RawPetMedics Live Worms

It's a good idea. I think starting the conversation, starting the podcast mid-conversation is quite intriguing because it's like you just started eardropping in on people as people have just started doing at the moment. This is the sort of stuff we chat about behind the scenes in the green room, guys, before you all turn up.

Yeah, we just wanted to know what Nick got up to in Paris.

Yeah, how'd you get on in Paris?

Paris was fantastic. Paris was absolutely fantastic. We went way off the beaten track. And landed in this tiny little genuine French restaurant and it was full of business people and little old blokes eating on their own and there was no English menu and we couldn't understand half of what was on the menu, but we ordered the lamb cutlets and lamb shank and it was unbelievable.

I had to cook.

It was unbelievable. Yeah, I must do a TripAdvisor for it. So yeah, the Paris, Paris was really interesting. And we went on the Eurostar. Do you know that thing goes 200 miles an hour?

Crazy. It's crazy.

Under the Channel.

Yeah, under the Channel for about 15 minutes.

Yeah, I was on that.

Blink and you miss it.

Yeah, my dad was great. The one in Japan is way faster.

Did you see the bullet train?

Yeah.

And the tracks have to tilt to keep the train on the track. I'd love to see the speed of that, but it's— I was going to say 320 kilometers an hour, but that's 200 miles an hour, so that's just what you just said. Well, I can't remember, it's some phenomenal speed. They want to build a new one as well at some— you know, isn't there a magnet one?

I'm like, in the UK where, you know, we talk about building a brand new HS2. What's HS2?

Oh, it's another failed project. London to Manchester or London to Birmingham?

London to Birmingham is the only bit that's ever going to get built.

They've been talking about it for 20 years and they're way out over budget.

We're the same in Ireland. We talk about building metros and stuff. It's like, not a chance of it. I heard that the Moscow underground is supposed to be absolutely incredible. The Moscow underground and any of the ones in New York. Can you imagine that for engineering? A whole city of tubes and stuff underneath the ground. Isn't it amazing that— I always think it's amazing the ground just doesn't just flop in on top of those tubes. I mean, I guess that's why they're secure.

Anyway, that's why you've not got a PhD in engineering.

Yes, correct. But I did— I do know, I do know an engineering, uh, trick. This is not interesting at all for most people, but, uh, the way the Hoover Dam is shaped. Did you see the way the Hoover Dam is shaped? It's not a straight— you would think they would just put a straight wall across the river to block it. No. Does everybody know this? Okay, so this isn't very, this isn't interesting at all.

Okay. That's how you make an arch stand up, is that it's curved. Because if it was flat, it would collapse.

It would just flap down. Very good, yeah.

Did you know though that they poured the concrete for the Hoover Dam so fast and so much that some of it in the heart of the dam is still wet?

Will never set, yeah, that's nuts, isn't it? It's crazy. So guys, we are Raw Pet Medics. You will find us on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. And thank you for your support there. We see you all and we really appreciate it. We really appreciate anything you can do there. Cup of tea, price of a cup of coffee each month. It really helps us this side. Times are hard and we appreciate it and we see you and we thank you. So thanks very much. Also, you can get us anywhere you listen to your podcast. So, um, and we would appreciate any of the reviews if you get a chance to give us a 5 stars on any of those podcasts. It helps to get us up the rankings. I'm not sure which apps do that, but I'm sure you guys will know when you start listening to it.

Nick, please subscribe us, yeah, on YouTube. Oh yeah, wherever you're going, please, if you think any good, please subscribe and say how good you think we are. And if you think we're rubbish, keep it to yourself.

Yeah, it helps us, it helps us go move up those rankings. So guys, we are talking about worms tonight. It's a lot. We get the questions into Patreon all the time and we try to give them most likely next show type idea, and worms is a very common one, and we have covered it a couple of times. So now that it's the season, I suppose, although I want to talk to you about that as well, and could I— could I— yeah, is it a worm— is there a worm season? I'm sure there is. I mean, anyway, we'll talk about that. I've got many questions. I've met— I have more questions than I have answers for people, but I do have a little tiny little bit prepared about a new study that came out that I just wanted to touch on and where it led me, tail wagging straight down a rabbit hole. If I could start that as an introduction for— it is about worms, if I could, and then we'll hand it over to the vets to teach us a little bit about worms. But I started thinking first of all about a nice title for this rant, and I was thinking, the parasites aren't in the food, they make it. And I thought, very clever, Conor. But this study, Parasite— Parasiteological and Molecular Investigation of Consequences of Raw Meat Feeding in Dogs and Cats, Implications for Other Pets Living Nearby. And we'll share the link on Facebook and you can have a look at that study. And what they found, okay, to cut a long story short, they have the usual first paragraph, uh, some people feeding raw claim, you know, they believe there may be some benefits, and then they get into all the dire, dire consequences of feeding real food to pets. So as soon as you see that first paragraph or two, it sets you up nearly for what the findings of this study are going to be. And you try not to, you try not to 'bring your own bias,' but that phraseology tells you the way the rest of this study is going to sound. What they found was of 81 dogs that they had a look at, 9 of them picked up some sort of parasites. And while we're talking about worms tonight, none of them were worms, as Bren rightly picked out. 6 of them picked up a fluke that lives in cows. It doesn't hurt dogs, but the dogs had it as an intermediate kind of passage of these little things. One of them had Sarcocystis. Yeah, very common in cattle, particularly if you were to Google the cattle in Hungary, 66% of them have this little nasty in there.

Where was the study done?

Hungary. Hungary. So this is where I'm going. Very good, Brad. So that was one of the dogs, and one of the dogs had a rabbit bug, Emeria something something. And so another bug, that's a bug of rabbits, not a bug of dogs again. So in fairness to the authors, they do say Is the E.

maeri.

Oh yeah, okay. I'm not sure, I doubt it's pretty for the poor old pet rabbit at the end of it, but this wasn't the pet rabbit, the dog that ate this rabbit was off in the countryside, which is a spoiler alert. But so this, of the 9 cases they picked up these bugs, but none of them harmed dogs, but that's not the point, they're still picking up nasties from eating meat from somewhere, but not nasties of them, so we'll talk about that. Here's the point, all those bugs I just mentioned, freezing kills all of those bugs, okay?

So that's the most important thing that I think we should really, really overemphasize.

Yeah, well, I think that's really important that even when we're talking about worms tonight, we're talking when this is— this, the title of the thing is from eating raw dog food, and it's like, well, when we say raw dog food, most of us are associating it with suppliers, complete raw dog food. That stuff is fast frozen, many massive companies process frozen. There is not a chance in hell a worm is coming out of complete raw dog food unless unless it was made yesterday and you got it, and like Nick's example, some of it was still defrosted in the middle, and then you'd have to be unlucky. So like, it's just, it's pretty unlikely, but that's not to say some fresh animals can have some of these bugs. I mean, you can see in some of the tripe samples, you'll see some of these little tiny fluke. I've seen pictures of them, I've had them when I was a supplier. So I understand that stuff is out there and not harmful to dogs. People are more worried about roundworms, hookworms, tapeworms, which we're going to get to. Okay, Conor, get to the point. The point is Where do these samples come from? I started Googling, I started thinking, you know, this is fresh meat issues, this is dogs scavenging on fallen cows issues, this is wild prey issue. Okay, so not a lot of people get fresh meat. There's not a lot of—

I just want you to feel like you were last week.

Yeah, I'm having a glass of wine.

I'm gonna put you in the middle, me and Nick are in the background. Okay, here we go.

As ever.

I need— oh, okay, I accept it for the moment because I need the juice. But, um, so I started thinking, okay, look, this sounds like a rural dog issue. And I started thinking, right, what's the difference between rural dogs and urban dogs in parasite load? And a study of free-ranging rural dogs in Estonia found that they are 9 times more likely to be infected with helminths, worms, than urban dogs. So that's interesting. First of all, gives us a bit of context. Urban dogs aren't picking up the worms of rural dogs. And as we just found out, rural dogs probably get access to that fresh meat, dead carcass, wild game far more. You don't see many rabbits running around, you know, Leicester Square. So that is the rural thing. So I contacted the authors and I said, where did you get the samples? And no response from the authors, which is very telling, because if you spend a lot of time doing a study, you can't— you love talking about it, you can't wait till someone asks you, because not that many people read them and you're dying to talk about yourself. No response from the authors to my questions. So that's a bit worrying. So then I start thinking, how did you take these samples? Remember in the Melbourne study, they chose the animals that were bigger, and then the animals that were bigger, the animals in the test pool were smaller, and they started making these ridiculous conclusions because they picked their samples. It wasn't random. You hear this word random, random control trials and random sampling. You've got to be real careful how you take your samples. So I started thinking about, then I thought, there's no control group here. I mean, you would think that their samples came in from vets and stuff. You start thinking, well, did the vets send in samples from gut sick dogs who may be more prone to worms? And so The main thing is no control group. If they were going to get samples from vets, okay, it'd be harder to get samples in from raw-fed dogs because there's less of them. Why didn't they just take in samples from dry-fed rural dogs as well? Wouldn't it be nice to know the incidence of these bad guys in dry-fed dogs? I mean, that is bloody obvious, and it's so telling that they didn't do it because, you know, getting a control group is easy because you're just asking vets for samples and they've more dry-fed dogs than raw-fed dogs in their books. It would have added far more weight to their findings. And the simple fact that there's no control groups, like, it's a massive red flag. So that stank a bit. Contacted them, said, what's the crack with no control groups? I wonder what the incidence of these parasites are in dry-fed dogs who also scavenge and carry in and chase rabbits and whatnot. Probably more so if you're dying for protein. And so I thought that was quite— it reminded me of the Big Tick Project, where the Big Tick Project, that was Professor Wall in Bristol University who put his name to that one, and they found 31% of UK dogs have ticks. And then in the methods it said we might have inflated the figures by the way we recruited everyone. So I'm thinking that study would have been way better if they just asked everybody what they were feeding their dogs, dumped all the dry-fed dogs, and then just said 31% of raw-fed dogs have ticks. They don't have to include the dry-fed dogs at all. So that title is very misleading. They only looked at raw. Why wouldn't they look at dry-fed dogs as well? It's so obvious that you would compare the two now that we know raw-fed dogs are healthier. Across a number of different things. Anyway, last little bit. I started thinking there must be some evidence of like raw and dry-fed dogs. Check out this study. In 2016, Neese et al. for Parasite Vectors set out to examine the risk factors for dogs shedding Toxocara canis, which is a roundworm, probably, in household dogs older than 6 months. Those younger than 6 months don't tend to shed roundworms. The overall background prevalence of these infections was about 4.5% in these populations. Increased hazards for infections were, not in any order, coprophagy, which is poo eating, geophagy, which is soil eating, walking off leash, which we just talked about, suffering from respiratory conditions, which is interesting, and feeding a commercial diet. Ooh, that's right. Of the 867 responses, 191 infections were recorded in dry-fed dogs. it ended up being an infection rate in dry-fed dogs of 0.33, whereas there was only 68 infections in the raw groups, ended up being an infection rate of 0.21, which gave a highly significant p-value. And the author's note, it's an unexpected risk factor was the feeding of a commercial diet, while feeding frozen meat appeared to be protective to roundworm infestation. Isn't that interesting? And this study about parasites didn't mention this. Can you believe it? They just missed, they forgot to include this key, key study.

That reference wasn't in their article.

It wasn't dinner brand, not at all. It's not surprising. And at the end of this 2016 piece, it said explaining that commercial bagged and canned diets are a risk factor for roundworm infections is difficult. And I was like, I'll give it a go. So off I go down this rabbit hole because remember Maya's talk which highlighted if you eat— if cats eat more omega-6 linoleic acid, it makes them more attractive to whatever bug it was. Was it toxoplasmosis? One of those fellas.

Yeah, because it's more inflammatory.

More inflammatory, okay. And so the environment is correct and the bug goes, you'll do. And so we kind of know that. In fact, studies have shown since the '40s that it's all about environment, it's all about your, the host environment, okay, and that's what keeps you protective. And lots of studies have been done. So risk factors outside, they found, are the dogs eating worm larvae— impossible on complete control and raw dog food— their housing. So if the dogs are housed on concrete, they won't grass and muck, greyhounds will pick up worms. And then third of these, of the three risk factors, was inappropriate and deficient diets. So in the '40s, they've done a whole heap of studies on cats and dogs on what makes them habitable by bugs. And I thought, this is great. So down the road— this is two days into this I'm doing. I mean, I'm serious, guys, this is so exciting. Vitamin deficiencies. Vitamin deficiencies are the number one thing for why dogs are picking up worms. If you want to pick up a type of roundworm called Acanella, which we have all heard of, you need to be deficient in vitamin A. So vitamin A deficiency in rats lowers their resistance to an infection of roundworm. And then there's lots of other studies in that vein. Foster and Court lowered the resistance of dogs previously infected with a hookworm more commonly found in cats, Anislosthoma canium, by giving them a deficient— a diet deficient in A and B vitamins. So A and B vitamins can make a dog more prone to hookworms that normally prefer to live in cats. So A and B, A and B. And what are the two vitamins that ultra-processing hammers out of diets? A and B. Studies show in Björk in 1983, B1, B5, B12, C is annihilated by processing storage times. I'm just skipping through a long paragraph. A and B are seen to be very deficient in canned food. 89% of the vitamin A was lost in processing. That was a study by Mooney in 2010. So A and B deficiency in dry-fed dogs, canned-fed dogs would be high. And the studies in the '30s and '40s show that makes you rife for worm infestation. And the last little thing I found, so I'm skipping down through paragraphs here, one more little gem that I just want to read over about them. Then I found a bit in a study from 1962 which found that all dogs with Toxocara excreted fewer eggs when given a carbohydrate-free diet of cooked horse meat. Compared to dogs fed starch-rich foods of cereals and fats.

Okay, do you want to just do a summary of your findings there, Conor, just so that if anybody came in a bit late, just summarize the whole thing.

The hungry— okay, I'll skip the hungry study. Okay, what seems to be the case is that it's very much about environment. It's very much about some animals are prone to these bugs and some animals are not. And we all suspected that, you know, we suspected the parasites in fact, the weak, the, you know, the 4D animals— dead, diseased, dying, disabled— the very young, the very old, for all the same reason. Your immune system's completely distracted, you're shattered. So it's all about environment, but it turns out having the wrong 3:6 ratio— so lots of the plant oils and omega-6 makes you inflamed, and so you're more prone to bugs— having deficiency in A and B complex is going to make you more kind of vulnerable to worms, and higher carbohydrate diets will mean you will shed more of those worms. So there are 3 concrete findings that would explain why studies show commercial diets make you more prone to worms. That's a study from 2016. And I just thought the very last point is that when bullshit studies like this first one I talked about, when those studies come out and don't talk about all those key factors, they distract people from the true point of what's going on. Science is so interesting. And there, after a day's worth of investigation, we found, ooh, 'Best not be low in vitamin A, D, get your 3 and 6.' Simple little facts that we now know that could protect you from worm infestation. They blanketed all that away to scare you about eating fresh food. And not like— and I just find that reprehensible. We're getting distracted from the good things to keep us healthy to focus on the crap to keep us sick. And it just really, really annoyed me. And that is it. So that's my bit on worms that I found out over the last few days, guys.

Okay, so my thoughts on that—

He's so good at his monologue.

Yes, I was really happy.

15 minutes, mate. Yeah, very, very good.

Sorry, lads.

Just to kind of put this in kind of some kind of global context, for me it's really obvious that I think that the big food corporations know exactly what they're doing and they just don't care. That's my opinion. I may be wrong, but it's like things that have happened perhaps in the last 3, 4 years that they know that there's a lot of problems and they're all going looking, looking the other way. Yeah, you know, they're all going look and everybody's scared to break rank. You know, who's going to come from Mars or Nestlé? Well, Colgate-Palmolive and say, I'm really sorry, we were wrong. Actually, feeding fresh and raw food is actually more healthy. Surprisingly, it's just not going to happen. Okay, and these studies that you're showing actually demonstrates that when you read the fine print, it demonstrates exactly that. They're absolutely saying, we know what's happening, we know that A and B are really good, helps to drop your your worm levels, but we're going to ignore it and we're just going to just find some pseudo-flaw in the argument against raw. I'm going to say obviously raw is really bad. Feeding fresh rabbits that the dog has just picked up in the field to your dog is not raw feeding, and they're likely to pick up worms because that's the way Mother Nature likes to do it. The rabbit has worms, it goes to the dog and what have you. That's not raw feeding.

We've got a caveat on that.

If you freeze freeze that. No, I'm saying straight from the field. But if you freeze— freezing is the answer really, as far as worms are concerned with raw. If we just want to summarize the entire 45 minutes, freeze the meat before it goes into the dog, at least a week in a normal freezer at about minus— normal freezer, minus 18, boys?

Yeah, yeah.

So if you do that, make sure everything goes in the freezer before it goes in the dog.

That's number one.

If you're buying meat, don't get it from Waitrose or Tesco's or Asda or something like that and feed it straight to the dog, as many people are prone to do. Put it in the freezer before you put it in the dog, okay? It's got to be in the freezer for at least a week, because if you put a whacking great, you know, economy 2-kilo lump in the freezer and take it out 3 days later, like the Hoover Dam, that middle of that section is going to be unfrozen. And so you're going to be exposing the dog to a certain level of of potential, uh, egg, um, worm eggs. It's the eggs that do the damage. If you see— if you feed dogs worms, they're probably not going to do anything unless they're full of eggs. It's the eggs. They pick up eggs in the soil and from feces and what have you. That's the thing. And when you freeze meat, you kill the eggs and any kind of, uh, um, infected larvae. Yeah, and the larvae as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think— could we just caveat this a little bit? Because we're talking a lot about about what's in the meat, and the majority of worms that we worry about for our pets are not in this category of going to be consumed. There are some of the parasites that were in that study which are to do with coccidia and, you know, sarcocystis and toxoplasma, which is not a worm, not toxocara, neospora. These are not worms. They're separate, and we're going to talk about those in another live.

Tiny little single-cell things.

The majority of people that are worried about their kids' eyesight, you know, seizure activity, you know, children being affected by Toxocara, you know, is through worms from the dog's mum that have passed through placenta or through the milk into the puppy are now dormant in your dog's muscle until their immune system goes down, and then they will go back through the life cycle. So actually nothing to do with their eating, uh, from, you know, prey or anything like that. That's all that's all within the dog. Okay, so then if those live those adult worms can produce up to 200,000 eggs a day once they come through as a live Toxocara, and they will excrete onto the ground. And absolutely, if you get coprophagia, as Nick was talking about, if you get, you know, which is eating poo, if you get them eating the soil in ground which has been contaminated, which some dogs are want to do, if they eat their food on that contaminated ground These are risks, but they're relatively low unless you've got a burden of worms. Okay, now those worms, again, you will not see those eggs. So the number of people that say to me, oh, I've never seen a worm, you know, the worms only will come out in the feces if there's so many they're elbowing each other out for space. Because as soon as the adult is out in the feces it can't clamber back in. It's not some horror show. It's not going to, you know, you lie down to camp at night and it wriggles up your nose and before you know it you're there. Okay, these are dead once they're out. Okay, the eggs becoming larvae consumed are the only thing that, once consumed and into the intestine, eats their way through the wall of the intestine. This is why the inflammatory markers are important. Because the more inflamed your gut is, the more readily those worm larvae are likely to eat through and then get into your liver, eat their way up through the chest, coughed up in the sputum and swallowed, and create adult worms. That's Toxocara for you. Horrific. Sounds horrendous.

Absolutely sounds—

can cause granulations in, you know, most of us If our immune systems are right, they'll granulate in the muscle. You'll never know that you've ever consumed them. For the children that are unfortunate enough to get a granuloma in the retina, that can cause blindness in severity if it's close to the optic nerve. It can cause just a blurring if it's away somewhere else in the retina. It's rare, okay, but it is seen. Okay, I've known of a child with that. That condition, um, and it is something that people get concerned about, but they always overegg it. There's this whole thing of somehow 100% of children's playgrounds have toxicara.

Does chemical worming clear toxicara dormant bodies inside a puppy's muscle tissue?

Uh, no, no, it only is active on the active parts. Even some of the most modern wormers the advantage that these Toxocara larvae have in hibernation is they are not affected in significance by those wormers. So it's only when your animal is stressed and their immune system is down and they hatch out. As soon as they're in larval stage, you can kill them.

Yeah. Okay, so it's not a guarantee that you can clear your dog of this dreaded disease with a chemical wormer.

So then we're totally separate now from a raw versus kibble, other than you're more predisposed if you're eating the larvae and eggs to allow those larvae to migrate through the gut lining, you know, up through the body and generate in, in that sense of becoming infected for your dogs. So actually, versely to what you were— they were trying to suggest, you are more predisposed if you're eating a high-processed diet that's more inflammatory to the gut.

Okay.

So I think slightly different from the whole meat argument, which if you're talking about certain tapeworm and a very few roundworms, usually in pork meats and things like that, and boar, wild boar, There are a very few which actually, as Nik was saying, killed by freezing, absolutely. That's one of the reasons that they used to freeze carcasses in the slaughterhouse, okay, just to sort of make sure. But meat inspection should determine if there's a risk there or not. They do check through their cheek muscle in many cases just to see, is there any signs of cysts occurring in that fresh rabbit on the field? The tapeworm, which is the most likely issue, is in the abdominal cavity. So if you've gutted it and had a look, you'll see this gelatinous-like globular thing that sits in the abdominal cavity. You can strip it out, throw it away, that's the tapeworm gone. Or you can freeze it, as Nick quite rightly says. Your choice if you don't like to get your hands bloodied. Okay, interesting.

It's the first thing that my dogs do if they take down a rabbit or a hare in the field. They first thing they'll do is go into the abdomen.

And do they take— do they eat the stomach contents as well as— you tell me, tell me.

Oh, it's back to that.

I need to know.

I interviewed Nick, you know these guys, they kill deer just as a part of wildlife sort of regeneration farming stuff down in Devon and they feed their dogs on the raw carcass. And so I asked this very question. I said, Conor will love this. So I've got this on one of the—

don't make me wait.

And they use the venison, you know, so they hang the venison and they, you know, gralloch them, so they take the intestines out. And I said, so, so what do they eat? Do they, do they just eat the, the bit of intestine? Do they eat the whole thing? Do they eat I'm sorry, Conor. No, they eat the whole lot. No, the content.

This is— listen, listen, my answer to that, because I refuse to be wrong on this one. I cannot be wrong. I have talked too much shit about it.

Listen, the—

you— we've all seen—

this isn't me saying it, Conor.

This is your friend of a friend. We've all got a friend of a friend. We've seen videos of cats chewing on broccoli. You know, and I'm like, okay, listen, these guys are rearing their dogs on bellies full of grass, 3.5 kilos of grass, and the dogs just lashing through it in the room under the deer. No way. Not in a male fallow deer, not in a male red deer. They're not going to eat 3 kilos of grass. I don't accept this. No, no, no, no, no. But I am interested and I want to know more. So that's very interesting.

I asked him next time he does it, film it.

Film.

Yeah, that's interesting.

The whole thing is that everybody says they don't eat rumen contents, and I can kind of— I can kind of go with that. But if they're super hungry, I think they would go for the, for the rumen itself. However, I do think they would go for the intestines.

Yeah, yeah, you do say that. I accept that, Nick. This— what— so what, Nick, what are the worms? Um, what are the— I— when I think of worms, I think of roundworm, hookworm, whipworm. They're the worms I think about. Yeah, these are all worms inside the gut. So where are dogs picking these up from, and what can you do? Oh, oh, Brian doesn't agree. I've said something.

No, there's another, there's another element, because for those people that worm egg count is on numbers, and I'll come back to that. So remind me.

Okay, cool. And we'll finish with lungworm. We'll do lungworm for Patreon. So I think, can you do the practical for the last little— yeah, exactly.

So My experience of, because I've been worm counting for the last 10, 15 years, is that 19 out of 20 adult dogs who are wormed or not, obviously if they're wormed with pharmaceuticals they're probably going to be free, but if they haven't, and somebody said in the comments actually, haven't done my dogs for years and years and they are still worm free. Okay, hope the best way to do a worm sample is you get 3 samples Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, send them off to, I use wormcount.com and then you know whether the dog's got worms or not. That's the important thing. It's easy to look for round eggworms. Tapeworms are not as easy to see because they're very intermittent with their shedding of worms. But the big picture is, why use a pharmaceutical wormer even if you're up on a pet health plan and your vet is giving it to you every month, every 3 months? Why use a pharmaceutical when you can just do a test? Maybe you can talk to your vet about getting a test on their pet health plan. Now that is, I think, is a very, very good idea. And I've spoken to several veterinary practices about it. Bren over there does exactly that.

Yeah, so we've got, we've got a special piece of kit, the Imagist, which does worm egg counts within the practice. So rather than the nurses having to go boggle-eyed over it uses AI. So unlike the standard where they used to just sort of like choose a few areas, try and count a specific amount and see per gram how many eggs there were, this counts the whole slide. So it's super, you know, and it just does it all for you. Any egg, it takes a picture and it saves it. So all the slides, so everything, it knows exactly what's there, and then it will give you the counts per gram. And this is why I'm going to come back to that, why it's so important.

That's what they're going to put people that look at imaging of tumors in tissue. AI is going to put them out of business overnight because it never gets tired. It just has these and it has the world's tumors to compare to. Anyway, Nick, go ahead, keep going.

So if 19 out of 20 in my experience, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, guys, 19 out of 20 are negative year after year after year, even if you don't use anything personally, with, with our dogs and our cats and our growing menagerie, we're using Vermex. And, um, we use that just on a monthly basis, and, uh, I'm very happy with that. Some people don't even use Vermex and they still get negative counts year after year after year. And so the, the whole point, it's a bit like kids. Kids will get lice, head lice, at some point, or they'll get worms at some point before they're 10, 12 years old. Okay, that's just the way it is. Do we give our children pharmaceutical preparations in the hair or for worms? Kids get worms. Do we give them continual pharmaceuticals in order to combat, you know, possibly even a once in a lifetime event, or at least once in a childhood time event for, for children. It makes no sense to me, and I'd love to hear your reflections on that, boys.

Yeah, absolutely. We started— I mean, some of the devastating thoughts when you look at sustainable farming and you understand the nematodes within the soil, how important they are. Yeah, impact of having all of that dog feces. People say, yeah, but I bag it. No, well, so then it goes into a and what do you think happens to all of the effluent that leaches out of that tip? You know, it gets into our waterways, it gets back onto the land, you know, it's all sorts of stuff. So let's, let's not go down that route. We do offer it now if anybody, you know, some people want wormers, but we just say on the plan, please bring faeces in, we'll do the worm egg counts. If it needs, you know, any treatment, we'll look at the other options like Vermex. You know, I know, Nick, you love Vermex. You work closely with them.

I've worked with them for a long time. It's a family business.

And then, you know, if you're not sure how effective that is, you can retest, you know. And that's the beauty of checking— is the herbal stuff that you're using, yeah, working? And I would say, you know, guys, I'm really sorry for those people that use diatomaceous earth. If there's one product out there that I've seen fail, especially in the face of a worm burden, it is diatomaceous earth.

Okay, not many people are feeding that.

I think those people are careful and monitor if they've got a positive. Don't assume the diatomaceous earth has worked. Please retest.

Yeah.

Okay, but coming back very briefly, remember, some people will— if they go to an external thing, they'll come back with a negative, but a positive is more than 20 eggs per gram. Okay, and some will go the other way, and if there's 1 egg per gram, yeah, they will still class that as a positive and think they need to use a chemical wormer. And I would say, please, please, please retest. And number 2, think, does your dog dog or cat, but dog, eat vermin or feces, like, like, no, so feces such as from, you know, sheep poo, horse muck, anything like that. Because the number of eggs I think are coming through, especially of hookworm and whipworm—

oh, that's interesting—

which are found normally in our soil. But so gardeners beware, if you don't wash your hands and you've got a heavily infested soil, you can pick these up, these infestations yourself if you've got an inflamed gut. But if you've not got an inflamed gut and you're good, the eggs can pass all the way through.

It could be passing straight through and you're just taking a sample.

If you've got one egg and it's not even, you know, embryonated, it's not gone into a larvae, yeah, it may be that it's not actually anything other than passing all the way through. So please beware of those really low counts. Retest.

I've got a hot take. I've got a hot take. Okay, listen to this now. Bear with me. A hot take. Okay, look, there was a cool thing that came out on Nat Geo there recently as a study by the— um, maybe I can't remember, but it came out in National Geographic. But, um, they said that gray wolves exposed to Toxoplasma gondii the parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis, are more than 46 times more likely to become a pack leader than uninfected wolves. I know, and I start thinking, okay, listen, first of all, worms are a very normal part of— as Ben was saying, it's part of the soil. Parasites are part of us. We used to rage against E. coli. If you kill all the E. coli, you will totally go into dysbiosis. Because they've managed things in there. You kill all the yeast, E. coli will grow. Kill all the E. coli, yeast will grow. They're completely related. And for all we know, worm burdens play some sort of role in there. First of all, we've got a big anti-helminthic kind of, um, or helminthic resistance, you know, anti-helminthic resistance. So the worms are evolving the way around this, okay? The chemicals that they use, they have to use more of them, particularly in farms. So natural worming is what it's all about. But maybe worms play some sort of role. So my question is, I bet you if I went looking through the literature, there may be some benefits to having some worm burdens. And I remember one or two examples at the way back of my mind about humans having worm burdens and the benefits to some in some areas when they have these worm burdens. I'll come back to that. But for now, the question is, how did Mother Nature allow mum to pass the, the bugs on to the child? Is there any sort of benefit to introducing a young pup to these sort of parasites I mean, you would think that the placenta would be so highly evolved that this does not pass. We don't pass on bacterial infections to infants via placenta. Like, I mean, how the bloody hell did an enormous worm larvae type egg thing— like, is there any possibility that when gut-sick dogs eat huge amounts of soil or poo, and they're very prone to containing these things, maybe a tiny thing we're missing is that— is there any sort of hope that but, um, one of the things was when you have a certain worm burden, it brings on a part of your immune system that works in the healing process.

And so it reduces allergy. So I mean, there's that whole thing, okay, about allergy control, and, and therefore including things like asthma all the way through to, you know, the eczema, psoriasis, and all of those skin things seemed to improve in certain cases with certain worms. And there was that horrible program on the TV about people, you know, ingesting certain tapeworms. You can buy them, you know, not just to lose weight but to actually try and, you know, get yourself to a point. So they even put them cameras, you know, these little capsule cameras, made them swallow them to show the worms that were growing in their intestine after they'd consumed these egg packets. But showing the improvements that they had as far as their other allergic conditions. So I can understand this modulation of the immune system may be one of those benefits that comes from, maybe a consequence of rather than purposeful symbiosis. Because the true thing of parasites compared to a symbiotic organism is that the parasite parasite takes. Okay, um, you know, and I'm not going to go into some people's comments about, um, no, anyway, the correlation, the big correlation here, boys, is the, is the, uh, hygiene hypothesis.

Okay, so yeah, the last 50 years we've got a lot, lot cleaner, and we've got even got, you know, oh my God, gotta use the Dettol everywhere all the time. And I mean, there's that study, I think it's from Germany, where they said that your chance of getting asthma and eczema as a child is inversely proportional to how many times your mum wipes the kitchen surface. That is, if she wipes it a lot, you're more likely to get asthma.

Wow.

Uh, uh, and if she's not quite so, so, uh, squeaky clean, you're less likely to get the, the asthma and eczema. And there's the other studies that, that when they go into the so-called third world— I think they're possibly more advanced than us, but so-called third world— they go in in and they worm everybody. And lo and behold, the, the, the, the, the rates of these autoimmune or immune-mediated disease, asthma and eczema, climb when they make that kind of intervention. Now they probably go and vaccinate them as well, which is a whole other story. Oh yeah, but there is, there is a correlation. And Bren, you were referring to that as well. There is, there's a seesaw, isn't it? You know, if there is some parasite, then you've got less immune-mediated disease, because the immune system, if you like, is shining its spotlight on the gut, and it's not shining it on your lungs or your skin or whatever it might be. That's kind of the simplistic way. So just in the last couple of minutes before we go over to Patreon, boys, just a final practical thought so that we can leave everybody with a positive—

yeah, I guess, could I bring one thing in especially? And frequency. How often should I worm egg count my dogs? Okay, so I think for me, and I'll go first if I may, and Nick, I'd love to hear what you're advising. I had a really interesting conversation with the nurse that did the whole playground examination of toxocara back last year, autumn last year. But she was absolutely adamant that you should be worming every month because it was that horrendous, the amount of positives. Now, I don't know how much that is other animals, how much wildlife can perpetuate the, um, the level of Toxocara-type species within the ground, how much mistakes there's made with, with what's in there, because it seemed incredulous considering the amount of worming that they were doing even back in 2000. The second thing was the amount of fencing off of children's playgrounds that there are, that actually there would be this level of contamination.

Good point.

That they were saying just about every playground had it. Um, so I think there's that element there. She was saying, unlike with farm animals, if it's not a closed system then resistance was not being detected in these worms. Now, I would suggest that that, for me, doesn't seem to carry true, because any organism ultimately will find a way if you're using enough of the chemical to try and destroy it. It's not going to be finding a resistance to that particular chemical by purposely going, oh, hey up guys, the drum sits out, let's start developing resistance to it. It's just going to be a genetic chance that you will find those worms which are resistant to that particular wormer. So I think, look, put those to bed. I've said about the odd low counts, I'm not worried. Retest. So stop guessing, start testing. And for me, I think looking at every 3 months. So initially when they're young pups and they've just been on mum especially for Toxocara. I would say, you know, when they come to you, 8 weeks. Unfortunately, if they come to you at 6 weeks, then yeah, you know, even then, do them at least every couple of weeks until they're 6 months of age and see if you catch anything. If you get negatives, okay, then brilliant. Just then move to every 3 months. And if they're still negative and you feel that it's too much of a burden, pardon the pun, to keep on every 3 months, by all means, you know, after year 1 of doing them every 3 months and they've carried on negative, cut back and do every 6 months and do whatever you can afford to keep checking. But I would say there is a risk the longer you space out that, that you will miss them because you will not see the eggs in the feces. Okay, they are microscopic. Okay, so unless you've got a microscope and you're mashing the poo and floating the eggs, you finding them is really quite difficult.

Okay, top tip. Top Knot has just written in and said, I'd love to do it that often, but it's too expensive.

Yeah.

And here's— so here's a top tip. I would agree with Bren totally that every 2 to 3 months, especially when you, when you start off with an adult— and an adult, as far as worms are concerned, is over about 6 months of age— Yeah, so over 6 months of age, every 2 to 3 months. And as you just see, no, no, no, no, no worms. You do it less frequently. I wouldn't go below about every 6 months, okay? And keep an eye on the poos and what have you for tapes. But actually, we've just had— Jet has just produced a whole load of spaghetti, i.e., roundworms, which is rather charming. So they are still available in pups, but he was a rescue and God knows where he's, he's been. Anyway, what I was going to say was, if you've got more than one dog, it is more— it is expensive, especially if you're doing, you know, every 2-3 months. But what you can do is you can do a group. This is what farmers do. They'll, they'll take samples from a number of, of the animals and put them together. So let's say you've got 4 dogs, or even 2 dogs, you every 3 months you put— you take a little hazelnut-sized piece of poo from from Georgie, and then you take a hazelnut-sized piece of poo from Freddy, and you put them together and you send them off as a, as a group. You can mix them up if you like— I wouldn't— and you get them tested. And then if there's any positive whatsoever, then you need to do something about it. And, uh, in Patreon, let's talk about what we can do about worms, perhaps. How about that? Yeah, to leave us on a bit about—

yeah, sounds good.

When you find lungworm and gutworms, because there are a few little nice tricks.

Lovely.

Conor, last, just last thoughts.

Yeah, I don't test as regularly as you guys do. I think you're vets and I think it's probably in your heads, you see more worms than I do, but I don't recommend that much that often, and I don't see them in Dublin in these 10, 12 years. I don't know how many tests I've done, but not a lot.

Is there a Dog's First product?

There is a Dog's First product. I'm allowed to push my own product because, look, there's lots of natural preventatives. There's things that make the environment inhospitable to worms because they're in the gut. It means that the things you put in there can touch them and they're single-celled kind of on the outside, so you can, you can hit them with stuff pretty easy. And so things like garlic can make things inhospitable to bugs, we hope. I would say if you went looking for the studies to support that, you'd probably find more studies for garlic than my neck next point, which really kills off me pushing my own product. But I always pushed pumpkin seeds, and I like red seaweed. Dulse was what people ate in the famine back 150 years ago in Ireland. And so that was— dulce contains kynic acid, and kynic acid, when it's taken out of red seaweed, really does work to kill worms. But I don't know how much red seaweed you have to use. But our product contains half red seaweed, half Styrian pumpkin seeds, because those pumpkin seeds are the highest based in cucurbitacin. So I like red seaweed for cholinic acid, I like pumpkin seeds for cucurbitacin. And the last time I said this live, Ben goes, oh, is there many studies to support that? I went, oh, I mean, that will soar. And then I went off and then huffed and I said, well, I'm going to find loads of studies and mashed them in his face. And I didn't find oodles. I found lots of stuff. I found some of the extracts and that kind of stuff, but actual studies of dogs being fed pumpkin seeds and seeing who picked up worms or not those studies don't exist. You're not going to run a study of 100 dogs eating pumpkin seeds, 100 not, because dogs so rarely pick up worms, it would just be impossible to run that for how long. So those studies don't really exist, and so it's a pity, but that's what I use. I use red seaweed because it's nutritious, and I use pumpkin seeds ground up. There's no husk on the outside. I love that product. It's simple. You can buy pumpkin seeds, any sort of pumpkin seeds will do, but they have— the ones you buy that are cheap have a husk on the outside of them, so they need to be at least soaked. What's the product called? Kanex. K-A-N-E-X. Yeah, look, it's a popular product, but I think sometimes people buy products thinking it's like a wormer, and I'm like, that's a different field. That's like, if you're going the natural route of killing worms, you're going for wormwood and black walnut hull and these things that if you see in a veterinary herbal website, those 2 or 3, grapeseed extract, they can really work, but you've got to be careful using them, and you need to hold the hand of Brian or Nick or a veterinary herbalist when you're using them because too much of that can cause issues. But if you've got a worm burden, you should be talking, maybe talking to a vet. In fact, we'll bring that to Patreon and tell us if you—

yeah, a natural approach to controlling worms.

Yeah.

Wow, what have we got next week, guys?

Is that the guest or is that the week after? It's the week after. What have we got next week? I don't know, it sounds like we've got to stay on critters because we just named— pork would be a good one, guys. Q&A.

Oh yeah, when you know what's going on.

Yeah, I don't. A week on pork would be good, guys. Pork, Yersinia, and a few other critters that pork is— let's do pork. Oh yeah, hepatitis E. Oh, hepatitis E. Yeah, okay, cool. Um, so yeah, that was great, guys. Thanks very much. We are packed— we are, uh, Raw Pet Medics. You will find us on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Thanks for listening, guys. Really appreciate it. For those on Patreon, you will see us for an extra 15 minutes for a bit on the side. So thanks for joining us, fellas. That was great. Love that. Cheerio, all. See you all.

Bye-bye now.