.

How do you say it, Victor? How do you say it?

Sund Hund. Hund.

Dog.

Hund. Mat. Yeah, the proper translation would be sound dog food, like healthy dog food, you know. So healthy dog food is sort of a would be the proper translation.

Cool, it does what it says on the tin.

It sounds nearly Scottish. He's a student hound.

Yeah, I had a writing teacher that was Scottish, so there you go.

And what's the company do, Victor? Who are you? What is the—

No, actually, I ended up here by accident, more or less, because, you know, halfway through veterinary school, veterinary college, my dog or the family dog got sick, right? Her, she got severe problems with her hip. She was a, at that time she was a 9-year-old German Shepherd and quite overweight as well, which we weren't able to do anything about it seems, despite all the so-called diet options that were out there. So she, you know, she couldn't get back up in the car or get down the stairs or up the stairs and being very depressed. And of course she got some pain medication for that, which helped a bit, but it also wreaked havoc with her stomach and she wasn't feeling very good at all. And of course that leads you to a certain amount of desperation, right? You see the beginning of the end is coming to your soulmate. Here she is, by the way, in case you want to say aww.

Oh wow, that's funny.

A long time ago, but anyway, at that time I got quite desperate. I remembered seeing a documentary 10 years earlier about a Danish veterinarian who was quite controversial, uh, in the fact that he treated a lot of his patients with chronic disease using food. And the food he used was basically cooked tripe and carrots and something like, like something else. I don't quite remember the exact details, but he said that you can never expect a body to function properly with bad food, bad nutrition, like for instance kibble, right? And that was also what my dog was on at that particular time. So what I did was, did was, uh, I trusted— I gave her raw, raw meat and offal and so on because I was desperate. And she transformed completely.

Wow.

She lost all of her overweight in about the 3 months. So she was 43 kilos when she started, which is a lot for— it was a big German Shepherd, but it was still a lot for her. And she lost 10 kilos without calorie restriction. She was just fed almost ad libitum, right? And her coat started to shine and she became a completely new dog, a puppy again, you know. She was running up and down the stairs, jumping in and out of the car, and I've never seen her like that before. So of course I told my teachers about this in vet school, but they were not too impressed. And I sort of respect that because it's just another anecdote. But as you go along and you meet more people and you tell them about your experience, you gain more stories. I went to— after my college degree, I went to Thailand to work with stray dogs at a shelter. And of course they have a different culture there, so, and they also feed their dogs differently from what we do here, meaning they give them a lot of leftovers and they throw chicken bones at them, cooked and raw. And the first time I saw it, I was like, oh my God, it's gonna end up bad, but it never seems to, always on fine, so to speak. And after that I worked in a clinic in Denmark and they specialized in raw food for chronically ill patients. And they work together with biologists that put together a diet that might be suitable for that particular individual, you know, chronic allergies or a problem with the gastrointestinal tract or whatever it might be.

Dogs or humans, Victor?

Sorry?

Dogs or humans? Dogs.

Dogs.

Okay.

The biologists for humans though.

Okay.

Yeah, right. And The results were amazing and I was really baffled by that. And I took this experience with me when I went to Birmingham to study acupuncture for the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society. I think they're called.

Yes, indeed. Yeah.

And I spoke to my classmates there and they were from all over the world. They were from Holland, Germany, England, of course, and so on about my experiences. That wasn't new to them. They had a different culture that it wasn't too uncommon, or they were very familiar with the fact of feeding a dog this kind of food compared to what I was used to back home here in my, in my country. Um, and taking all this experience in consideration, it's very hard to do anything else but to focus on nutrition for the rest of my career. I found any other job to be, you know, almost pointless and only treating symptoms, like putting a a lid on a boiling kettle. Yeah, so I just tried— so the clients I had after that, I tried to find some sort of option for them to give to their dogs. And then I found like a very good producer of this sort of food that I'm representing now to hand out to them. But then it grew and it ended up in one shop and then another, and all of a sudden I have a pet food company. Yeah, we ended up here, but yeah, it just went that way, sort of. But I enjoy what I do. It gives me free time to read and to try to inform dog owners and colleagues of what I've learned and so on.

And you're doing that, you're doing some of that, Victor. You said like you're on the campaign trail. I mean, you are talking to Who are you talking to this weekend?

Yeah, that's actually not thanks to me. That's thanks to a wonderful girl called Louisa, who was— she was also in Dog Risk and in Helsinki, and she's partly responsible for setting together a program for a conference up north, or halfway up the country, where the in-house vets— because she— this is like a big pet store chain. And they have veterinary clinics, clinics, clinics franchised to them.

Oh yeah, okay.

Right, I think maybe 10 or 12, I'm not sure. And that staff, all those vets and all those other staff, I think are going to that conference. And she had made sure that there would be maybe a 2-hour program of the latest in dog nutrition from the Helsinki University.

Oh nice.

So she has invited Anna to come and speak for them. I'm not sure what she's going to speak about, but probably something with the— actually, I don't know, maybe it's pathogens or inflammatory markers or something like that, or something from the study of dog waste, I assume. And I'm not going to talk there myself, but I'm there as support in the ongoing, in the following debate, maybe, that will take part. But I still thought that the question was interesting. What would you do once you have the chance, once you're facing 50 or 80 or 20 or 100 vets? What would you tell them if you had 20 minutes to open them up? I've got one.

Yeah, okay, so I think it's really, really useful to look at the criticism of raw from the industry and from vets. Rural Feed and Veterinary Society and Rural Pet Medics, we've boiled it down to benefits, bugs, balance, and bones. Okay, these are the four areas. So talk about the benefits. You can find 15 papers easily for the benefits because the World Small Animal Veterinary Association says that there's— he's dropped an earphone.

You find your headphone, I'll just do this. We'll just do that.

We could all hear you, right? Okay, so you find your headphone. So it's basically the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, I think in about 2012 or so, came out and said there are 4 major problems with raw food, and they basically boil down to benefits, bugs, balance, and bones.

Yeah.

So if we can critique those, we say, here are some papers on the benefits of raw food. Oh, look, there aren't any papers on the benefits of kibble food relative to raw. Okay, so that's number one. Benefits— bugs, bugs. You can just say, yes, there are a low level of bugs in raw food diets, but the problems with those bugs is vanishingly small. Fantastic. And you can quote, um, Antoranemi, 2019, and also, um, Nikki Kamek, I think it was 2021, she did a, she did a paper. Um, and you know, you can just say, right, here's a load of, uh, incidents where, where, uh, people and children have got salmonella from kibble. Okay, so the benefits, bugs, balance, balance Do animals need every meal balanced? Patently no. But if over a week or two weeks the diet, which is different from a meal, a diet, if the diet is balanced, you're off to the races. Yeah, you're good to go. And then bones, you could, you can just say the problems with bones are again vanishingly small, but the benefits are enormous. Psychological benefits, dental benefits, mineral intake benefits. And I think, and you can do that in 20 minutes. Yeah, you have 5 minutes on each section. You just whack them, whack them with that benefits, bugs, balance, and bones would be my thought.

I love the depth of information that you've gone to there. But you know, there was one thing that really hit home at the London Vet Show this last week, and that was when BVA stood up and did their thing about their appalling effort on how to feed pets.

Yeah.

Um, and how to defend it and how to try and get it across the line as far as understanding what clients are saying to you in the consult room. And somebody that I actually had thought was very much in line with the conventional thinking on everything from vaccination to worm and flea treatments to feeding dogs kibble, all of that side of things, when he was president, um, and I was on committee at the BVA. And it was, um, this is quite a few years back, by the way, um, and, um, I actually listened to him, and one of the things he said back to the committee was, so in this day and age, as an older man being constantly advised by health professionals that I should be eating much less processed food and much more fresh. And considering that I see myself as just another animal, another mammal within the whole, uh, thing, how on earth do I square that with telling clients they should be feeding their animals on ultra-processed food.

Totally.

And the excuse that came back was there just isn't enough data, i.e., they'd not looked at all of the data that is available. So it is, I think, something that the greater profession are coming to realize, that actually what they're doing post-COVID when they're all looking at improving their own health is looking more and more towards fresh, varied diets to get greater balance and all of the rest of it, they are suddenly coming to the realization that feeding the same old pelleted food over and over again cannot be healthy. And they are just crying out for the data to be shown where that leads, how that is, what they need to be doing.

There is data, there is data, but they're crying out to be shown it.

And it's just, we just need to, you know, go down that route and then just show them now where all of that data is.

We need to sit down in a room with them and just go through all the papers. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It'd only take half a day.

I really enjoy the idea of asking a question.

Yeah.

Actually, because we're, for some reason, we're always on the defensive, so to speak, to explain ourselves to common sense. It's like being I wouldn't say Copernicus and the church, but a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, similar.

So what's your— oh, oh, he's muted himself.

I thought you were going to be sick there for a second.

I love a mime.

I was tapping the mic on. Can you hear me? I was saying very interesting things. Um, I think the problem is when you're speaking to people that have taken the leap in dogma not in science. If you come at them with facts and figures, they turn off, as we found with so many topics over the last 4 or 5 years. If you try to talk to somebody about vaccines and go, well, you know, do you want to talk about vaccines or do you actually not, you know? So I think coming at people, I think I like Brian's idea where you're coming at them with a slightly more human analogy or a question you could ask the whole crowd, particularly if it was a very strong veterinary crowd, you'd say, guys, we're evidence-based scientists. Can somebody please put their hand up and tell me what was the most convincing study they read that showed them high-carbohydrate ultra-processed kibble is better for the health of a dog than a raw dog food diet? Like, which studies? Put your hands up, guys, and we'll discuss them now, and we can pull my pants down in public, you know. And when you get, you know, maybe one example of the cats that were fed minced up rabbit meat for 9 months, which is always the one that's cracked out, which nobody should do. You say, listen, there's only 5 or 6 well-controlled head-to-head studies of dogs fed ultra-processed kibble versus a decent, well-made raw dog food. And virtually every single one of them, bar one, which just came out published by Purina, shows that raw wins every single time. So if we are going by the science, which we don't need to get into, Every single road leads to fresh food being better, as it does in humans. So, you know, what study are we talking about that we're worried about? Oh, well, it's dangerous. Okay, we were just talking about benefits. In 20 minutes, it fills me with horror, to be honest, Victor. What are you thinking? What are you going to do with your 20 minutes?

No, I don't know if I get 20 minutes, but I think that puzzles me the most is like, what's up with all the sugars to start with? What is it that is so appealing to feed a dog or any kind of species like a massive amount of refined carbohydrates? Been ultra-processed despite all the signs that are around involving all kinds of species of how dangerous it is. How do you justify it? Do you even know what's in the bag? I mean, where does it all come from to start with, and when did it start, and why did it start, and who told you? Yeah, more or less, right? I mean, that's just because it makes absolutely no sense. And the funny thing is that afterwards we're going to have this talk, we're going to go to an animal park that is just next by and speak to the vets there. So we're going to speak, talk about dogs first, and then I'm going to see dogs in the wild, like real canines. And I wonder if any of those in the audience would be happy to feed kibble to one of those canines in the zoo. I doubt it.

Yeah, yeah, they don't. I don't know.

Absolutely not, because your brain transitions. Oh, that's so canine in the wild, of course he would eat meat. There's no danger there, there's no danger for the handlers. Of course they would eat the raw egg. Of course he would do that. The whole fish, he would eat the chicken bones. I mean, nothing makes sense to me anymore in this particular field.

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder if there is actually the vast amount of science that is available regarding the dangers of this kind of ingredient. I mean, it's mind-blowing.

I mean, I wonder if there is a zoo out there that's really cut costs and asked Royal Canin to come in and feed their big cats.

I think, I think they have tried feeding zoo cats and zoo canids on kibble, but I don't know for sure. We'd have to ask one of our zoo vets that.

I think in Australia they tried it. I read it in Lonsdale, the book. Yeah, it wasn't very successful for obvious reasons.

What a surprise.

Yeah, no, no.

So we've had a bit of a chat going on in various forms forums, haven't we? And there's been a little bit about, are carbs necessary? And I think there's still a bit of debate out there. It was one in, it was one of the post-DogRisk chats. Somebody had said that, yeah, they'd watched somebody giving evidence that they thought that starches were necessary, and there was a little bit of a debate going on. Are there certain disease processes where we consider that higher carb diets, especially grains, are required. And I think it's worth just, you know, what are our thoughts? Because I know where mine are, I've made it quite clear on that chat. But, you know, I think Conor, you're sometimes a bit open to debate and a bit of outside the box thinking.

Why would you be with this?

Where's Victor? On this.

Yeah. Yeah. Are we talking about specific, like, in cases of disease or in general?

Firstly, in general, but then there is a disease that comes along, let's say cystine stones. What do you see the benefits of feeding? So let's go to the general first.

A general— the need for carbohydrates? No. Yeah, I can't find any biochemistry book that says you need carbohydrates. You don't agree. Uh, and it's just the fact that's indisputable in my opinion. Um, so, uh, then regarding, uh, that doesn't mean that you cannot eat it, right? Not all carbs will kill you. That's not the same thing. But do you need it to survive? No, absolutely not. That's why we have polar bears or, you know, or Arctic wolves or whatever. I mean, the body is not in need of carbohydrates. Um, the kind of bodies that we're talking about anyway. And then it comes to certain disease. Yeah, in the literature there are those that propose a certain amount of carbohydrates in the diet because the body, for one reason or another, cannot handle the amount, the proper amount of protein, or too much protein or too much fat. I don't have too much of an issue with that. I'm not sure if it's true. I haven't— I'm not sure if it's true, uh, it's recommended, but I don't ever see a reason to feed with grains. Ever. If you want to find carbohydrate source, I would go for a mashed, I mean, potatoes of some sort or sweet potatoes as an option rather than refined grains. If you want to use that option. That's my stance.

And so are we convinced whether, you know, cause we're talking about things like the Nestlé paper from 2013, I think it was from, you know, the fact that there's genetics that would suggest that they can produce enzymes to effectively utilize carbs. Where are you at with that?

Can I suggest, guys, all 4 of us, what we should do is we should set up a date and we should just, we should go through that paper line by line because I think it's got more holes than a colander. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because that, that is a program all in itself. We go through the Axelsson paper and we'll say, right, what does it mean? What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses of this paper? And what are the conclusions of this paper? Because the kibble manufacturers have been using that paper ever since to justify the use of high carbohydrate diets. I don't think it's justified.

We're talking about the paper in Nature. Yeah, yeah, no, I disagree completely with that. Not with the paper. I do agree, I can accept the fact that some— not dogs, some breeds of dogs have genes that made them maybe more capable of digesting carbs. That says nothing of whether or not starch or carbs are good for that species or for that individual. That's the point. And I think that when it comes to the papers being published, for instance, regarding the discordance theory, that the mismatch theory, but it's all over the place, including our veterinary literature that is not sponsored by any pet food companies. They talk very clearly about cereal being a double-edged sword, right? Because the agricultural revolution, as we got it, it gave us more food. We could stay in one place and we didn't have to move around so much, but and it created a civilization. We could develop cultures and trade and so on, but the food that we got was not good for us, right? That's what most of the science today says. So we got more food but the worst kind. And it says, according to this theory, the cereal grains— when the cereal grains replaced the animal-based diet that we used for hunter-gatherers, there were characteristic negative effects such as reduction in stature, increased infant mortality, Reduced lifespan, increase in infectious diseases, increase in iron deficiency anemia, increased autoimmunity, and increased dental caries and enamel defects. While we are no longer hunter-gatherers, our genetic makeup is still that of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who is optimally adapted to a diet of meat, fruits, and vegetables, not to cereal grains. And this is our basic literature. Because there's a vast difference between consuming carbohydrates from fruits and from maybe some leaf as it is to consuming it from grains, considering all the anti-nutrients that also exist in grains. And we look at the, the dogs existed when dogs existed 5 or 6 or 7,000 years ago, they survived, but we don't know if they thrived. And there's a difference in today's culture. Our dogs, we would like, we're trying to find a diet that makes them thrive. Not just survive. I know that my German Shepherd could survive on grains. She ate it for 9 years and she reached mature age and she was able to reproduce, would we have let her. And so her species would have moved on, so mission accomplished. But she doesn't— she didn't thrive. She got inflammation all over in her body, she got fat, she got lazy and felt terrible. And I know many people feel the same. We talk about this A lot. The science is all over the internet about the effect. Even actually, some of my friends are medical doctors, and they talk about even our farm animals in the paper or in the magazine of the Medical Association of Sweden, right? So our modern diet is the reason that we get as sick as we do, right? Such an increased enormous amount of starches in our diet, and to talk about humans here and the formation of advanced glycation end product, right? So when we eat a lot of sugar from flour, it will, the glucose will connect to parts of the proteins in our body and form a complex with, and we call that the dysfunctional protein. An accumulation of these dysfunctional proteins in the body will create an inflammation. And depending on where in the body you have this inflammation, you will experience different kind of diseases. The funny thing about this article in those— in the paper is that they talk about our farm animals, right? The way that we feed our farm animals now differ from the way we used to feed them before. So today you can more or less have a pig grow very fast by feeding it starch-rich diet. Yeah, in just 4 to 6 months it will reach an age where you can get meat from it, so to speak, in comparison to maybe 2 years before when it, when you just fed it roots, right? A different kind of starch, natural starch. And the result of this, that if these animals would have been allowed to live long enough, our farm animals, if we would allow them to live, they would develop chronic diseases the same nature as we do. And the list that they put up to cause this disease are, I mean, they're vast and they're all over the body. I mean, musculoskeletal disease, connective tissue disorders like osteoporosis and autoimmune disease, arthritis, chronic hormone imbalances, chronic lung diseases, periodontitis, Alzheimer's, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, breast cancer, ovary cancer, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, glaucoma, cataracts, stroke, Down syndrome, cystic— this list is endless, right? And this list comes from thousands and thousands and thousands of publications in the medical databases. So, you know, if this science is all over, why do we make the ingredients in pet food thinking they will have any different effect?

Totally agree. I mean, every farmer knows that the best way to make a pig or cattle or chickens grow fast is to feed them grain. Okay. Yeah, cattle. And yet we do that to our domestic animals and are then surprised when they do exactly the same. They get overweight or obese. I was going to say, it's not necessarily growing fast, putting muscle on either.

Dr. Brady. Fatty rashes. Do you know, to the— do your own— your unhealthy previous— by the way, your dog that you described as your heart dog, that was my one.

Look at— oh my God, the same thing.

7 years old, you're saying she was hobbled, she couldn't get up the cliff, couldn't get up the cliffs, she was totally about to die. And this dog was incredibly closer. And, uh, same thing, I fed her raw, she turned inside out, and she was just, just a brand new dog and just made a zealot out of me. So But the reason— here's the thing for people that don't understand. First of all, the more you increase carbs in your diet— okay, where's my hands? You can't see them. The more you increase carbs in your diet, which are purely a form of energy, they don't— they offer very little else, the less you get protein. Okay. So, you know, a lot of the issues that Victor was describing are just purely the fact of there's so many vitamins and minerals in the red bits, but also you need a huge amount of protein. So as the protein gets less and the carbs go up, you just have less of the good stuff. So it's quite obvious you're going to get structural issues as Victor listed off. And then he gets into the cancers and the metabolic diseases, which are all fueled by high sugar consumption. This stuff is absolutely done in the science. We know this is a problem since the 1970s. They started incriminating animal products and fat and we started jacking sugar into our diet. And here we are and we're in this state and we can't, we can't seem to get out of it. But we know this. So, you know, to Victor's point, What science have you got to show that these high carbohydrate diets are now safe for dogs, meat-eating animals? So, you know, to be evidence-based is to accept everything we know in human nutrition and say, well, it's actually completely flipped, it's actually really good to put meat-eating cats and dogs on high carbohydrate diets. It's preposterous. There's no science to suggest that, no long-term evidence whatsoever. And so like It's so crazy. And one more point that you said earlier, when your dog is really unhealthy, to explain to people how the genes are passed on, this Axelson study, as we talked about, is insinuating that as we fed more carbohydrates to dogs, ate more of our leftovers, as we do feed them, poor societies feed leftovers, higher carbohydrate diets, as you said at the start. And we may be, by force feeding, by giving them these carbs, the ability to digest or handle carbs has increased slightly, and they are slightly able better able to deal with glucose than cats, ever so slightly. It doesn't mean that they can eat 50% Roman cookies, just, you know, here's high fructose corn syrup. Of course it doesn't mean that. And to sum it all up, when you feed animals these high carbohydrate diets, we induce the diseases that Victor talks about. You turn into this 6 or 7-year-old shepherd that can't walk. And those dogs, when they're with free access to mates, don't get access to breed because healthy wolves are bred. There's not— it's not everybody in the group or pack gets to breed. Only the healthiest bitch does with the alpha. So like, it's, it's, it's, it's quite obvious that if you're going to feed some poor wolf high carbohydrate diets and she turns into this obese, poor structured, ill animal, that's not an animal that gets invited to breed too often. And that's how your genes perpetuate. So, you know, this idea of, of kind of this tiny little step they've taken towards carbohydrate digestion, and therefore that's why we feed them all the carbohydrates, is preposterous. It doesn't stand on any realm of science whatsoever, no matter what way you look at it.

It's, it's, yeah, you know, the abstract in Nature says that, you know, allowing our early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive, thrive on a diet rich in starch.

Yeah, like, let's see some references for that, you know. That's—

I see. And what did we mean by that? Because, you know, another article here about the Maillard reaction, like the advanced glycation end products in pet food, that was, uh published in Frontiers of Immunology says more or less that is, you know, cattle, our, you know, cows have problem with a high carbohydrate diet to develop laminitis, and I mean lameness, etc., and horses as well. Um, so insulin resistance in horses, gut health and inflammation in horses. Yeah, it's— they tell me that if a horse an herbivore like a horse or a cow cannot handle high starch, a dog can.

Yeah, that's it. And dogs won't choose them in feed trials. You can leave out as much dry food, as much carbohydrates as you like, dogs won't choose it. So, you know, it's on no level at all is this a scientific suggestion that— and the retaliation is, well, you need to prove to us what we're doing is incorrect. And it's like, yeah, you know, that's what the cigarette companies put into science. You You know, it's like, well, you have to prove what's wrong. You snuck the shitty product on the market, and now it's up to the public to invest millions and years of effort and the top scientists to prove that your ridiculous stance is incorrect. It's quite odious, and I'm not sure you can get through in 20 minutes to people the lack of science in there, because it annoys them by saying, you guys don't have any science. And they're like, excuse me, have you read these big books? And we're like, you sure haven't, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I read also in an article popped up a few months ago from Applied Microbiology about a bacteria found in the wolf's gastrointestinal flora that can be used as a protective measure for inflammatory bowel disease in dogs if you can extract it, isolate it, and put it in a dog. And the reason, yeah, so it's very effective. I'll send it to you. But the funny thing is that wolves has this bacteria in the flora, right? Dogs do not because we fed it differently.

Uh-huh.

So that's a really interesting—

Yeah, exactly. So if you feed a dog starch, it will survive, but you will also knock out or exterminate protective measures.

Yep.

So it won't get sick. Right. And it's very interesting that this article said that as well. And it's like, Really? So we know that as well.

Yeah.

And now they're trying to make— now they're trying to commercialize this bacteria to have it as probiotics to put it in on top of a bad diet, you know. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Why did it get there in the first place? The dog is missing a substantial amount of protective measures in his body because we fed it in a certain way. Yeah, we didn't feed wolves that way. They fed themselves in a certain way. That's And so they have this protective measure for that particular species.

Yeah, so it's interesting, there is a study coming through, Biome 9 have looked at some of the bacterial changes and they are isolating more and more the bacteria and their individual functions. And exactly what you were saying, for those dogs and wolves that are fed on a higher fat and higher protein diet there are certain bacteria that will convert the bile acids into secondary bile acids, and they actually have an improvement in reducing colitis, so that large bowel disease. And actually, if you take those bacteria out and you can't convert your bile acids into secondary bile acids, you are predisposed to ulcerative colitis. So that was one of the things at London Vet Show that was coming up. The more and more that they're looking at this and the effects on the microbiome of some of these individual foodstuffs, again, you realize just the impact, the negative impact on some of the feeding of these aberrant calories, these cheap calories effectively into the diet and what you actually end up inadvertently causing through that. And actually, we do need to take a step back and start looking at nutrient-rich calorie-poor foods to improve our health.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. But how do you guys feel? How do you guys feel? Let me throw this question out to the three of you. How do you feel about the move of isolating wolf probiotics and using them to give to dogs? How do you feel about broad-spectrum wolf probiotics for dogs which have hit the market?

How different is that from choosing soil probiotics to choose something from the soil.

And it's closer to your Fido. A wolf is closer to your dog than soil probiotic. However, I think, I think soil is probably the mother of all probiotics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's where— and then you may get specialization in certain, certain species who are eating certain diets, and, and there may be evolution of bacteria within, within the gut over hundreds of thousands, millions of years, possibly. But I think I would like to investigate the wolf probiotics. So basically, you just get some load of wolf poo and powder it and stick it in a tub.

There you go.

Really, you know, essentially, that's it.

Or put it back up. You know what? After all of our talking of FMT and the way to do it in Conscious Dogs, one of the Idex ones on FMT actually used that method this year instead of knocking the dogs out.

Wow, brilliant.

How successful it was.

Yeah, the Brendan Clark— did they say, did they attribute it to the Brendan Clark of Rock Hard Metal? You want to get them for that, that's trademark stuff.

Yeah, trademark, how to do this.

Yeah, what do you think, Victor? First of all, do you have wolves up in Sweden? Do you have wolves in Finland?

Yeah, and they're very close, they were 20 minutes away from No, 40 minutes away from here, I heard in Malmo recently. Yeah, I didn't see it. It's not firsthand reference, but I heard they chased the runner apart in the forest. Wow. Yeah, God, I don't know if chased or just trotted after, but yeah, there've been reports and some have been shot 'cause they're too close to—

Wow.

Yeah.

I love that. I was looking at some pictures from a great friend of ours and she'd gone on a wolf experience and this weekend up in the Lake District and she's there and the wolves are coming up and she's getting kisses from them and I'm thinking, oh my God, there is no way.

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd be meaning that as a true wolf experience.

Yeah, wow.

I'd be running.

I'll tell you what, wolves are really, really, really scary things, but I used to do some work with wolves. And when you go in with the wolves, uh, we would— we were taught you've got to go down to their level so that your face is at the wolf level, okay? And before you go in, this lovely Tony was her name, she said, um, just to let you know that the average bite capacity of a, say, a German Shepherd is something like 40 pounds per square inch. Okay, and the average bite of, say, a Pit Bull Terrier is maybe 100, 120 pounds per square inch. The average bite force of the average wolf is about 700 pounds per square inch. Have a good time with the wolves. Literally, you have to go eye to eye with these guys like this.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with that. Do you know that I just, I just recently— no, I don't have any facts to back it up, I just want to disagree. So just recently I was looking at this, I was looking at the bite force and the wolf. Do we, we had 5 animals on the screen with hyena, which, uh, was, you know, up there at the very top, and which was 1,100, I think, PSI. And then we had a gray wolf and we had 3 or 4 different types of dogs, but it was It was like, um, uh, like an English Mastiff. There was a Dogue de Bordeaux and a couple— but there's 5 or 6 dog breeds that have a stronger bite force than gray wolves. And the gray wolf actually was kind of lower, like other dogs. Now you're probably right. Yeah, I couldn't believe they don't have the bite force that these bigger animals have, that the shepherd protected dogs do. The bullfighting animals all have stronger bites than them. They're, they're hunting tired. They cannot— they can only bring down big prey when it's exhausted because they don't have the bite force to, to knock it out. Now listen, this is just me Googling, uh, so we will— I will— I'll post up the little slide that I had and we can have a look at these animals and people can pick. But the bite force was a bit disappointing. Now listen, I wouldn't be thinking about this when the thing is chasing me through a paddock, you know. Conor Brady said it's not that dangerous.

Yeah, okay, well, I tell you what we need to do is we need to ask Penny. You know Penny, our friend, the Dr. Zoolittle? So Penny, if you're watching, if you could get us any information on that, or if Tony or anybody who's working with wolves can get us some hard data. I'm just reporting what I was told by the wolves.

In the meantime, Fiona, who's on Facebook— hi Fiona, yeah, well, I was talking about you— who's probably got some great cute photos, you should be posting them in the chat so that everybody can see how great that experience was. Yeah. Obviously Swedish wolves, far more ferocious and kept right on the outskirts of town.

Yeah, yeah. Is it getting cold up there at the moment, Victor? Do you do a lot of— does everybody in Sweden go skiing in wintertime? Yeah, nice.

Not everybody, no. I mean, it's very nice up in the north. You have proper winters with snow, so it makes a huge difference. It lights up a lot. Yeah, it's just, uh, you know, Irish.

Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, cold and wet and rainy and wet and cold and rain and windy and you got nothing. Yeah, yeah, it's awful. We do a thing called a bit on the side, Victor, because it's quarter to 8 now, and so we jump over to this other platform. You don't have to move, you don't have to do a thing, and we'll just do his technical magic and we'll continue on our chat. There is a number of other myths that bother you, Victor, and we have a list of them. And tonight we got through one, and we promised we'd do another show on carbohydrates. Yeah, I think we— I don't think wolves was on the menu tonight, but anyway, yeah, but we have a list of other things, so we want to just chat. We want to hit a few of those with the 15-20 minutes extra that we have for rawpetmedics.com. Thanks to Victor tonight, really appreciate you stopping in. And like Nick said, we do have to hit that Axelson study. It keeps coming up, so let's put that to bed. Yeah, okay, we'll bring Victor back for that. That would be a good one for that. So thanks everyone for tuning in, we really appreciate it. You can catch us on podcast anywhere you're listening. Guys, any final thoughts before we boogie on?

No, catch you over on the other side.

Cool.

Oh good, here's to Axelson.

Yeah.