RawPetMedics Tuesday night live: Grounded

Evening, good evening, good evening, good evening.

Time— oh no, we're a bit late.

We're gonna play disastrously late. Disastrously late. So guys, how are you? How is your— how's your week been?

Good, good. Yeah, um, yeah, busy and good, but I can't say I've got absolutely anything hopping off the page right now. Do you know, I'm going to be in, uh, I'm going to be in England on Thursday for a day.

Oh, you come and see, come and say hello.

I'm going to see— I'm going to Essex just to pop in to see people. Yes, and then meet a girl I've been working with and that kind of thing. So red-eye flight at 8 o'clock in the morning. I do hate a red-eye flight. Red-eye is not 8 o'clock, I suppose.

No, it's not.

But you have to, you have to get up at half 5 where I live because it's a 40-50 minute drive. And you know, it adds up. And I can't get to bed early when I'm flying, you know, I get a bit excited and I don't— I pack my bag at about 11 o'clock at night for some reason. It's like an addiction. I can't pack my bag like in the afternoon of that day before. It's like 11 o'clock, where's my red jumper? So that aside, once I'm on the plane, I love it. But yeah, just flying away. Have you got your passport, Jayne? Don't even ask that question. I don't even know.

Not only that, Conor, have you got your passport? Have you got your import papers?

I'm sorry, you know, no, you don't need them anymore. Britain has seen the light. I think it's only the US now that's hanging on to that one. I don't think there's any other countries. Uh, I think with Spain, maybe with Spain you have to, uh, come with a negative. I'm not sure, but I think all that stuff is hopefully in the past. What about you, Bren? Anything going on this week?

Oh, I'm having to bottle feed a little goat, and I know, I know what you're gonna say, and now I'm not gonna show the picture because Conor's already made an internal message to me about what he thinks of cute animal pictures, and he thinks it's totally unfair to reveal those, and I'm not going to say exactly the words that he said. Yes. So I'm bottle feeding a goat. Yes.

Okay.

Baby kids, they need it. So that's my little bit. Just so much going on. I've got the launch of RawSafe this week. That's gone on, so that's gone press release. So that's all coming out. So that's officially— there are those that have got it are doing their press release. So hopefully by the weekend it'll be in various bits of press, and then beginning of next week they're going to start sending out So we've got some literature coming out to all of those people that order, just on safety of how to receive your food, how to make sure it's stored properly, you know, normal hygiene methods, stuff like that. So lots of information there. So if you want to come and see us at Dog Edition Live, we're going to have a little bit of info there too. So I think, Nick, you're joining us there too, aren't you? Oh, he's on mute. Can't hear a word he's saying. He's turned— he's— see, this is the guy that was having tech issues, and that's why we were late, guys. Nothing to do with this guy putting his shirt on at the last moment.

I'm enjoying the silence, I have to say.

Oh, he's there.

You can hear me?

Okay, good.

It's all being recorded anyway. Okay, so I had 3 announcements to make. And so the first one is, I think we fixed the septic tank. Okay, everyone will be on the edge of their seat for that one. Okay, so I think we fixed it.

Think, think.

Well, we have to, we have to give it a trial run. But I thought we were going to be down in the septic tank. You can imagine what that's going to be like for a couple of hours making this wall. But The guy came along this morning and he said, you just don't need the ball, you just need a good T-piece on the outlet. And that's all I'm going to tell you until— because people will be switching off left, right, and center.

I wonder why he'd just had a shower. I thought that was the reason. Yes. And now I know why. He's been swimming in the cesspool.

I've been swimming in a cesspool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that was number 1. Number 2 is Ellie, and Ellie's taking the kids off camping. And so this house is so— it's amazing. It's— it's— you can— I can almost touch the peace and quiet.

Bar the smell of poo, that must be a lovely time.

See, I thought— I thought that was the reason they've gone camping.

It's because trying to tell the children not to use the loo or something like that while we're down in the, in the, in the septic tank is quite a difficult thing. So I've actually timed it with, with, with, with, with military precision to get them out the way and then to do the septic tank.

So I'll keep you—

I'll give you a 3-month update.

Okay, that'd be great, Mick.

That'd be great. Yeah, I'm sure everyone will be on the edge of their seat, right? And then the third thing, uh, remember last week we had the lovely Penny Wood, amazing zoologist and, and a font of all knowledge? Well, she is this week doing that. Is that coming out the right way for you?

Look, okay, there's a post on Facebook as well. You want to find the link, go through on Facebook, you'll find it there too.

It's— and the link is, uh, petandparentlongevity.com. Pet— oh, look at that, Bren, you're an absolute star. And also just want to say a really big thank you to our patreon supporters. We really, really, really appreciate it, whether it's like you give us $1 or £1 or £5 or £10 or whatever. Thank you very much, it really, really helps. I just wanted to say that. And the patreon link to keep Pete happy is www.patreon.com/rawpetmedics.

I am just after— as soon as you said patreon, I'm after remembering something. That I haven't done. Oh, did you not?

Did you recall something?

You remembered!

You both remembered! Oh, okay, can this be the first FAQ just to get this started? Go for it, go for it. Okay, so, um, do I have one? I do have one. So, um, Peter asked in the FAQs, Conor, um, could you give us a few tips about—

one second, one second, one second, you're going to start this this little segment again, but what I'm going to do special for these guys, OK, I'm just going to hide. So we're going to be able to comment, but me and Nick are just going to hide for a moment. So you're full screen so that everybody's attention is on you.

Oh, oh, oh, boom. Oh yeah, there we go. Look at that. Is it hot and sweaty where you guys are? It's hot and sweaty here.

It is.

I'm not nervous. I can handle this. So OK, recall guys, this is very, very easy thing to ingrain, but it needs a bit of repetition. OK, so let's get this done in 3 minutes. I think there's like a 10-step program to recalling a dog and it begins at home. Okay, so getting the dog to come back to you in the park is a difficult thing. There's, you know, he's running around the first time out that day, probably the only time, and he sees like rainbows and unicorns and beautiful poo and things to eat and smell that way. And he turns around and you are standing there angry with a storm cloud over your head calling the dog back and he's thinking, yeah, I think I'll stay over here with the deer and the lovely things. So it's very hard to call a dog back in the park when they're distracted. Okay, you need to— all the things you usually use won't work. You need to have ingrained or conditioned the dog to come back to some sort of sound, a whistle if you like, although people do say you have to have the whistle on you all the time then. Little string around the neck, keep it where the dog lead is so it goes around your neck. This is all guide dog stuff, by the way. So a whistle is really, really handy, but you don't have to have a whistle. You can just have a special noise that he's never heard. It could be something you don't mind shouting in the park, you know, it could be, you know, bananas, and when he hears that word, he's going to come sprinting back. So it's getting to that point is the key. It starts at home. So you've got a dog and he's being fed 3 times, 4 times a day when he's a puppy. And it starts as a pup, but you can teach any dog to do this because they're all fairly simple operating systems. It's good reward or nothing. Okay, so let's say you have a dog and he's on 2 meals a day, you need to make the dog sit and wait for his food. Okay, so this is the first time he's going to hear sit and wait. So most adult dogs have heard this, but pups, they're going to need a bit of restraint. You might hold his little collar, put your hand in front of his chest, whatever stops him just for a couple of seconds getting to the bowl. And then you blast the whistle 3 times, say, and you move your hand. No, no English. Don't use any English for any of these things. Dogs don't speak English. And you lift your hand and he ignores the sound, he flies into the bowl and he starts eating his food. You repeat that 3, 4 times a day, holding him back, and then you lift your hand and he flies into the food. Very, very quickly, the dog is going to cotton on that that hand is going to be there to stop him from his food. And within about 3 or 4 days, you'll be able to remove your hand and just go wait with the flat of your hand, wait, wait, and blow your whistle 3 times and boom, he goes into his food. And within about a week or 2, you'll find you'll just be standing up telling them to sit and wait. They get it very quickly because there's food involved, particularly if they're food motivated, which most as pups particularly are. So you're making them sit and wait for his food, he's here and sit and wait. But what he's really hearing is that he hears the whistle and it's whistle, food, whistle, food, whistle, food, whistle, food. And his favorite thing is dinner. So he's associating the whistle with the food, unbeknownst to himself. So you make him sit and wait for his food. You repeat this for a few weeks or a month inside the house, and you start making him sit further away from his food, bring in a few distractions, walking between him and his food, or perhaps somebody saying his name, but he has to sit and wait all the time. You're introducing a few distractions. You're on level 2 now with the distractions. You blow the whistle into his food. Level 3 is you go out the back garden and the dog is just, it's just you and the dog, no distractions around, and the dog's off the lead, and in your pocket are 2 or 3 sausages, okay, some really high-end treat, not dry food, obviously that would be the lowest quality thing you could feed them. Dogs work harder for meat in trials, no matter how big the pile of dry food, they work harder for the piece of sausage because this is their high-value item, so they understand this. So get your value of your treats right up there. And you, so level 3, dog's nosing around the grass. And when he's distracted, you blow the whistle 3 times. Now, he is not silly. The whistle doesn't mean come back to you. What he'll do is he was sniffing, he hears the whistle, he'll go, dinnertime, and he'll look at you. And that's the magic key. When he looks at you, go, oh, good boy, good boy.

What have I got?

Sausages? Bloody hell, he comes sprinting up to you and you pop out, you break the sausages in half and you rub them around the head. Oh my God. It's called bringing out the parade. You make a massive scene. He's like, oh my God, yes. Sausages. He's excited and then you stop. Okay, you might repeat that twice in the morning and you might do it once in the afternoon. You stop at the top. Don't repeat it so many times he gets bored of sausages, you know. So you let him off doing the same thing again and he's nuzzling around the hedge and then you go and you look at you and you go, dinner time. And you go, sausages. And you go, oh yes, I forgot. And he gets the sausages. Now he's associating the whistle with a really high-end food treat and in the back garden. Soon as level 4, you're going to introduce some distractions, a human distraction first of all. So there's somebody that might be calling him or talking to him. He hears that whistle 3 times, he's not going to run to you, he's going to look at you. You need that look. And when, as soon as he sees you, you do the things to get the dog back. You need to work at it, guys. Don't stand up straight, get down low. Okay, so get down low is friendly and inviting, play bow. If you want to tell someone what to do, you act like a cop or a headmaster, or you stand up straight and you look down. Lads squaring up to each other on the football pitch, there's a reason you stick your pigeon chest out. People that I've never seen before do that. So there's a reason you stand up straight to look authoritative, but you get down low to get the dog to come to you. And you do your jazz hands and you go, oh, you're actually blasting the whistle 3 times, so he's already ready to come to you. Jazz hands, clapping his name, making high-pitched noises. Start moving away from the dog, backing away, because that attracts the dog to you. They're the same ends of a magnet. If you go walk towards a dog, you push him away. It's a fatal error when the dog's in the park and you're looking for him, you walk towards him and you go, so yeah, see you later. And off he goes. So this is level 4, there's a person involved in the distraction. And level 5, you bring a friend's dog in and you have another dog around and you blast the whistle. That is really high distraction for the dog. You blast that whistle and he's going to look at you and go sausages, lads. Do it with a hungry dog, don't do it with a well-fed dog, you know, cheat, skip the breakfast. Whoops, sorry about that, but he's going to get it, sausages. And so you blast the whistle and you're going to teach the dog to come back to you in your back garden when there's a dog around and a human around. And very slowly then you can introduce on a walk, you'll get a dog on a long lead. I'd advise picking up a 5-10 meter lead, putting the dog on the lead in the park, letting them nuzzle around in the quietest part of the park ever. No paths, no bikes, no dogs, no birds, no nothing, okay? Really quiet part. He's hungry, he's nuzzling around the grass ignoring you, you blast a whistle and he'll go, sausages, and you go, yep, sausages. So you're at about level 6 or 7 here because you're training them to come back to you in the park now. And then very quickly you start coming off the sausages, okay? You can't be rewarding them huge amount of sausages all the time. So in the park, as you have your little lead clipped around your waist or whatever, he runs up to you and you go, here are the sausages here. Oh wait, hang on. Is this the right sausage? And you change the sausage and the dog's sitting in front of you. Oh, give me the sausage. Give me the sausage. You slow it down a bit. Go, oh, it's half the sausage. I'll put this in my pocket and I'll give you this half. But he's sitting in front of you waiting for that sausage, okay? And you slowly give him one piece of sausage. Then you give him a second piece of sausage. Now the dog has sat right in front of you for 10 seconds after you've called him. So this is developing the sit and wait where the dog's head is on your kind of knees, okay. So you start working on that, then you let him off the lead, you blow it again, or don't let him off the lead but release him, blow the whistle again, comes up to you. Very soon the sausages won't be in your hand because you can't be bribing the dog, okay. Big difference between a bribe and a reward. A bribe is sit, sit, sit, sit, I've got sausages. A reward is Buddy, sit. Okay, and when he sits, it's like, oh, good boy. I might give you a little pat on the head, or I might give you a sausage. So, you know, you're moving up now. And then level 8, then you're calling the dog back to you, blast the whistle. You're still going to need to do your work in your jazz hands sometimes if it gets a bit busier in the park. He comes running back to you, you make him sit and wait, sit and wait. And suddenly, as soon as he comes back to you, straighten up a little bit, get a bit more authoritative, and you stand up straight again. You go, Buddy, sit and wait. Good boy, sit and wait. He's tied on, he's not going anywhere. And you're getting your treats out and you might just give them one bit of treat and then you make a big fuss of them because it's all about just getting any reward at this stage. Once you've conditioned this noise into the dog, really high quality trainers like the gun trial dogs and stuff, they just touch the dog on the head, one little touch and the dog's just dissolving with happiness, tail wagging furiously as if he's just been given a bloody, you know, I was going to say a fox to eat. I don't know if any dog's been given a fox. But so this sort of training can be developed, but the mistake is staying on the treats too long. They're painkillers, guys. If you're on painkillers after a month of an injury, you've done it wrong. So that's kind of how you develop it. I have an article on recall, and I swear to God, I'll put it up on Patreon tonight. I wrote it about 10 or 15 years ago for Guide Dogs, so excuse me if it's gone out of date a little bit, but it's got the 10 steps of how you develop this, that eventually when you blast that whistle, it means come up to me, sit and wait in front of me, and within about 10 seconds, I might pop on the lead. Because the mistake people make is, we're going home, there's the lead, he's like, oh no, I'm not coming. So you might clip on the lead, you might get a treat, or very soon he doesn't get the treat, but then you have a dog that just can't help himself. He hears the whistle and he comes sprinting back to you. And the main thing is that this noise gets the dog's attention. Everything after that is less relevant, okay? He might not come straight back to you, but if he looks at you, see, he's 20 meters away and you sense this danger, the dog needs to come back to you, you blow the whistle, the dog will look at you, and if he looks at you, you just start, you sprint away from the dog and he'll come tearing after you because their eyes are rigged for movement, particularly if you're moving away. So that's the kind of 10 levels of recall. I'm sure I'm getting a few bits, but I'll post it up on Patreon tonight, as God is my witness. Thank you for reminding me. That is, uh, that's whistle recall. What do you think, gents? Is there any other tips and tricks you like about recall? It's so important to have good recall.

I would say the one thing is you don't just train them at the beginning of their lives and then think that's it. Yeah, it's ongoing. Every day is a training day. And I would always say, always do reinforcement. And the next thing I would say is make them work for that reward. Okay. Actually, once you've got them doing the reward, as Conor was saying, you sort of then develop it, but you make them do more and more. So maybe not every time, but every third time, every sixth time, every tenth time, that will keep their hunger to want to do the work to get the reward.

The psychology of that is that a jukebox doesn't pay out every time. There's really high-quality psychology involved in motivating your heart and addictive mechanisms. I would rather the thing paid out every time, but does it— a treat, an occasional treat.

I'm hoping you don't mean a jukebox and you actually mean One-Armed Bandit.

Oh, I mean One-Armed Bandit.

Jukeboxes do pay out every time.

They always play the tune.

Yeah, exactly.

And for that, Conor, we're going to get you to sing the Milky Bar song.

Let it go, let it go.

Oh, that's great. I think we're going to cut that video, uh, or Pete will, you know, let's be honest, Pete will cut that video and launch as a separate video to go alongside your blog, because I think that's a really good explanation there. And, uh, so hilarious, me watching. And Conor, you did a sterling job while I was posting all of the comedic comments that were coming me up at the time of ignoring all of those comments because so many dogs were being driven wild by your whistles and, you know, searching for dinner or sausages.

Name the Beatles tune that used the dog whistle at the end of it.

It's not Yellow Submarine or something weird.

No, I'll tell you what, I'm going to give a small pack of canny then to the First answer in the comments. Oh, good one. First correct answer in the comments gets a Canada.

That is very good, very good.

Yeah, I'm not that big into me.

Blew a silent whistle for ages at the end of one of these songs. It's the one that ends with— oh, Day in the Life.

Boom, Nick!

Oh, we shouldn't have said it.

He's got the Canada. He's just stolen it off our viewers.

Everyone's furiously googling, guys, sorry, Nick Thompson has ruined the night.

Yes, I think in response to that, Nick, you now have to launch your own competition to give away the Canadent that he's going to give you and something from DermaDog.

Yes, yeah, okay, you can think of your question in time. Has anyone got a favourite FAQ that they want to do here?

It being, uh, yeah, yeah, so just whilst everybody's thinking of their question that they really want us to answer tonight and you can post it in the comments.

I've got one.

I'm going to do this live. I just want to say we accidentally put next week's This Is What We're Going to Do into this week's advertisement. So what's going to keep us grounded and how we got where we came from and how we got to where we are is actually shifted into next week. So sorry guys, but we're going to do frequently asked questions, Q&A for August tonight. Just to really throw some of you guys off.

I've got a question, I've got a question, okay? And it's okay, it's nothing to do with Raw or pets or medics, so it's really, really on theme, but it's one of my favorite questions. Who did backing vocals on You're So Vain by Carly Simon? Anybody?

Jagger. Yes!

Yeah, come on guys, what are you doing? This is not giving each other the best of— you get some Dermadog and Mick, you get some Canada Day.

I just want to look right about something. Good man. Yeah, good man. That's really good.

This is, this is not how it works.

Music quiz, music questions, music questions. I've got, I've got an FAQ here, guys, that, um, from a, from a friend of mine. It's actually a It's actually, it's actually a little bit sad, so I'm going to bring down the buzz here a little bit. But a friend of mine has a dog, and he— I'm reading it here— the dog was only a year old, okay? He's a Dogo Argentino. Is that how you pronounce it? And, but he's a big, big boy. And this dog was the best looked after dog, you know, in Dublin. I swear to God, this owner was unbelievable. Everything you could possibly do for the dog, did everything right. One of these stories, fed the best quality meat imaginable. And if you can imagine, like, for a 50-kilo dog or whatever, it's— that's quite a food bill. So unfortunately, the dog got sick, okay? So on Tuesday, he wasn't feeling well, clearly had a little bit of a soft poo, and I think he might have done a little vomit, but nothing too astounding. It was kind of like, all right, buddy, you're not feeling great. And he knows what to do. He just had to kind of fast and skipped a meal. Fed him something easy to digest, you know, lightly cooked turkey and porridge or something, whatever he fed. And then he said, I kept him on that for a day and he seemed okay, but he's a little bit down. Brought him to the vet's, great vet here in Dublin, one of our only holistic vets, and she kept an eye and he was still drinking and he just seemed a bit down. I'm gonna butcher the exact details of how long this went on for, but, you know, by Wednesday, the next day, something was still wrong with the dog. He wasn't right, he clearly wasn't, but he wanted to eat And so the owner gave him a bit of food because he seemed hungry, but he vomited then, let's say on the Wednesday, and the vomit was foul. It was just, he said, the foulest smell, like rancid meat that the dog vomited. And he said, this is not right, back down to the vets. He said, guys, there's something seriously wrong. They started taking him very seriously at that stage and they said, look, we, you need proper diagnostics of what's going on. It's not a twist, it's not a blockage. The vet could determine those things, but keep an eye and if one more thing happens, go to your local vet hospital. So he went home, one more thing happened, brought the dog to the vet hospital slightly longer at the other direction, goes to the vet hospital and the vet hospital have all the doodads and they scan the dog and do everything and they looked and they said, yes, Tommy seems quite full of gloop and they'd be worried about ulcers developing from this kind of bile or something he has in his guts and they gave him a couple of tips and tricks and said, go home with the dog and keep an eye Went home, had to go straight back in again. So 3 times in a day or 2. Eventually went back to the hospital. The hospital said, you've got a very sick little dog here. He is not happy at all, and he mightn't even be strong enough for surgery to open up and see what's going on. And then he got a call. He said, well, just do whatever you have to do. Don't ignore cost, just save this dog. And then within half an hour, he said, you need to come in because the dog is failing and To cut a long story short, the dog had died and the vets weren't quite sure what had happened. The owner asked to open up the dog and find out what happened, and the vet said like it was pretty, pretty shocking because his intestines were kind of black and his gut particularly was black, his stomach was black. And the vet said, I just can't believe this dog walked in here and tried to jump up and play with me like the day he died. You know, this dog was still able to— okay, he wasn't as good of form, but he was a happy 1-year-old pup. And so toxic shock was the diagnosis. And then the vet said, what do you feed the dog? And the owner said, best quality raw dog food. And it is the very best quality raw dog food, in my opinion. And they said, right, well, you know, we get an awful lot of this, and, you know, it's the raw dog food, we get an awful lot of these types of gut gastroenteritis cases. Now, to defend that vet, I don't think the insinuation was that bad. I'm probably building up that a bit badly because I hear this quite a lot from people through via Dogs First and stuff, you know, you get these contacts and you hear these statements coming from vets. I believe that my friend's vet was really clued in, quite fair, but the statement was made. This is, you know, this is a raw-fed dog and it's like, you know, so gastroenteritis or some sort of toxic shock black intestines. What the hell could have caused that? He's very careful about what he feeds them, didn't see any scavenging. The other dog wasn't sick and fed the exact same food.

Therefore, therefore it's likely not the food. But also, it sounds like a twist to me. If you've got that, if the dog is fine in the morning and dead in the afternoon, something catastrophic must have happened.

It was going on for 4 or 5 days though.

Yeah, but it was bright, the dog was bright in the morning and dead in the afternoon. Yeah, so I've, you know, and if it was a toxic thing, you'd just expect the dog to just be, you know, get worse and worse and worse. I would have thought the timescale for me sounds like there may have been a twist. It may have untwisted by the time they opened him up, something like that. I don't know. The other thing, there was a meme going around. Brent, this is more your department, um, but there was a meme going around of this, uh, girl who goes to the vets and says, my dog's got had a bit of diarrhea, and the vet says, oh, that'll be the raw food. And then she goes in again a couple of weeks later and says, oh, my dog's got a bit of an itchy skin, and the vet says, oh, that'll be the raw food. She then goes in a few weeks later and says, oh, my boyfriend's left me, and the vet says, that'll be, that'll be the raw food.

Yeah, yeah, facts. Yeah, that's the, that's the worry, you know. Um, I think the dog was getting quite sick, Nick, through it. I might have butchered the exact details. And he, I mean, this guy, the owner, was worried. He was going to this vet, he was going to the veterinary hospital, you know, the dog was not doing well. So I don't think it was a sudden demise.

Yeah, and so I'd like to come in there and I'd just say that one, the effectively shock, which will be the toxic shock, okay, that's not a diagnosis, that's the end cause of what will be the sudden demise because that's Unfortunately, when the gut doesn't hold its integrity, all of the bacterial toxins, etc., will flood the system, and that will cause effectively cardiac failure. You know, their kidneys, their organs will shut down. You know, effectively they, they pull the plug on everything and everything shuts down, and they just pass away. Really horrible to happen. I've seen it in really badly damaged guts with even things like parvovirus, all the way through to, yes, obstructions that can cause that, perforations. But actually, now that you've gone through the case the way you have, it does seem to be very similar to a case that I had in a young dog where the dog actually got an infarct, a clot that happened in the mesentery. So you imagine that the gut is built up of arcs and arcs of gut material, each fed by blood vessels through the mesentery. And what can happen is if the core base of that actually either twists, as Nick was talking about, or actually gets a clot in it, okay, an embolism, that actually obstructs the blood flow to all of that gut. And that gut tissue then effectively dies off. And as soon as that dies off, that becomes a liability in its own right to the rest. They'll get peritonitis, they'll get other issues going on. It floods the system. So it could be something as dramatic as that, and nothing at all to do with what they've eaten, but more to do with, you know, a fluke. You know, you go on a flight, you know, you fly this Thursday, Friday, and there's that risk that you will get an embolism. Not trying to put you off or anything, unless you wear your tight stockings, which I know you wear on a weekend.

Oh yeah, on the rest day.

Ultimately, you know, it could be just the literally, you know, something's happened, you know, that's caused an embolism freak, and it just clogs in the wrong artery at the wrong time.

Would that make the rest of the intestinal tract blacken? Like, I mean, I understand a part of the intestinal tract blackening, but the blood supply wouldn't be cut off to the whole thing. It's not one tube.

It depends, depends whereabouts that clot forms and how low down the arch is. So the closer to the gut wall, the smaller the arc that will be affected. The further down that vascular wall, the greater the arc that can be affected. So yeah, really, and then it's a cascade because as soon as the toxins start to build, you'll get more clots, you'll get DIC, disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, that cascades into more obstruction. But yeah, I've definitely seen it in a dog out of the blue, suddenly died, went in, we did a post-mortem to see what on earth was going on, and we had this distinct arc. The rest of the gut healthy, no obstruction, but this distinct arc of necrotic gut that had just effectively broken down.

Two follow-on questions then. The first one is, an owner in this situation wants to find an answer. Can you find such an embolism after death? Can you open up the dog?

It should be a fresh— it has to be a fresh cadaver. I mean, this far on, you know, finding that clot is not going to be a possibility because there'll be so many other factors going on. You know, as soon as it's more than 24 hours old, virtually you've lost everything, especially in this weather. And, you know, as soon as you freeze stuff, you're not going to find it. You know, it's a really heart-wrenching, heartbreaking story to hear, but it does happen.

Yeah, he's hammered with it. He really is taking it, taking it hard. He's had quite a lot of dogs. He was particularly fond of this one. So the second question is, what are the options available to us dog owners to get some form of a post-mortem? Like, whatever about the vet's opinion at the time, which is, you know, obviously extremely useful, what can we do? What can we say to the vet? Can you just run some bloods, please? Can you check some, check the tissue? Can you take a biopsy? Can we, like, what are the options available to us to get this done, and does pet insurance ever cover it?

Pet insurance, as far as I'm aware, does not cover post-mortem. It's more a case of you finding out, especially if you've got other dogs and you want to make sure that there's nothing obviously been ingested that could have been the cause of it. You know, see, we go in and find a stomach full of, you know, some weird tablets or, you know, you know, the metaldehyde stuff from slug bait or something like that is one of the obvious things. Generally, you have to have a discussion with the vet. They're going to discuss, you know, that you may go through all of this process of looking at all of the organs and find nothing. Okay. And there is that possibility. There is a possibility of asking them to send it to their local laboratory that can do postmortems. But unfortunately, as soon as you do that, you won't be able to ask for ashes back. They will go for communal cremation just due to how they deal with hazardous waste and, you know, what they would therefore consider appropriate. Very few of those external labs will allow to go onward for cremation. Depending on your relationship with the vet, you could ask for another vet in the practice to do the post-mortem, or even another practice to do the post-mortem. But, you know, that's a hard conversation to have, and many dog owners will be distraught at this point, not even thinking that they want to go down that route. And it's only really probably the vet, honestly, the vet that's dealing with you right there, then right there now, probably wants to know as much about why has this case escaped them what's, what's happening.

She definitely did. Yeah, the vet was, uh, the vet was upset, you know. So great vet, there's no doubt about it, but I think the, this slight insinuation about the raw dog food kind of has—

Well, it becomes, uh, they need to create a narrative, they need to create a story to explain the unexplainable.

Yeah.

And therefore sometimes they are prone to going down the let's grasp at the easiest thing, you know, and it's the big red bus in the room that they want to talk about because they're told that by so many other people in the profession. And don't let that, you know, interrupt the realistic view that so many people here on the comments are just saying, well, you know, of course they're going to blame the raw food because, you know, we've fed for 30 years raw food and, you know, we're not seeing it. So it's not the dog.

The other dog was fine. I think he said that the other dog had a slightly soft poo on Tuesday when the first dog was sick, and I even that would be enough for me to think, okay, interesting.

But it doesn't need to be food. There's so many other things out there that, you know, they could have picked up, you know. Yeah, you can't go down that route.

Brent, with the previous dog that you saw, what was the cause of that necrotizing enteropathy? Do you know?

No, it just had— it had an acute inflammatory process. It went— it skyrocketed its temperature. So it's almost like that, you know, typical child that suddenly skyrockets a viral temperature. But other than that, it was just found that there was a clot in the mesenteric artery that effectively led to necrosis.

Okay, okay, fair enough.

But, you know, consequences of clots can be many, many things, and, you know, High temperatures can be one of them. Conor was asking earlier about what can cause those clots. You know, it can be literally high temperatures, viral disease. They set clotting factors off that you wouldn't know were there. You know, change in blood pressures, all sorts of things that can happen to set them off.

And what's the— Philip is asking, what's the price of a PM? Would you say an average price? I imagine it's variable depending on how much work they have to do, but where would you think?

Do you want them to just look in the gut? And see what's going on? Do you want them to do a full post-mortem, you know, take samples, send that off? And it's not just the time, you know, if you are giving over an hour of your time, 2 hours of your time to doing that, that alone, you know, is a cost in itself. But then it's the cost of any samples that goes to the lab, which will easily double what you're doing, and depends on when they're doing it, whether they're doing it for them learning what might have been going on, or, you know, and they're willing to discount that pricing, or whether they are just saying, well, look, we're stacked out, we've got so much other work, but we will do it for you if you want to, but that'll be the cost. And I would be surprised if you're under £500 for them to do a post-mortem these days, and then you've got costs of laboratory stuff on top. So just, you know, be prepared if you really wanted to go into investigating at length what exactly was going on.

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, sounds a little bit disheartening actually. Sounds a bit like, I'm not sure I'm actually going to know here, and there's not really anything you can do about it, which is tough to take. I kind of want to know that was something. There's a depressing amount of comments that say, was he poisoned? It's a bloody hell. But mind you, you can pick up a poisoned rat and stuff, and, you know, poison could come that way. But, um, yeah, you never know, there's funny things. Um, so is there— have you, um, has anybody else got an FAQ? Yeah, there's—

I saw one just a bit further up. I can't find it now because there's been lots of, lots of discussion. And was it Kelly? Yeah, yeah. And oh, there you go. And protein—

see how good am I?

Enteropathy. That is very good. We both saw it and both thought, oh, that's interesting. So, uh, boys, where would you go with that? Basically, lymphangiectasia, um, uh, PLE, ultra low fat diet.

Can you tell us a bit about the disease?

Yeah, um, it's where it's a Lymph angio— so it's a condition of the blood, the lymph vessels. Vessels. And yes, the—

which is plasmacytic lymphocytic enteropathy. So basically there's an inflammatory disease, and then what you've then got is the lymph gland— well, sorry, the lymphatic system is filling up and you're basically oozing lymph into the surrounding tissues of the gut. That thickens it even further. That further prevents absorption.

Uh, PLE could be protein-losing enteropathy though.

We have to clarify that. Go on, Kelly, ask.

Yeah, Kelly, come on in.

You can maybe clarify which of those it is.

And so what does lymph do for everyone? Before you move on, just explain to everyone what the lymphatic system does.

Okay, I'll jump into this. Right, so with your heart, everything that comes out of your heart goes, cycles around your lungs and then around your body and then back. Yeah, 100% of the blood that leaves your heart more or less comes back and hits your heart. However, what happens is that in the tissues, a tiny bit of blood juice, if you like, the serum the lymph tissue is left behind. So 100% of blood enters the tissue by the artery, but only 99% of that, if you like— I'm making up the numbers, but just to make it easy to understand. So what happens to that 1% that doesn't return from that tissue? The answer is it's lymph and it has to be drained. And the reason— the symptom of that in people is where you get filled legs.

Yeah.

If you've got heart disease, you know, little old ladies with heart disease or little old men with heart disease, their legs fill up with fluid. And that's not blood, but that is edema, edematous tissue, because the lymph is not being extracted. And lymph moves passively through the action of muscles and it empties back into your bloodstream just here. And it's a fantastic mechanism for lymphocytes to move around the body. It's a wonderful and very interesting kind of— it's kind of a system right in the background but very, very, very important. Have I missed anything there, Bren?

No, I think that's— yes, lymph certainly building up, that oozing into tissues, thickening of tissues, And yeah, absolutely. I mean, they've identified it was protein-losing enteropathy. You're absolutely right.

Okay.

Okay.

So, yeah, you will get low albumins, but you'll get low absorption. So you sort of like into a perpetual cycle of, you know, the enteropathy getting worse, the other issues of the thickening of the gut, just meaning you're getting low and you're losing protein back out into the gut rather than actually absorbing more.

Okay, so I was going to ask, I don't get the protein losing bit because it's like it's nothing to do with the lymph system, but if this is affecting the gut and the gut's ability to do the job, is that where the protein loss bit comes from? What's the PLE bit from?

No, no, it oozes out back in the fluid. There is, you know, albumin getting lost back into the gut from that fluid leakage.

Okay, okay, right, cool, got it. Right, so, okay, so what are you gonna do?

One thought there, Conor, where would you go? With that?

I don't know, as soon as you see kind of weight loss in dogs, I'm no expert because it depends on where the hole is and why, I suppose, you know, like it's kind of like when, you know, when you've got these gastrointestinal issues and the dog is low on B12, so he needs an injection of B12, and it's like, oh, bloody hell, the dog gets a savage amount of B12 in his diet. Why is— what's the hole and where is it, and let's fix it. That would always be the way I'm thinking, but because I lack any sort of knowledge of this particular issue when I see weight loss, you need to, you need to fix, you need to stop the leaky, you need to plug the buckets, but I don't know how to do that. But in the meantime, if it's protein loss, you can always feed this higher protein diets. Dogs eat very lean diets. I'm a big promoter of very lean diets for dogs. I don't see why that'd be a problem. I imagine if this dog is already raw fed, she's already getting a whack of protein in her diet, and she's saying she's on low fat, which if you're a raw feeder means very little carbs, low fat, a lot of protein. So the dog's probably already on quite a lean diet, and you can't push that too far because once the fat goes too low, the dog will start getting extremely lean. So I don't know is the answer. I don't know what I'd be recommending. I'd be saying you need to go talk to your vet.

My thought would be to do some food trials because it may— I find that wheat, beef, and chicken are the most allergenic foods, and those would be the first things that I'd be removing. So Um, you may have done it already, Kelly, but if you haven't, I'd be thinking about doing food trials just to change the chicken breast and white fish for another low-fat— so rabbit or venison— um, and, and do some food trials because it may be that the thing that's driving the inflammation and the lymphangiectasia and all that stuff is just a food sensitivity. Brent, where would you go?

Yeah, so I take that a step further rather than just sticking to the, the food alone. And I would actually start to look at how can we fix some of this leaky gut that's leading to the inflammation? You know, what can we do to close those gap junctions to stop exciting the inflammation? So a little bit more functional medicine, maybe adding some butyrate into the diet just to sort of shortcut the repair requirement of bacterial production of that helps with healing. There's a few things like using glutathione, so L-glutathione, the liposomal, so that's liposomal, liposomal vitamin C, using some of these nutrients just to try and seal up the gut. Even going back, so I had a little dog in the other day that's been on— so the classic conventional treatment here is suppress the immune system, stop that inflammatory process going on, you know, stamp on whatever's going on there, add steroids usually in at this point. Even speaking to the referral guy, they were on about adding cyclosporines in on top, azathioprine as a sort of last ditch, you know, those sort of things. And I just went, I can't do that to this little dog. You know, it's had an enteropathy for the last 6 months, and literally adding in aloe vera, adding in tree bark powder, okay, and just giving that turned that little dog around within 3 days. Just bandaging the gut, calming things down, getting them away from cardboard hypoallergenic foods. I'm giving it some real nutrition using those two things. And now we've got to 80% where we've got— the last 20% will be about sealing that gut, reducing the excitement of the immune system, and then coming back in to sort it out. Not, not— and accepting it's not going to be an instant fix. Now, lymphatic stasis, yeah, don't get me wrong, can be really, really difficult to turn around in that short a length of time. But it still backs up, I would say, do whatever you can to stop the stimulation of that immune system, get the support in. You've got to stem that, ultimately, that level of lack of absorption somehow. And some of that is a reset of the gut flora. That's another gateway in, you know, bone broths, absolutely just reiterating bone broth over and over again. That's another thing that this little dog had, you know, and, you know, just accepting there will be a point where you've started, you're going to have weight loss regardless, you've already got it and it will continue to lose weight. You know, ultra low fat for me personally is not the root of this dog's problem. The other things that are stimulating the immune system, not the fat levels.

Yeah, it's like, it's like if you focus on that, you can only create leaner and leaner and leaner and leaner diets, and that will not solve the problem. There's something else. Natural anti-inflammatories— can people reach for things like things that will, from omega-3s to golden turmeric paste, to things that we know are quite potent natural anti-inflammatories? Can you do that to help?

Like Boswellia. Boswellia is where I'd go with that. Boswellia is frankincense and is used in human herbal medicine for IBD scenarios. So to a certain extent, this is kind of just a glorified puffy IBD type situation from what I can see. And so you've got to look at the face.

Small intestinal, yeah, small intestinal. I love to reach for Iris vers, you know. I think that's, you know, if they're vomiting and got stomach cramps, you know, anything from IBD through to pancreatitis, I find it really useful.

Iris, very much so.

So it's interesting, they've got their species of bacteria when they're doing probiotics to fix the gut, the likes of phytospore, where they have studies that show— I think of probiotics, I think of some of those species as like little fraggles. They're in there and they keep keep their environment perfect for them. So, you know, once they've got a mucosal kind of membrane to live in, which is why people put in marshmallow and slippery elm to these dogs that are kind of gut sick, that the gut flora themselves, given the right nutrients, which is your broth, that's all your tarmacatum for a ruined gut, all your collagen and glucagon and cool stuff. But like, isn't there species of bacteria that fix intestinal walls and that kind of thing? Isn't it? Is that not—

is that Would that be, I don't know, akkermansia or one of those perhaps?

It's one of them.

All of those ones which really accelerate the butyrate release. But you can cheat because you can add butyrate at this early stage to heal the gut until you've grown the normal gut flora with all the bone broths and supportive prebiotics and probiotics. And yes, eventually it should kick in itself, but until that point you can get this thing. Beauty Caps, which, you know, butyrate capsules, um, that are options. They do it as liquids, um, you know, you can actually supply that.

I've got a good one, I've got a good one. Surely colostrum, surely colostrum will be good here with growth factors. Would that not help stimulate a bit of healing in the old—

if they're not beef intolerant, that might be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think— can colostrum get you on a dairy intolerance thing? I'm not sure if the if it has that same stuff in it. Maybe it does still. Yeah, I mean, your dog might well be able— if your dog is able for beef and you've established it, colostrum is fantastic for gut issues sometimes. It used to be a big go-to for me. You know the way sometimes you kind of go through a phase of, I used to always use that and now I always use this, you know. So there's loads of ideas for fixing guts and fermented food.

I think fermented food is good, Philippa. Nice, good thought.

And Deb, you know, you talked earlier on in the list about isotonics, you know, things to get fluids into dogs. I think that's a really good point. You know, I've already said bone broth. Nick, what's this orange juice and brewer's yeast?

I was talking to Penny, and it came out today actually, my chat with her and with Katie, and I said that I was raised— my mother was crazy about raw— about raw— about, uh, health food, even in the '70s. For example, she took non-debittered brewer's yeast, added orange juice, mixed it into a sludge, and then you neck that for, for B vitamins. And so obviously, Deb is actually listening to what I say, which is kind of reassuring. So thank you, Deb.

And, um, and that's why he's got so much hair and he and him haven't.

You gave him a life gave him a lifelong taste of brewer's yeast, I think. There's loads of ways to get fluids into dogs. Like, if you put anything into water for a food—

bone broth, I think.

Yeah, like bone broth is one way. But even if you don't have bone broth, guys, a tablespoon of full-fat probiotic yogurt into the water, dogs will hoover that up. Like, any sort of flavoring into the water. There's great studies of dogs eating very crappy foods. Once they flavor it with gravy, it was called the gravy study, and what they were showing was dogs have a terrible taste for meat, and so they'll eat anything flavored with meat. They were flavoring, like, you know, I'm not messing, tissue paper and whatnot, and the dogs were— this is what they want. So anything in that water, if you're trying to get water into them— but I always question, the dog will take in water if he needs water, and sometimes I think, can you kid the dog into taking more water to his own benefit? I think that would go against the whole practice of zoopharmacology, and I'm Do you need to?

Yeah, and I don't think it's just fluids. Remember this, it's also the salts within it. And this is why for rehydrating, I always add a teaspoon of salt to every pint of fluid. So if that's bone broth, that's a good way. So a teaspoon, good salt, level teaspoon, to a— of a good quality salt. So good quality Cornish sea salt, something like that. Okay, um, and you know, to a pint, so that's 580-odd mils of fluid.

Okay, I'd also put half a teaspoon of honey in there as well.

Yeah, local honey, or raw honey, pasteurized. And you give them that water, but also give them plain water because they might not want your salty isotonic water all the time. So have two bowls of water at a time. So you're making your own is great. The salt, the good quality salt, so beneficial. All you raw feeders are feeding zero salt diets. That's not healthy either. There's brilliant minerals in salt. There's a whole list, 60, 70, 80 minerals in some of these salts, you know, and most of them— how much strontium do you need in your diet? Not a lot, but you need tiny amounts of all these things, and salt contains a hell of a lot, way beyond sodium and magnesium, you know, it's fantastic. So yeah, dogs will take salt as they need it. In this process, ZooPharmacology, how much magnesium does he need? He'll take it. And then when he's finished, when he's topped up, he— the thought is that he will stop drinking it then at that point. Um, I had that done on me with licorice, where the— remember I told you that story about ZooPharmacology, dipping your finger in the licorice and you keep dipping it, tastes like licorice, tastes like licorice, and on the third dip it was like, oh, that doesn't taste nice at all. And she said, you can sit down. And one guy dipped his finger 7 times and she said, you need to go to the doctor. And she was spot on. The guy was mega stressed, his adrenal glands were shot, and he had big black bags under his eyes, which is apparently a symptom of it. And she was spot on. The guy was mega, mega stressed. He had more problems than stress. But I had done 3 dips. The girl beside me just did one. She goes, oh, it's horrible. I think it's lovely. Well, it's not like crap licorice. But, and that's classic. So you found it because we all still have the process in our— Caroline Ingram was doing this to us in Switzerland. And she goes, we all still have the process, not just pregnant women that are. But you have to listen to your body. And that's your body saying, take that licorice, take that licorice. A big part of Eastern medicine. And on the third dip, the body just said no more. And I went, well, that's not nice.

So yeah, I used to do exactly the same for zinc. You give a solution, I think it was a zinc salt, and if you taste it, it tastes like water, you are zinc deficient. That is to say, you can, you can take more and more and more and more. If you taste it and you immediately get rid of it, your zinc is fine. Oh, it's a recognized— it's a recognized test. Test for assessing. So you can kind of buy a little kit from, uh, Higher Nature or whoever it was, but it makes so much sense.

Yeah, a little mini suitcase with like all your vitamins, all your minerals. Drop them into water and neck them every day and top yourself up. Oh my God.

Okay, so, uh, Rebecca's saying about tequila, you're necking them.

Yeah, I needed a load.

Rebecca, just in the last minute, guys, Rebecca, it's very interesting about the parvo-like illness. Rebecca, if you can keep us posted on that. I'd have thought if it's like parvo, if it's connected to parvo, they would be able to identify. They just stick it under an MRI or whatever it might be.

Well, remember there was that electron microscope, there was that slight variant that hit Northern England and Northern Ireland at Christmas time. And it sort of went through northern England and across Northern Ireland. Also all tested negative, caused massive amounts of vomiting and diarrhea. And I think there was— they were trying to connect it to COVID, they were trying to connect it to parvo. I think they ended up thinking that it was actually a different variant of parvo that was going through. So I wonder if it's the same, because they were all testing negative in hospital for parvo, but with parvo-like symptoms. So that would be interesting because that went to Northern Ireland, I think, as well. And I just wonder whether it has spread around the world because originally they felt it came from sea life, so from seals and stuff like that, because it hit from the coast first and then sort of spread inland. Yeah, because we do know seals seals can suffer from parvovirus.

They can.

So it's interesting. The dogs were very sick, 2 to 3 days wiped out. I was looking visually at a couple of them, particularly one of them, such a healthy dog, and a week later the dog was smashed. It really hit him hard. He could barely drink water, lying in his bed. But they recovered after 3 days. But you can see how with a weakened animal or a pup, like parvo, it's shocking what parvo can do to a little pup. It's not nice to look at. So anyway, guys, it's 8 o'clock, I think. Yeah, God, I love FAQs. It's great, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lots to talk about.

I'll tell you what, very quickly, Stephanie, you need to read the literature from RawSafe. If you come down to Dog Edition Live, catch us there, you'll see some of these leaflets that might help you out with that question right there. Otherwise, you'll have to go on to rawsafe.com and look it up And it opens—

that question was about raw feeding with a baby in the house. I've got babies in the house at the moment, so I'm walking the walk here. But, uh, yes, the study showed that if you feed a dog rotten contaminated meat, they will poo out more, uh, hazardous bacteria. That's a fact. But if you feed good quality clean meat, like the very vast majority of raw dog food producers, and certainly if they're following RawSafe guidelines where they're putting themselves forward for a voluntary audit, which is terrifying as an ex-food producer, believe me, you don't want people walking around your factory if you're not absolutely prepared because it's just, it's a scare. Like, you try to be as good as you can, but it's hard to keep things absolutely perfect. So believe me, companies that sign up for RawSafe, no, no food producer, no dry fed, no dry food industry, pet food regulators, AFCO, none of them do inspections. They don't test people's products, they don't inspect your premises, nothing. So that, this is a huge thing, this RawSafe.

Rachel Mack in the comments has visited Yeah, one last thing.

So with the, with the stats, if anybody recommends moving from fresh food to dry, they need to bear in mind that from 2006 to 2016, 132 people were poisoned with salmonella from dry pet food, half of them toddlers under 2 years of age. Okay, in that time, fresh food, fresh pet food harmed zero humans. That's according to the literature. Of course some stuff is going to be going on, it's a big world, things happen. But we have enormous safety studies, two enormous ones from Helsinki and New York, that show it seems to be an incredibly safe thing for families to do, possibly even protective. When you think about, you know, people that live in India can drink the Ganges water and we can't. So like, there is a whole lot to this, but what we do have is a huge amount of evidence, proper peer-reviewed evidence, that tell us it's a safe thing to do. You don't have a single study suggesting dry food is a very safe thing to do. It has its issues. It's not inert, and people are being poisoned with it, particularly kids. That is not happening with raw dog food. It's not to say it's not going on, but to suggest that this other product is safe and perfect for kids is an absolute myth. It's not been borne out by the literature. It's not true.

I raised two kids in the presence of raw-fed dogs and cats and all sorts. And the other thing I was going to say was I'm going to be at Edition Dog, so Bren and I are going to be there. Look us up. I'm on the Lucilin stand in the morning, and I'm on the Ethical thickly raised stand in the afternoon. So all the fun at the fair, methinks.

I got a text message, I just got a WhatsApp message there just a few minutes ago. I couldn't help but it popped up on my screen and it's from a very famous vet and she's saying, I'm at SuperZoo in Vegas, rolls and rolls of absolute pointless crap for dogs. And said rolls and rolls of pointless crap for dogs and I thought, wow, that sums it up. Yeah, guys, I better crack on here.

Great, okay, so yeah. Grounded, Grounded, and How We Got Here next week.

Yeah, I think in short, yeah, that's going to be a, that's going to be a three-parter. We're gonna do, we're gonna do each one of us, aren't we? Are we gonna, uh, take a look?

Yeah, well, we can do the Grounded bit as an intro, then we'll do a little bit about each one of the stories, I think.

Okay, I will be able to pick, pick the person's brains as to how they arrived. Yeah, good. Three parts. Nice.

Yeah, I I want to give them a bit of a push as well, so we can conclude after we talk about our own, you know, how we do things. Then we could conclude with people kind of talking about their small business. People can write in on Patreon, tell us a little bit who do you want to recommend for some, you know. And I thought that'd be nice just to check out what are the cool little businesses out there and start supporting the independents a little bit. So I think there's a 3 or 4 show bananas are coming up in that But let's start to kick it off next week anyway. Yep.

Karen's always going to have the last word.

Like a Marvel origin story.

That's the film you don't want to see.

Very tedious. 4 hours of it. God, I want my money back. All right, guys, that was a pleasure. That was cool.

Fabulous.

Fabulous fellows. Thank you, guys. And thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. And we'll see you in 7 short days.

To look.