Nick Rick, Dr. Conor Brady, and Brendan break down tripe for raw-fed dogs: what it is, how it's processed, and why sourcing matters. Grass-fed tripe has far fewer pathogens than grain-fed CAFO tripe. They cover safety concerns like salmonella and E. coli, and whether the bacteria and post-biotics actually benefit a dog's gut.
Chapters
Here we are, here we are once again. We're going to be talking, talking utter, utter tripe, and you're going to say, what's new, what's new. What's up guys, how are you, all good?
Very good, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think we're, uh, I'm raring to go. This is going to be a popular topic. Isn't it funny how one little piece of meat gets people most animated? I mean, this is easily everyone's favorite bit of a cow for some reason.
I always find it very helpful how you say that. And could I just say before we start, thanks to Maudie for the photos.
Okay. Hat to come from Maudie, our tripe queen. Okay. But yes, this was last summer. These were the cleaned up version, Conor, before you think there's anything else coming.
There is better photographs I'd like to see, but another time.
So we're talking this stuff.
Yeah.
These photographs. Maudie is the tripe queen. She is simplyrawfeeding.co.uk, canine nutritionist. Guys, check her out. And very few people know more about tripe than her, but between the three of us, I'm sure we could put together some sort of show on it. And also thanks to Karen for all the questions. Karen, you did a great job. A lot of people send in a lot of questions. This is one of the busier nights for questions, so thank you, Karen, for organizing our thoughts for all that. That's fantastic. But yeah, Bren, so did you learn much about tripe when you were with Maudie?
Oh yeah, well, it was, it was a mutual thing. I think it was, you know, talking about the number of chambers, the different types of tripe, because, you know, this is obviously from beef. We went through all of the stuff about from lamb through to even venison, totally different type of tripe, you know, from— so this is all stomach lining, you know, it's all stomach. But people think about stomach lining. It's not just stomach lining. There's all the musculature within the stomach.
Stomach.
There's often a lot of a mental fat. If you looked at the original photo, we had a great photo that we— in fact, I'm going to stick this back up. I wonder if they'll come along. Let's see. Oh, anyway, guys, if you—
by the way, guys, it's not— yeah, it's not just the lining. It is the stomach. It's the wall. It's all the muscular layers. It's the mucosal layers. It's the bacteria, it's the saliva, it's everything. Okay. And that's why it's so important. That's what we're going to go through today.
Yeah. Well, actually, you know, we are Raw Pet Medics on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. Guys, if you can visit there and give us the price of tea or a cup of coffee, we deeply appreciate it. Some of you that are doing it, we really appreciate that. We're also on podcasts wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you can rate us, please do, guys. We want to climb those rankings and we won't be happy until we're topping the list. please just pause for a second with the doggies, stand on the lead. That's what I have to do when I pause with Dudley because he just pulls on the lead instantly, and then I can use my phone for a moment. So please do that. We deeply appreciate that support, and tell your friends and share it around. So yeah, should we begin with a little explanation? May I begin with a little explanation of what tripe is? Because I studied this for 3 and a half years in college for my doctorate. Did you know that?
I'm sure I've told you before.
Please, can I just check this? So for your doctorate, you just basically blurb out a load of tripe.
Absolutely.
Is that what you're saying?
Tripe and deer poo. That was, that was my, my, my studies. Like, the first thing is that the people use the word stomach all the time, right? So they say cows have 4 stomachs, and that kind of bothers me. It's like cows don't have 4 stomachs. Okay. So like, that would suggest that you've got 4 digesting chambers and it's so— no, you've got 4 compartments. Okay. But they each do a different thing. Okay. And only one of them has what could be described as a stomach, the abomasum. That's the last one. It's smooth like a glove. And in that you'll get a few digestive juices and acids and whatnot being released. Yes, that's the last chamber. This first chamber we're looking at in these 4 gut fermenting chew and the cud species, these guys, this is for holding huge volumes of food. Okay, so grass is the poorest food source on the planet. So you have to eat, if you're something that eats grass, you have to be enormous because you have to take in huge volumes of this every day and you can't digest grass. Okay, but what you can do is you can farm bacteria that digest the grass for you. So you bring in huge volumes, you chew it down with all the saliva and juice and goo, and you bring it down into the belly, the first, the tripe. Okay, this is the rumen, they call it, and they hold that material and then they bring it up later on for a chew, like a bit of chewing gum, and they send it back down again. And that process churns and heats up the mixture and you get this bacteria digesting the grass down. And when it's small enough, it passes into the reticulum, and the reticulum is about a fifth of the size of this enormous room and 4 kilos in weight when it's empty in a cow. But this reticulum can be about half a kilo as well. It's like a very large tennis ball. I don't know what sort of ball that is. And it's kind of netted, like honeycomb shaped. It's such a cool shape. And that job is to take the smaller bits. It has a little narrow opening from this massive room, and it takes the smaller bits and organizes them and then passes them down into the omasum. And the omasum is this cool organ which is like small and full of little tiny leaves. Have you ever seen it? You can peel the leaves like a book all the way around. Like, I mean, 30, 40, 50 of these leaves. And the idea of that is to extract all the water and bits and pieces from the grass. So by the time it gets down to the abomasum, this digesting chamber, it's actually goo. Okay. And so this, this, this goo is easier digested and off it goes down into the intestines when it's ready to go. So that's the only digesting chamber. The rumen doesn't digest, it just holds bacteria. It's a fermenting chamber, I guess that's what you would call it. And In that lies a lot of cool stuff, because if you've got cool bacteria, they produce a lot of postbiotics. And so that's kind of what the tripe does. And all these animals have these big bellies. Okay, so you've got deer and you got lamb or sheep. That's much a slucier tripe. It stinks, I think. I mean, beef tripe stinks, but lamb tripe and venison and all sorts have this belly. The reason you don't see a lot of venison tripe is because they leave it on the mountain when they shoot the deer. Farm deer, you might find a bit of venison tripe, but they're not going to bring the belly and gut contents of the deer off the mountain because they can't carry it. So if you're eating farm deer, you might get a bit of venison tripe. I know a couple of people sourcing it, but yeah, so that's the tripe in a nutshell. I thought I'd give that description to people to set them up.
I'm just going to come in with a linguistic kind of just out of interest. Now, number one is, uh, even humans will say, I'm just going to ruminate on that, which I think is quite nice because when When cattle or sheep, they just kind of sit down and they regurgitate some of this material from the rumen back up so that they can break it down further so that the bacteria can eat it as well. Okay, so that's called rumination. So we've taken that on, and so even we non-ruminants ruminate, which is quite nice. That's chewing cud.
Chewing the cud.
Chewing the cud. Chewing the cud.
Chewing the cud. It's very nice. And the other thing is the fore stomachs, if you spell it F-O-R-E, you're actually anatomically correct because you've got the true stomach, the abomasum, yeah, and then you've got 3 pre stomachs which are called the fore, the B4 stomach. So you've got 3 fore stomachs, If you're with me, is everybody with me?
I'm not.
Okay, so you think we're out of the 210 followers right now?
I think we've just lost 150 of them.
209. No, no, no, no, no, stay with me. So because this is important, you and I have got stomach, okay? And imagine if you created 3 stomachs ahead of that to sort out what's going to go into the real stomach. They would be called fore— F-O-R-E— yeah, before stomachs. Okay. And that's all the cattle and sheep and goats and venison do. They have these pre-stomachs, the fore— F-O-R-E— stomachs to prepare everything before it goes into the real stomach, the real digestive acidic stomach where there's mucus and acid and what have you. Just wanted to point that out because I like that kind of thing.
Yeah. It's also, it's interesting how they organize things in their stomach. So when you see deer will scavenge all sorts of bits and pieces. And so in these 4 chambers, you've got this enormous tripe initially, and then you've got the reticulum in the second chamber, and all the debris gathers in the reticulum. It doesn't gather in the room. And so like half tube plastic bags, half a golf ball, bottle caps, they're all in the reticulum. It stops there. And so you can actually, that can actually get quite clogged with dirt when the deer live in there. In public parks like Phoenix Park, one of the largest enclosed parks in Europe, in fact. And did you know about tripe from my project, which nobody's going to find interesting to lose the last 20 followers that are still listening? And it varies in size during the year because why would the tripe get bigger in winter and smaller in the summer? Why does it get bigger and heavier?
Because the quality of the forage reduces.
Yes, because in relation to what Nick was saying earlier, that's a— it's a muscle. It's all muscle. It's got all sorts of different types of longitudinal and, uh, what's the other one, muscle, and to contract it all the time. And so if it's working a harder forage, a tougher forage in wintertime, it gets heavier in weight. And so, uh, because female deer aren't as big, male deer can take this poor grass forage, but female deer are smaller, so they eat higher quality food, berries and nuts, and they hang out in forests. The lads will happily just graze all winter on this, on this dirt poor food. Anyway, that's probably enough about, uh, what the tripe actually does. And I think one of the common questions would be people want to know, uh, What's the difference between like washed tripe and bleached tripe? I think people are of the belief that there's folk out there actually putting bleach on tripe. Do you guys want to go through the process of what that is, or do you want me to— do you want me to—
I'm happy to jump in there. Okay. Because I have eaten bleached tripe. Okay. I did a post on my Instagram recently. No, probably 6 months ago or so. Because I thought if I'm talking about tripe all the time, I need to have tried it. And to be honest, it's a bit like squid, but a little bit more squidgy than squid, if you've ever tried squid. Okay, so bleached tripe is the stuff that you will get in certain butchers, certain northern butchers, if I can be so northernist. Okay. And it's a classic, you know, tripe and onions is, you know, it's kept Britain alive for years and years and years. And That's what humans have. Yeah, they bleach it with literally with hypochlorite, a bit like Domestos or a bit like, you know, a chlorine-based cleaning agent to get rid of all the bacteria. Okay. And that's fair enough. And people like that. As far as the tripe that you get from the, from the abattoir, if it comes straight from the abattoir, it's going to have loads of this gooey rumen contents, which is basically grass soup in various stages of digestion. Okay, that's unwashed, but most of it will have a hose on it for a bit, to a greater or lesser extent, just to get rid of the, the gross contamination. And essentially, those are pretty similar in terms of how much goodness there is, because all the stomach has not really changed that very, that very much. So I'd say If it's unwashed, it's just mucky to deal with. But there's prebiotics there. The grass is prebiotic. There's a vast amount of probiotics because dogs have been eating cattle and sheep and goats for millions and millions of years. So they've got a great relationship with all those amazing bugs. And oh, you're losing something.
Well, if this is QI, the noise would go off where you start saying about animals eating bellies. Okay. So this is a very contentious topic.
And, and okay, good, let's go there. Let's get into it.
Okay, let's go on then. Actually, first of all, can I just rewind to the bleach bit? You're not allowed to use bleach in the, in the food chain, okay? Humans or dogs, you're not allowed to use bleach. So the, the terminology is raw tripe, okay, which we use in raw dog food. That can really only come from grass-fed cows because the US doesn't feed green tripe at all because they're all CAFO-raised beef and they're fed wheat and corn, and that's what grows salmonella and E. coli. So a grass-fed cow has 300 times less salmonella per mil than—
I was just going to raise exactly that. Yeah, well done. No, keep going.
So that's why we don't have raw dog foods beefed up with tripe, pardon the pun, in the US. So raw tripe is great over here, tricky to get over in the US. So that's the first thing. But then they have washed tripe. So washed tripe is where they hose it down and it still looks greenish, and as Nick was saying, has some of the goodies still on it, and that's fine because it dissolves holes and stuff. And all those little finger projections in the, in the rumen, they're called villi for increasing the, the surface area of the thing. And you have them in your guts too. So that's washed tripe. And then the word bleached tripe— bleach, you're not allowed to use bleach. So what they do is they use either boiling hot water, uh, on the, on the stuff. And what happens is, because they're using boiling hot water to sanitize it because humans have to eat it, it does, uh, it bleaches in color. So they mean the bleach in color as opposed to the bleach into the process. And the other stuff they use is hydrogen peroxide, which is inert to your badness. But bleach is like, that's in the US perhaps there's a bleaching agent that's used because Darwin's pet food ran out.
Chlorination. Chlorination, yeah. Well, they chlorinate the chickens, don't they? There was that whole thing that they have to chlorinate.
So yeah, we don't do that here though, do we?
No, no, we don't do it here.
I can't say for sure.
Is that hypochlorous acid? Is that hypochlorous acid though and it becomes chlorinated? But anyway, we can't use that over here. We don't use that over here. And I would like to bring in, depending on the time of year will depend on whether we've got grass finished. So sometimes over here in the UK, you won't have CAFO reared, but they will be shed finished animals, especially in the winter. And that's where some of them will have concentrated feed, especially if they're beef animals, or even for some of our lambs. So it's all about knowing the source. And this is a common thread and a common question on, you know, our pre-show posting was, well, you know, we're getting all sorts of issues with some dogs had massive reactions. Was that down to the actual tripe? Some were having obvious signs of what you would consider food poisoning or vomiting and diarrhea episodes. And I would say some of that could actually be inadvertently not doing, not knowing the source of tripe that you're giving. And as Conor quite rightly said, the studies are there to show where you've grain fed that animal, that increased levels of salmonella and E. coli in those animals is huge compared to grass finished. So, you know, this is another great reason to do what Modi does, you know, and actually go out and find somebody that will, um, look at that grass-fed animal and that you're collecting that grass-fed tripe from that animal once it's been slaughtered. So it is really hard. I tried to do this. I had, um, colleague of mine grass finishes her lambs, the slaughterhouse would not release anything except the carcass. They were, you know, and the obvious liver organs. So that's, you know, it can be a challenge.
You can't buy it in Ireland. You can't buy green tripe in Ireland. So all our stuff comes from Northern Ireland. So when I was making pet food, I couldn't get them to release green tripe to us. They shipped it all off to Eastern Europe, Russia. And, uh, so I would think about the cows were slaughtering. I would not— wouldn't— so green tripe is very hard. So you don't see it in raw dog foods made in Ireland. Really, you see it coming from Northern Ireland because of the, the UK, um, Department of Agriculture permit.
Okay guys, what's the difference between, uh, grain finished in the US and grain finished CAFO in the UK? Because those two One is much more intense. One, in the States, they use a lot of antibiotics to stop the animals dying of acidosis because of all this grain in their gut. They're not meant to eat grain, they're meant to eat grass, and this, the, the, this, this, the, this grain creates this massive acid environment. Okay, whereas in the UK, if they have to, they will use bicarbonate, not antibiotics, in order to keep the acid down. So it's possible that there is more contamination in a CAFO, in a, in a, in a hothoused beef animal who's grain finished. Yeah, the grain finished means their last month or 2 months they're given grain to really put fatty, fatty the meat.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So in the States, they will— this is a whole massive industry and they do use antibiotics and they feed them on on M&Ms and, and, you know, I kid you not, everything, you know, um, see the McDonald's, the outcasts of restaurants and what have you. In the States they can get away with that.
That was, that was The Omnivore's Dilemma that highlighted that, remember? He highlighted that often. Yeah, yeah, I want to, uh, I need to correct something I said there. I, I implicated Darwin's and, uh, and, and, and bleaching. I should not equate those two. There's nothing to do what Darwin's had. There's Darwin's some other issue. That was something else. So apologies for that. That wasn't, uh, It wasn't, it was some other life issue. Anyway, look, it wasn't bleach, so I take that back. Sorry about that. So just to clear up.
And I'm going to look at bleached because the stuff that I tried was white as snow.
Yeah, but that's hot water or hydrogen peroxide. You're not allowed to use bleach. Yeah, definitely not. Look, in the UK. Okay. Well, yeah. Well, I don't know. You've left now, so God knows what Britain's doing.
No, no, we've left. But do you know what? Because there's not enough legal people and there's not enough parliamentary time, We've taken all of the rules and regulations that were part of the EU and we've kept them.
Wow, because they're pretty good. In relation to the other bit though, Nick, you were saying that like, so people are obsessed about the nutritional quality of tripe. Okay, so you'll read a blog post and people will pick out, you know, good quality fats and protein into some bits and mince and that kind of stuff. Okay. As does every single piece of food on the planet. I don't think tripe probably stands out in that regard. It's not really a sink, it's not a storage organ. But in relation to dogs actually eating tripe, I think that's interesting because I went, I spent a horrible couple of hours online on YouTube particularly looking for images of dogs eating sheep and cows and I never found any videos of a dog eating the belly. Okay, so what I did find was two videos, I think I've got them saved, of them eating a sheep, horrible old death for the sheep, and they pull the belly out of the way and then they get at the stomach contents, they want to get, not stomach contents, excuse me, they want to get inside of the organ meats and all the fat that's around the organs and stuff. So I haven't seen— there's no video footage that I've seen of a dog eating the tripe of a bigger animal, which is like sheep or cow, anything with a tripe or belly full of grass. They may eat a bit of the intestines, although, uh, some— maybe some people will tell me in the comments. I just want to read this out. David Mech and his team, right, they have like thousands and thousands and 350 collective years of videotape of wolves, okay? So he's the absolute foremost authority on wolves, and in his book Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, it's a seminal work, he says of wolves, to grow and maintain to sustain their own bodies, wolves need to ingest all the major parts of their herbivorous prey except the plants in the digestive system. The large rumen is usually punctured during removal and its contents spilled. The vegetation in the intestinal tract is of no interest to the wolves, but the stomach lining and intestinal wall are consumed. So I think it's possible that the wolves would eat the intestinal bit where the food has been fermented and digested down, which maybe they'd sneak a bit in. But I've never seen any dogs eating tripe fresh from a dead carcass. Have any of you guys ever heard of such a thing?
Okay, here's my thought on that, is that you're a hungry wolf, you haven't eaten for 7 days, and you come across a carcass where the much better fed wolves have taken all the liver and all the good stuff, and there is intestine left there. I think you're not going to turn that you're not going to turn your nose up at that. In addition, my dogs, if they take down a hare, they will jump straight into the abdomen and start with the intestine.
Yeah, so not the belly though, for grass.
No, not the belly for the grass. However, I don't think a hungry wolf is going to say no to tripe, to the belly wall.
But Mac says they do. Mac says he hasn't, he's not seen it, and that's 350 years of videotape of the meeting.
Yeah, but I can give you about a billion years of veterinary theory which says that kibble is good.
Yeah, yeah.
And if you're saying that, you know, a lot of our— so you're saying that when they dump that gut of the deer on the hillside, that there's no evidence of foxes or foxes, dogs and wolves, foxes, diverse form of foxes, Good grief. Well, I could say, well, dogs diversified from wolves quite a time ago as well, but I'm not going to go there yet. I'm just saying, so any—
foxes are omnivorous, so I can see African wild dogs would do it, hyenas would do it, but I don't see wolves doing it. And dogs only came out of wolves 30,000, 40,000 years ago.
All I would therefore say is my dogs are no longer dogs, because they obviously will eat the intestines of the goats and stuff like that. But I—
yeah, it's just a tripe bit though, since we're talking about tripe. I am— it is interesting that I just want to hear from someone that, yeah, we— I came across my poor old sheep had been savaged and the bellies were eaten. That's what I'd like to hear.
But I bet you that it's poor quality, guys. It's poor quality. So if you're confronted with liver and heart and what have you and tripe, then you're not going to go for it. You'll go for liver and heart. If you can, if you, if the liver and heart have gone, then you'll go for perhaps muscle meat. Yeah.
Yeah.
And but if all of that is gone, I don't think you're going to turn your nose up at some edible tissue.
Yeah.
You're just not going to do it if you're starving. You know, even, you know, humans eat it. Humans eat it. And we're omnivores.
But if you're starving and if you ate it when you're starving, I mean, I eat a shoe when I'm starving. I'd even eat my leather belt when I'm starving. Does that suggest it's a good food source? Or at his least, I think it's a horse.
So if I've debunked the guts of my goat onto the field, okay, I've taken the rest for me, the dogs aren't getting that.
Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
But they're not starving dogs.
And they'd eat the belly.
But they would eat what's left of that intestine and, um, rumen. So why, what is your issue there?
Oh no, I just haven't, I've just never seen it. Just never saw a wolf doing it. Never saw a dog doing it. And I'm interested. I'd be interested to have a videotape of a pack of dogs eating a rumen. Ant and eating the belly where the grass is stored.
Yeah, I mean, if you— obviously the thing is that it's that whole high-value thing. And you know, if you start to talk to people like Isla, she'll give you the, uh, levels of, you know, dominant dogs sometimes will eat the more dominant, you know, odorous meats within that liver and stuff. Yeah, yeah. And you'll have others that won't, and you'll have the more subservient dogs eating sometimes some of the, the things that like the intestines, like the rumen. Um, so that's interesting that she would say that, having done the sort of study on wolves that she's done. Um, and yet we're then saying that there's somebody else, maybe in a different area, different tundra— who knows what the herbage is like within what they filmed, you know? Because if it's in northern Canada, in some, you know, tundra where the herbage that they take is totally different to the herbage of a lowland goat in northern England.
Yeah, like he could be studying grey wolves in one particular bit. I think it'd be interesting, we'll see what comes up. If anybody's got any information on that down the side, guys, you're all tribe beaters, pop it up. I'd be interested to see that video.
Michelle Fitzlanes, she's on it, she's gonna be asking questions.
She is all over it. Okay, I've got one final thought, is once a carcass has been finished, yeah, and this is after whoever has been filming it for, say, a week, what's left? Answer: skeleton. The hooves have gone, yeah, because they're quite chewy. It's not skeleton plus tripe. So the tripe goes somewhere.
Scavengers. And it's hyenas, foxes, birds, everything will eat it.
But I guess—
hyenas, yeah, hyenas aren't, aren't true blood carnivores.
They'll eat Oh, okay, we need to do a show.
African wild dogs versus omnivorous versus maned wolves. Yeah, foxes. Yeah, it's interesting.
Let's do a show. Let's do a show because I think there's a lot of crossover there.
Yeah, it's an interesting debate because I think— remember we were saying this a couple of days ago, lads? We're saying like, um, back in the day people were obsessed about tripe. They would say tripe's an elixir, oh, it's an elixir. And you go, what's an elixir about it? I mean, what is it that you think it does? I think personally— and I don't mean to poo on tripe, pardon the pun— but, uh, You know, the thing is, back in the day, in the '70s, okay, back in the proper '70s and '80s, they used to feed a thing to dogs called biscuit. And that was what all dry food essentially became— biscuit. In other words, without the 4% bone meal they put in it now to call it meat-based meal. So it was just crackers, it was just wheat in a little round thing. It was called biscuit. And breeders knew that dogs didn't put on good form eating carbs all the time. And so they'd go around looking for the cheapest part of the cow they could source, and they'd go to the abattoirs back in the day when you could do this because it was a more normal environment. And you'd walk up to the abattoir and say, hey, what's the cheapest part of the cow I can have? And they can go, well, you can have this belly if you want because humans don't eat it in Ireland and England. And so they'd say, lovely, give me a sack of that. And they'd take a sack of this smelly goo back to their dogs and they'd put it on top of the crap crackers they've been feeding the dog, and the dogs would bloom. And the breeders go, oh, tripe's the best stuff you can feed dogs. I'd say, well, pound for pound, a chicken thigh would beat the pants off a bit of tripe. I mean, you've got the cartilage and bone and fat and meat, you've got everything there. I mean, I'd like to see in a wrestling match, a piece of tripe versus like any other piece of meat. No, Brendan.
Probiotics? Probiotics?
Probiotics for herbivores.
So, so Conor, are you telling me none of your products have probiotics in?
No, I like— in there, that's different. Why would that probiotic be the one that dogs need? That probiotic's for digesting grass. It's a type of lactobacillus for digestion. Okay, yes, it has postbiotics that the dog might benefit from, but if he really wanted it, the tripe and belly would be the first thing they'd eat. But I haven't seen that.
I've only seen them because, of course, we've got to remind everybody that these herbivores with, you know, all of this tripe are actually not feeding themselves the plant material. They're feeding the bacteria the plant material to create loads of great things like butyrates and all of those postbiotics which feed their gut and feed them.
Yeah, that's mad.
So, so all of these people that go out there and say, look at those bulls, they can, you know, they're feeding on plants, so therefore that's what we should eat to be the size. Yeah, no, you've got to have a belly the size of a bull in order to get the same response from those plants. Oh yeah, we don't have that.
So, okay, so going down the, the carnivore-omnivore argument, we could go herbivore. It is a cow a herbivore? Because actually they're not, because they eat the products of bacteria, which are living organisms. So where do bacteria come in the herbivore, omnivore, carnivore argument? Okay, I mean, everybody, everybody lives on fats.
Yeah.
Okay, bacteria produce butyrate, propionate, fatty acids, and that's what the cattle survive on. That's why they put on fat and give you nice steaks and everything else. And so actually we all live on fats. Yeah, fatty acids.
That's interesting.
Okay. At the bottom line. Okay.
Karen's trying to move us on.
She is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to have to do tripe too, actually, because I'm going to— I'm going to look at— I'm going to try to bleach and tripe. I'm going to look at that and just see what's what. And just I'll see if I can find a butcher to give me the lowdown. On all that stuff too. Okay, histamine. So a few people have asked about histamine, and the question we've got is, is raw tripe— is raw tripe contaminated in dogs with— contraindicated in dogs with allergies and dogs with a history of mast cell tumors? And there's another question somewhere that says, can you feed a dog with allergies with tripe because of the risk of histamine. Do you want to— who wants to jump into that? Brent, do you want to jump into that?
So, right, my take on this is just like we had this discussion around fermented foods, there is a massive trend out there to talk about if you've got any histamine-related disease the first thing you could do— I did a little search of this on Sunday, this was before this morning's search, this was Sunday's search— and there are so many people advising. These are not just nutritionists, not just doctors, but just every man and woman and his dog and her dog seem to be advising that the first thing you do if you've got anything that's histamine-related in your disease is to cut out histamine-rich foods. And I was trying to get my head around this because actually one of the biggest things that we have, you know, you can't just cut all of that out because there's, you know, the diamine oxidase, which is really important in the gut to reduce gut levels of histamine. But the levels of histamine within the body, the circulating system and therefore actually is concentrated in mast cells. And those mast cells, it's all about when they degranulate, is that histamine continuing in those areas? And that's reliant on another set of enzymes, HMT, which basically is about neutralizing that histamine that comes out of those mast cells. So it stops the cycle of of inflammation reigniting, more mast cells dehiscing. So we've got to be really careful that we don't suddenly mix up histamine in the food, which actually can also be part of generating stomach acid. It's, you know, part of the normal cycles of digestion, with what happens. Does it actually get through the gut lining to excite any mast cells on the body side of that reaction. And that will be down to, is there lots of other leaky gut stuff going on? Is there lots of, you know, do we still need to seal and heal the gut? So I'm still yet to be convinced.
That's interesting.
Actually, we need to be massively hot on some of the benefits of fermented foods, and that includes tripe because there's going to be fermented foods and stuff within green tripe for those people feeding green tripe. And whether also there's stuff to do with what's in the cells around those, you know, obviously got to be histamine release in order for that digestive process that I've talked about, because that's a natural cycle for, you know, the goblet cells to release more acid. Within the acid part of the stomachs. So it would depend which tripe you're feeding, all of those. That's my take, is that I don't— I understand why there's a— it's there and people talk about it. I think that if there is a leaky gut and you give anything that's a massive challenge to that, then you might get a histamine response. Yeah, but I don't believe that's because of the histamine in the food.
I think that's the challenge of the stuff going through people drinking charged water because they want to affect the pH of their body. And it's like, but your pH of your body is like a really constant kind of thing. I'm not sure you can kind of jump your pH up and down just having a pint of slightly charged water because your body doesn't fall for it that way. It's much more—
it's got buffers.
Yeah, that's the whole point of buffering. That's interesting.
So if I could just summarize there for boys, um, can you give dogs with food sensitivities tripe? In 2 or 3 words.
If you've got a food sensitivity, okay, your dog has a mechanical degradation of the gut lining, and when that starts to happen, you can start developing food intolerances. Okay, so the castle walls are breaking down and little half-digested proteins can get through into the tissue and blood, and the body doesn't like that, and it'll tag those proteins and say, if you eat any more of that half-digested protein, I'm going to freak out. So you will develop food intolerances if you have leaky gut and you're eating beef beef-flavored dry food, beef raw dog food, doesn't matter. As long as beef's going in half-digested, sneaking through the castle walls, the body's gonna tag it and freak out. And next thing you know, you eat a bit of beef and the gut starts pumping the chain. So you've developed a beef intolerance. So it doesn't matter what part of the beef you feed. It can be a tripe, eyeball, you know, it can be his testicles, it doesn't matter. It's beef once it's chewed up and gooed down. And so I doubt you're gonna get away with any part of the beef if you have a beef intolerance. But if you don't have a beef intolerance, you can eat beef all you like. I don't see why tripe would be a particular healer of leaky gut because I don't see what constituents there are in tripe that would actually mend up those walls. Butyrate. Butyrate, okay. Yeah, it's, yeah, a little bit.
Okay, so, Bren, where would you be on, so dog with beef allergies, can you give it tripe? Well, people are getting confused.
I think we've got to qualify. Beef tripe. Yeah, I know. So beef tripe, I would say no. You know, if it's got beef intolerance and a leaky gut, you're just going to aggravate things. If you're going to say goat tripe, you'd probably want to, you know, ease things back. Yes, I'd probably make sure that you to some degree have washed it, but you're giving other stuff, you know, it'd be bone broths and things like that for me first of a different one, but not from beef.
Beef.
And I think, you know, that's, that's the important bit that I would want to get across is, look, there are different tripe out there. Tripe is not the same from a cow as from a sheep as from a goat as from a deer. And if your animal has definitively been told it's got an allergy to one of those, you've got to avoid that particular type of tripe. Even beef gelatin on your capsules, which is really, which is really hard because some companies out there that are making food foods will have the— it's goat, okay, but then they're making up the organs with beef liver, beef kidneys, beef tripe, and, you know, just putting it down as that's the— oh, sorry, that's the organ mix. We didn't think we needed to declare that in the type of meat.
And, and bone meal is also going into some products as well, I hear.
Um, so I'm just gonna just, just say it really, really simply, therefore if your dog has got a beef sensitivity, i.e., you can't feed beef, be very careful with beef tripe. But you might get away with lamb tripe or venison tripe if you can get a hold of it. If your dog has a lamb sensitivity, be careful with lamb tripe. You've got to do a food trial. That's the only way to get to the bottom line of that. The other, just one other thing, just in our last 6 minutes is Rachel Mack has had the most amazing idea in that with our Christmas celebration gathering— I'm just going to give you a little teaser now. We haven't got dates, we haven't got a venue, but with our planned Christmas get-together, Rachel Mack has, in her genius, has said, why don't we do bush tucker trials?
You two could do that and I couldn't. And I'm not doing that. No, no, no.
But some of, some of the, the more adventurous RPM people might do. So I just, I just put that out there just in case.
Yeah.
So watch this space.
For the, for the Christmas celebration, I'm going to choose inappropriately a totally different comment about something else, but the boss has spoken. Conor says no. This was actually the comment that she made. And I would just suggest that actually, you know, there was so much adverse popularity about Bush Tucker anything that I don't think it's appropriate that we use that sort of image. Okay, it was just an idea.
There's a couple more more ideas here. I can speak to one of them. And I want to get one off Judy's page as well, because we're getting more and more listeners from the States here. And fluke in tripe. Okay, so this was common. This used to happen when we would get a bit of fluke when we get a bit of tripe in. And you would see a little bit of small little brown little fellas. And they're about that size, little round, kind of like little raisins. They're little fluke. And they're called rumen fluke. And it can happen, okay, in some cattle, it can happen The thing is that fluke only wants to live in the rumen, so I am not sure if it affects dogs. I don't believe it does. Lads, what's your opinion on that?
Freezing will kill them. Okay, you can also— fluke, the most common is Irish beef liver. That's massive for fluke because Ireland's very wet and fluke likes— flukes are just kind of flat worms that live in the tubes in your liver. I think if you freeze it, you're absolutely fine. So I would say to Dr. Judy's guys and to all of our guys, make sure you freeze everything for at least a week before it goes in the dog.
And so two things there, washing it off, okay, would reduce the numbers. So, you know, if you've got washed, there should be much less of the fluke. I think freezing it will kill them, but also we've got to understand the life cycle. You know, if you go around and ingest a live fluke from an intestine of a cow, the adult, it's not the adult that goes through and infects you and comes out and goes through your liver and then, you know, re-emerges. It's the larvae that then feed through. So my understanding would be that even if your dog dog ate the adult fluke, that fluke isn't then going to live in your dog. It would be all of the eggs and larval stages that you'd be more worried about.
Gross.
Here's another question: is our dog going to get infected with a fluke which is habituated to a beef animal? That would be the question.
A beef worm?
But that's what I'm saying is I don't think that, you know, for all that it looks gross it seems gross. It's like your dog picking up a beetle on the path and eating it. Is it going to survive in your dog?
That worm, that worm's living in like pH 4 in the tripe and wait till it goes through pH 1 of the dog's stomach. Good luck getting through that, buddy. Here's another one. We're running out of time. Here's another one. Freeze-dried tripe where fresh is unavailable. Are the benefits the same as fresh, especially for the gut? This highlights an important bit about freeze drying. So freeze drying is fab. It's the best way of preserving food that we know of. It's near space station. That's why they get it there. That's why we feed the armies on it, and it's great, okay? In regards, regards nutrient loss, it's as good as freezing, except you can carry it with you and you don't need all the water. So that's great. The problem with freeze-drying is, particularly with meat and particularly with something like tripe or any of the inner organs, which are more prone to the, the bad bacteria, sadly, is that it requires a heat kill step. They don't tell you about that when they sell you freeze-dried food or, or dehydrated food. Some of the freeze dryers will say they have a heat kill step, and a heat kill step is 70 degrees. So if they tell you they cook at 40 degrees, it's just not true because Salmonella and E. coli aren't killed at 40 degrees. In fact, they're aided by it. So at 70 degrees, you get a heat kill step, which some people might say is a slight bit of a cooking step, but it's a flash in the pan. And so, and then it's freeze-dried. So if you're doing that to tripe, well then, as the lads are highlighting, these probiotic kind of benefits that you may get from, from eating tripe would be lost in that, in that the 70 degrees would probably be enough to kill Lactobacillus, I imagine. But all the other stuff will be there. All the protein and fat will be intact and vitamins and minerals and all the other cool stuff. Postbiotics will probably still be caught up in the villi. But I think freeze-dried tripe would be great. I think it's a decent substitute, but you won't get the live stuff.
Why pay all the money for freeze-dried when you can just get dried? You just get good old-fashioned dried tripe. It stinks. Dogs love it. It's good for their teeth. They chew it. You still got some bacteria on there. Good to go. I would just say just—
I'd say even the dried stuff is probably cooked. This is the US now. This question came from Judy Morgan.
Yeah, well, this— we're back to— you're back to the levels of salmonella and E. coli because even in this country, we know various food companies are testing tripe to look at what, you know, is acceptable through their doors. And this is why I know that grass-fed, you know, is totally different to grain-fed. And a lot of them will say the only ways that they could get it to a point where it would be safe to put in the food to get zero salmonella contaminants would be to use either microwave, because they've been told that there's a microwave system that effectively doesn't heat the food above a certain level, therefore it kills the bacteria but doesn't cook the food. I find that hard to believe, and microwaving stuff is ionizing radiation, um, to me. Okay, but you don't agree, Nick?
I would try and— we haven't got a microwave in our house, so I would try and not—
that's what I say. Do you agree that it's ionizing? It's not, it's not harmless to—
yeah, I, I would avoid it. I'd ask your supplier where they get their tripe from, what they do to it, how, how much do they test the tripe that comes out, how they test their tripe sticks, good to go. And yeah, you know, if you get problems, it's their problem, not yours. We feed tripe sticks to ours all the time.
Yeah, I do as well. And there's a question there about dehydrators. I got a dehydrator, dude, does that need cooking? Look guys, all meat off the shelf, you can't be guaranteed zero salmonella. I think the only meat protein you can get zero salmonella from, certainly in Britain, is eggs. And in Ireland, nothing. We didn't get the salmonella out of our eggs and Britain did. So you can eat your eggs raw in Britain. Don't take my word for that. I'm sure there's authority body to talk to before. But with raw meat—
it's got a lion stamp on it.
Oh, there you go. Okay, so, uh, but with meat, you're not guaranteed the meat is going to be clean. Chicken, certainly not. Beef, you have— they will tell you that, you know, everything in Tesco's is zero salmonella. You can't possibly know that. It's coming from the— it's coming particularly when there's liver and stuff being bought. So I would say if you're dehydrating meat, no, that doesn't kill any bacteria because you're passing slightly warmer than room temperature meat over the product and dehydrating it. So there's no heat kill step in that. So you will have the amount of bacteria that was on that meat, except you left it at room temperature drying for 24 hours, which is going to aggravate the process a bit. So you will have dehydrated meat. The thing is, bacteria aren't active when they're on a dehydrated piece of meat. They're in stasis because there's no water, so they just sit there. They're not dead, they just sit there. You haven't killed them, okay? You just took all the water out of them, so they're waiting. So when your sweaty hand picks up a treat, that may be enough, but you're talking tiny chances. So So dehydrated meat off the shelf of supermarket, likely very, very safe, likely fine. Yeah. And I'm not sure that requires a heat kill step. What do you think, lads?
No, I think you can imagine that piece of tripe goes, it drops into pH 1 in the stomach, it's fried in acid, and I think it'll be completely safe in most situations.
People handling it though.
It is, however, it is 1948, so I'm going to say why don't we go over to Patreon and just do one or two more questions?
Yep.
Okay, would that be a good— I hate— I'm always the party pooper, I don't know why that is.
No, it's good. No, you're right.
But shall we? Yeah, shall we? We'll, we'll go over to Patreon, we'll do another one or two, or we can just— we'll talk about salmonella for the rest of the evening.
Salmonella indeed.
And how we're not too worried about it, actually.
Yeah, well, yeah, I think we can do that.
Um, oh, I've I've got a fact. I go, guys, come over, come over to join us. I've got a doozy, I've got a doozy, something to talk about. I have it ready to go.
Oh yes, guys, it has been an absolute pleasure to see so many people engaged with this. It looks like we're gonna have to come back and do more Tribe, uh, stuff. Um, absolutely brilliant. Tribe 2, oh my word. Um, we've got a great show for next week. Um, Nick Rick, you want to do a little intro just for the guys on Facebook for guests for next week?
God blimey, I don't know who is coming next week.
Oh, come on.
I have no, I have no idea.
I have, it's like, I have no idea. You've hooked this lady up.
Yeah, hang on, people are going to be very excited about this.
Oh my goodness, yes, we have.
Good.
Listen, I've been booking up people all week, so apologies. We've got the amazing Lauren Langman who is coming, and she is in the agility team for the UK. She runs an amazing school. I'll tell you a bit more about her in Patreon just now, but she is a force of nature. She's in the UK agility team. She runs Collies in that situation. She's ultra knowledgeable, she's deliriously happy with raw food, and she's going to come on and talk to us about agility, about her business, about behavior. She does a lot of behavior work. So Lauren Langman, force of nature, she's coming on next week. I'm really, really excited. Apologies, Lauren, that I couldn't remember that I booked you for next week.
Absolutely. Absolute Dogs is her company name.
She is Absolute Dogs. She basically teaches dogs through games. And I think what better way of learning is that? Yeah, it's all about games.
That's going to be next week. We have got a raft of brilliant guests that the guys have been booking in. So you want to keep an eye out for those coming over the next year. But Lauren for next week and for everyone else, if you want to catch up with us over on Patreon, Don't forget, um, patreon.com/rawpetmedics, uh, just come and find us over there. Um, the link is scrolling along the bottom of your slide right now. Um, and for, uh, that's our bit of this on the side.
Lovely.
So let's see you over there. Yes, indeed. Take care.
