RawPetMedics Tuesday night live: Longevity Plus

Hello everybody.

Oh, I should be hiding everybody and just coming in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pretend that she's not here, that she's a special guest.

So we can still hear you, but you just, you know, yeah, we'll bring you out as a surprise.

You'd just be throwing your voice and it'd be me just, you know, Bianca's the first one in.

Very good. There are some people that obviously are ahead of time. They do wait in the wings thinking, well, they'll come on eventually, and here they are, you know. Yeah, we're on early.

Very cool. There they go. Here they are.

Yeah, you see, they're all going to start making comments. Yeah, it's nice when we make—

yeah, great. 6th, Rach Mack.

Yeah, she is going to be sad. She's dropping.

It's all right.

So any, any, uh, any crack over the last week? What's been going on?

Oh, well, uh, I've got an amazing one just before, before we get into the, the really good stuff. Okay, here you go. You're gonna absolutely love this. You're gonna absolutely love this. This is a June 2022 report which says, according to a survey conducted by the University of Guelph, Ontario Veterinary College, 66% of dog owners and 53% of cat owners feed their dogs and cats raw pet food. This trend reflected the search trend data. Searches for raw dog food have increased by 110% since 2017, which is just a great way to start the evening. And this is reporting on a Vet Record study from 2020 by Sarah Dodd et al. Vet Record 2020, and the title of the paper is An observational study of raw feeding practices and how these have changed between 2008 and 2018.

C. Cool, gee, that's a good one. That's, that's the first I've heard of that.

66%, guys, what a great way to start the evening.

Yeah, 66%. Just repeat that for everybody who's joining us. 66% are feeding some form of raw food.

Yeah, 66% for dog owners, 53% for cat owners. That's supreme because normally it's kind of a 10-to-1 ratio of the dogs versus the cats. So it means the cat owners are catching up. Wonderful news. I'm sure that's because of all the work that we've been doing on this wonderful show, guys. I'm sure it is.

Marvelous.

Of course it is. It's due to Raw Pet Medics. Isn't that great? All without the support of the industry. Go ahead, Ben.

Yeah, absolutely. I've got a really funny one for you this week. First, a shout out to Sam Broadhead. I saw 12 beautiful German Shepherd pups from her raw-fed bitch with raw-fed from weaning just amazing to see them. Huge German Shepherds. I'll give you a shout out quickly. But what I have is a funny addition to that. A client of mine, I'm not going to name her because I don't want to embarrass her, actually had to stop because she watches Raw Pet Medics while she's grooming, and she had to stop and then go back and actually replay Conor singing Milky Way. Because I could not stop laughing. So guys out there, I think we're going to create a little TikTok of Conor's Little Milk Away song. Karen's on it, I believe. So that's going out there live now that she said that.

So, Conor, what's been the highlight of your week? What's been the highlight of my week? I can't really tell you what the highlight of my week has been. It's been extremely busy. I suppose on the piggyback of what Nick is saying, Things are very, very busy. I am particularly busy on the email front, on the Facebook Messenger front. I did 2 lives this week already and it's only Tuesday. I did a group of French Bulldogs today, so you're just talking about allergies and you can just sense it. You can just sense that it's getting extremely busy these days. So what's been going on? Nothing. I've just been nose to the grindstone. Everything's been very good and very, very hot for the last few days, so I'm just kind of taking— I'm trying to take it easy. Took Friday off, that kind of thing. But, uh, yeah, nothing to report, lads. Just working away. So it's been very boring on our side.

Yeah, I am very—

I am very excited about tonight though. I'm very excited about this, uh, this lady tonight we have got there. We're— I'm very excited. Nick, you can introduce her when the time comes. But before we do, guys, we're on patreon.com/rawpetmedics, and that helps us very much. The price of a cup of tea or a pint if you afford it, that's great, really helps us this side to get the show going every week. If you can do it, great. If you can't, don't sweat it. We're going to be here no matter what, bringing you these fabulous guests like Penny. But can you tell us a little bit about Penny before we bring her on, Nick?

So I was contacted by this wonderful person called Dr. Sue Little about 2 weeks ago, and she said, we're doing a summit on pet and, uh, uh, owner, both longevity. Would you like to be a part of it? And I said, absolutely, I'm absolutely all over it. So we had a chat, and, um, she's a remarkable, remarkable person. She's a— started as a, uh, uh, a zoologist and a behaviorist, ethologist, and she made observations with the— her captive animals versus the wild animals and noticed that the wild animals are so much healthier and suddenly went, oh my God, we're killing our captive, our domesticated animals through many things, but through the food that we're feeding them. That led to a massive, massive revelation for her. So she's done lots of research. She's very, very well read and she's a fan of ours. But there you go. Nobody is perfect. But apart from that, she's really got all this information at her fingertips. So I'd like to introduce Penny Wood, Dr. Zoo Little. Here she is, here she is, all the way down that end.

Penny, thank you guys, it's awesome to join you all.

It's amazing, it's great to see you. So listen, Penny, it's really great that you could be here. You've just finished filming, you're squeezing us into a very tight schedule. You would— I I couldn't believe it. You were writing emails to me, like really boring business emails at 3:30 this morning. Do you never sleep?

Do you never sleep?

Do you know, I thought I learned about how dolphins sleep, right? And they put half of their brain to sleep at any one given time. So this hemisphere sleeps for a few seconds, then this hemisphere sleeps for a few seconds. So that is my idol. That's what I'm going to be like.

So nice, nice. Just one closed eye and kind of like in stroke form.

Okay, everyone thinks I'm winking at them all time.

But no, amazing, amazing.

Listen, so, so Penny, swans and birds too, don't they also do that? Close down one half of their brain and keep the other half open for—

I would well believe it.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're migrating.

I don't fully trust swans. I don't know where I am with swans. And horses, actually. Horses and swans and possibly monkeys. There's 3 animals actually that I'm not very comfortable around. Swans just seem to know what I'm at. I tried to feed them there 2 weeks ago and, uh, was accosted by them and they've no manners, they just come up and just start jamming at the bag to get the food. Do you not find that with swans? You don't think swans are—

Well, you know what, Conor, I've heard that they're pretty uncomfortable with you as well, which is why they attack you.

Yeah, did they say that to you? Yeah, you're like Dr.

Dolittle and we've got to protect you. I'm Dolittle, she's Dolittle, I'm Dolittle, you know, it's as simple as that.

So Penny, do you want to start off with a bit of background, like how, what's the ethology, what did you do in the background, tell us a little bit about your background in canine cognition and sensory neuroscience. They sound absolutely cool. Give us a bit of background.

Absolutely cool. So ethology is just simply the study of animal behaviour. So out of the science, you sort of had these people coming into behaviour as a behaviourist, and they were people who were looking at behaviour under artificial circumstances, artificial conditions in a laboratory. So Skinner and people like that. And then you had people more like Conrad Lorenz who were looking at ethology, animal behaviour, the natural behaviours that they're doing out in the wild. And so ethology comes out of that. But then you have cognitive behavior and you have sort of more instinctive behaviors, the things that the animals just do without the forward prefrontal cortex processing. And I was more interested in the things that did require that level of brain engagement, the decision-making, the problem-solving, communication, interaction, personality stuff. So that's my background. And I took that into a very applied point of view rather than writing the research papers that we all love to read, taking it to the actual zoo in front of the animals. And so using other people's science to make the difference and build those relationships in zoos to improve animal welfare, to improve their quality of life, to enrich their sensory experiences. And it was while I was there that I started— I was working alongside a lot of the vets because again, they're part of the welfare team. And I was a bit surprised to find that the medicine they were using was this band-aid approach. It was like, oh, here comes this flamingo who's presenting with bumblefoot. It's already established, it's a big deal. So we just give them some antibiotics and we do the thing. I don't— that may not be what they did, but they didn't heal the flamingo. This flamingo was a repeat offender, you know, he'd come in 9 times with a bad foot, you know. And then the same thing would happen with a lot of the other patients that were coming in for clinic. And I was just like, why aren't we healing them? Like, if that flamingo is in the wild Either he would have become coyote lunch or he would have gotten fixed. So what is it that they're doing? Because they're not all becoming coyote lunch or whatever. They're healing themselves. How are they doing that? It seems to be a better model than what we're doing with our very superior human brain, right, to fix them. So I started getting into what are they doing? What is the natural healing modalities that work? What are they eating that's priming their immune system to be able to have the resilience to fight back. Because at the end of the day, this was something that hit me like a sledgehammer, is it's no doctor, no vet, no drug, no food, no fancy-pants therapy that heals anyone of anything. It is your own immune system and nothing else. You support that, you can build it up and make it stronger. You can optimize it. You can biohack it to the nth degree. And I'm all behind all of that, right? But if you don't have an immune system that is functional, you're out of the game.

And would zoos not be feeding really high-quality food to their zoo animals anyway? Would they not be up on nutrition for their animals? Where do you think that is? Where do you think that approach is in zoos? I would have thought that was—

yeah, and you've got to remember, zoos are a continuum. There are some really bad dodgy zoos that need to be shut down, you know. They haven't got a clue what they're doing. They're putting them in concrete and all the bad things. Then there are state-of-the-art phenomenal facilities investing massive amounts into research, conservation, and welfare for the animals and improving not just the ones in front of them but so many others as well. So zoos are just, you know, it's— they're not the same. So some will have dietitians and nutritionists and animal specialists on the food side as part of the team, and others will get advice from them. We like to share a lot in the zoo community. There's not necessarily bags and bags of money to So those who don't have, we tend to share with those, you know, so everyone gets the information. But there's— we make mistakes. So monkeys, for example, you know, we used to give them all this trash like they get back in the '50s. They got cream buns and so did the elephants and, you know, all this rubbishy food for humans because we just like to feed them to make friends with them, right? Then it was like, okay, no, no, no, monkeys don't eat that. They eat fruit. So let's give them fruit. So we gave them lots of fruit in their diet. Problem is we gave them human fruit, so fruit that had been cultivated for the human palate, and we like sugar. A banana that I buy in, you know, M&S or something is going to be a totally different banana that I go and pick out of the rainforest of Costa Rica in terms of sugar content. Yeah, so the monkeys were getting diabetes in captivity in swathes, like a lot of primates were going down with diabetes because they had too much sugar from too much fruit. So we're doing the right things, but it's this— you've got to then change again and say, okay, so we have a little bit of fruit and lots and lots of the green stuff. And that's a great zoo that takes that on board. Unfortunately, there are kibble companies for zoos. I hate to say it, but that was my next question. Yeah, there are kibble companies, and so you can buy monkey kibble, seal kibble, lion kibble, bear kibble, all the things. And I mean, you can imagine how much I hate that. And so I'm seeing the diseases, and this is what started to happen to me. I started to see the diseases. Your cat in the wild, your leopard out there, your lion on the Serengeti, whatever, is not dying from chronic kidney disease. They're not dying from hypothyroidism. You put that cat in captivity, that's exactly what's going to take them out. It was us that was doing it.

So when you've got that, that situation, because I see zoos really as restricting the environment of those of those animals. And just as, you know, some pet parents without meaning to restrict the environment of their pets, is, is that restriction, the lack of their ability to explore and find things that can heal them or help heal them, is that the issue? Or is it, um, something else that you're seeing, you know, that actually you can still give them that restriction of environment but yet give them other things to explore within that very restricted environment to heal them. How are you addressing that?

Yeah, great question. And it's both. So it depends on the attitude of the zoo, the keeper, the curator, the board of directors, whoever, as to whether or not they're willing to embrace a new idea. And some are more conservative than others. When we restrict the size, and we're so conscious about the size, we always look at the size as that's the contributing factor. It's Sometimes it is. For a polar bear, it absolutely is. For an elephant, it really truly is. For a meerkat, it's really not, right? Their value system is on the colony and the family and all the dynamics that happen with that, rather than how big is my patch of sand. They're not roaming species the way a polar bear is. So, so long as the zoo or the keeper or the pet parent, whoever is the captive, you know, authority, the person in charge of the captive environment, So long as you are providing options to the animal, that's the key thing. Options for sensory engagement, which is what I used to do with the— or I used to focus on with the mental health in captivity. Sensory engagement, enrichment of options. Here's a toy that smells like something. Here's, you know, go and investigate that, figure this out, try this challenge, dig that hole. Okay? Same thing with medicine. So if we can give them the options and start to bring into their environment, here are 20 different dried herbs and teas that I, you know, have bought, you know, and human quality stuff's great because we know then it's clean, right? Especially if you're buying organic, please do. And we then supply that into the enclosure for the animals. We know then that they're going to interact with that and what they like, they'll go towards. This is a universal rule across all living beings. What you like, you go towards. What you don't like or don't need, you withdraw from. If something's horrible, you're going to leave it place, right? So the herbs that they want to have, they'll ingest, they'll roll in, they'll rub, they'll crush, they'll get on them, they'll lick them, they'll sniff them, whatever it is. And the ones they don't need, they'll ignore. And if they really don't like them, then they'll get rid of them. They'll push them away, bury them in something else or whatever. So now they're giving us a whole load of information. It's like, you needed this. But they go one step further. They're even cleverer than that, right? I didn't have to come up with a genius plan of knowing exactly which one they needed. As long as I give them choice. But their choices will change each day according to their need, and they know what that is. So as long as I keep giving them lots of options, they'll pick a different thing, a different combination, a different dosing level, a different ratio. They're doing all the hard stuff. I'm just the facilitator.

Thing is, Penny, in the wild, they're going to have an almost infinite variety because of the, you know, different soil at the top of the mountain to the bottom of the mountain. So the the ants are going to be different, the, the forbs are going to be different, the, the bushes, the grasses, the everything else is going to be different. So it's almost infinite. And they would be able to, through zoopharmacognosy, be able to say, right, I'm feeling a little bit halfway up the mountain today. Is it possible in the zoo? And I'm kind of— I kind of know the answer. In a zoo scenario, it's almost impossible to do that.

How does—

how does the zoo the zoo community cope with the fact that they can only give a limited, as well, but as good as they can, but a limited environment?

Anything's better than nothing, and choice is phenomenally empowering. So you're not only giving the access to the materials that they might want, even if it's sort of second best option, it's still better than zero option. But the ability for the animal to have that sense of gratification and achievement I've found a thing, even though they didn't put it there, but they, they use their nose, their eyes, whatever, to go and find where we hid it for them, right? I found the thing that I needed and now I'm using my skill set to dose myself accordingly is better than none of that. And also you've got to remember we like to put up on the pedestal the wild and go, the wild, oh, it's the best place ever. The wild isn't always fabulous. This is why, you know, sometimes when you have the open door policy at the zoo where animals can can elect to come to work today at the zoo. They'll come in from the wild and join the zoo for the day, and then they'll go out again, right? An open-door zoo. They do come in because there are benefits to being in captivity. You've got a maid, you've got a butler, you've got a cleaner, you've got a cook, you've got, you know, you've got a whole household staff to look after you, right? But out in the wild, it's not like every fruit tree is in season and fruiting at that particular time. They might want the fruit off that tree, but they're going to wait 6 months for it to come into. So they've got to go and find Plan B anyway.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely a balance. Like, I mean, there's disease, there's hardship, there's winters, there's, you know, there's all sorts of things. And there's always predation. I mean, okay, the big cats wouldn't suffer too much of it, but there's always a risk other cats trying to kill their babies, other sort of stuff that just does not happen. So I can see how primates and that kind of— those sort of animals would get fairly well used to it. I heard a great quote there in this book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, one of Nick's favorites. And Sullivans was saying how, um, when, uh, when these grass farmers, they call themselves guys that rear cattle properly, and he says, when what you see when you look at a pasture, you just see grass. He goes, I see about 20 different species of plants. He goes, I see red and white clover, I see sweetgrass, I see this, that. He goes, now watch this cow. He goes, and she'll walk straight over, she'll select certain plants at certain times of the day, certain weeks. Depending on what she needs, and she'll leave the stuff she doesn't really like. If you were to leave her alone, different species would grow because she likes certain things at certain times. So he says it's really particular to these cows and how and what they're up to and reproducing or not and that kind of thing. So yeah, that's interesting. It must be interesting that like if a cheetah grew up with certain foliage in Africa, would that not be the sort of foliage you'd love to offer the cheetah to roll around in? Or, you know, I imagine they eat their little bits of grass here and there. Do all big cats do that? That seems to be a very common thing in carnivores though.

Herbs, yeah, cats love herbs because they're aromatic and they've got a good sense of smell and they don't get any calorific value from their plant materials but they can get the active components, the active chemistry inside plants to do medicinal effects or just the pleasurable side of things. So, you know, they enjoy the smell of catnip because it elicits those things and peppermint's the same and, you know, So there's a bunch of stuff that is just for fun.

That's cool.

And so following on from that, because there's a big thing that you talk about with your longevity stuff of, you know, how we can re-engage our pets to a longer lifestyle that sort of almost mimics wildlife. You know, you know, one of your early things was trying to get the wildlife in zoos to live longer like they would in the wild. But there's a lot of the veterinary industry which would go down the route of, well, actually the wild isn't, as Conor was pointing out, isn't always the great place to be. You know, you can get predated on, there's disease, there's injury, you know, even when you're hunting you could get injured seriously and end up— so how do you, you know, is it truly something you've researched that you've got animals in the wild which are truly living longer because of that ability to have variety and you know, choose their own sort of self-selection of healing and that side of things. Where do you get that research from? Where's that basis?

So it's a very messy situation. And this was something even as a kid I was looking at. I was like, Mom, what is— what is the one in the wild with the less than the one in captivity or vice versa? Because there was no clear pattern. And I was like, it didn't make sense to me. That's the same animal who has less birthdays or more birthdays. Phase. And it's in the— it's, it's not necessarily that they're going to live longer in one thing or the other. It's they're going to die of different things because of the environmental circumstances. So this is not a genetic driver. This is not governed by the species that you are and what genes you have. This is more than 80% governed by lifestyle and epigenetics. So the epigenetics can be turned on and off and controlled by your environment and your which is why diet is such a big deal, amongst other reasons. But only 20% or even less than that is genetically dictated. So the animals in the wild, when zoos first sort of really started taking off, Victorian era and the early part of the 20th century, the animals had horrifically short lifespans. You just have to read some of Gerald Durrell's books to discover just how quickly something that they plucked out of the wild was put in a zoo. And they're heartbreaking stories. Because people had no idea what they needed. They had no idea of the species biology, the natural science. As that skill set and that knowledge base has increased, we've done better and better in the captive environment. But like I said, we still make mistakes like giving them human food with way too much sugar in it. So it's the fact that in the, in the wild, they don't die from age-related chronic debilitating degenerative diseases. They die from a broken tooth, which leads to a mouth infection, which leads to a bacterial influx into the bloodstream, which goes to the heart and gives them a heart attack in about a week and a half. Right? It's just like living, living life, living life, living life. Oh, I'm dead. You know, it's that how it works. And yet in captivity, all I could see was living life, suffering, living life, getting sick, living life, getting sicker, getting sick. Medicine doesn't work. Side effects are kicking in. Oh my gosh, we have to put them down. And that to me was just unacceptable from a stewardship point of view of where they keep us, where they're— we look after them, where they're— we've taken away their autonomy in many respects, right? This is a big responsibility from a welfare point of view, and it applies exactly the same with pets, right? We have taken away their autonomy to be a grown-up, functioning, self-directed, I make all my own decisions animal. And said, we'll make decisions for you because we know better, because we've got thumbs, because we can go shopping, because, you know, right? So if we don't take the time to learn their species biology, if we don't take the time to look and find out that this is better than that, that's actually damaging. Don't believe the media hype or the advertising line, but actually find out, is this what an animal would choose if they had the choice? And there's your answer.

So I encourage people So, Penny, that's a great segue. So we've got nutrition, we've got epigenetics, we've got longevity. Take us, if you would— and this is an opportunity for you to promote your fantastic summit, which is just coming along— but take us on a journey from, from those revelations, those insights, to where you are today organizing a longevity summit for humans and their animals. That's a, that's an interesting journey.

Yeah, and it was, it was a long journey too, if I'm honest with you. And this is why in large part I'm doing the summit, because I want people to be able to catch up quickly. I don't want to make them do 5 years of intensive research and reading all the things and doing thousands of hours of classes and so forth. But I had that, I had that sort of existential crisis thing where I put together what I knew about working in the wild with the animals what I knew about working in cooperative care to improve their mental health and all the things that were making such a difference. But sometimes without fixing the underlying healing problem, we couldn't fix the psychological problems sitting over the top. Because if you are in pain, you're never gonna be in a great mood, right? Just to really simplify it, but it's more complex than that. So you need to have, to have both. And so I saw that and then I started being told, oh, it's totally normal. For your cats to get hypothyroidism and to get chronic kidney disease. That's normal. That's what we expect. That's what they die of. That's normal. And I sat there as a zoologist in that consulting thing and went, you know what, it's really not normal. It might be acceptable in your world, but it is not normal. No animal is programmed to die of a particular disease. I'm sorry, I refuse that. And so I started out to figure out what is it that is going to look after our animals better? What is it that's going to give them the health lifespan and the lifespan that they deserve and that they would naturally have if all things were perfect, including if the wild was perfect too. So after studying all the modalities I could get my paws on, I rejected a lot of them. I collected a lot of the good ones and then I just synthesized that in my head and how does it make sense to me? And so I created what I call my facets of juvenescence. And juvenescence is the science of youth living. You have to of getting younger, of being vital still. And they categorize very nicely, and it's consistent across the board. It doesn't matter if you're a human, this works for you, right?

You know, yeah, you're, you're, you're 64, Penny, aren't you? There's no—

65. No, last week. Yeah, see, so it works, right?

Incredible.

But everything that I can do for me, for my longevity, my health span, I can do for my pets. I might have to modify it a little bit Right, right. Because my cat is not going to sit there and eat broccoli in the same way that I'm going to. But the science of longevity is the same if you're a mammal, if you're a mammal, if you're a mammal. And what's even crazier is that the disease process of degeneration and getting a disease condition and the process of aging are the same. So if you knock one out of the ballpark, you knock them all out.

How does, uh, I'm begging to ask this question, uh, how does kibble, how does high carbohydrate kibble promoted by the veterinary industry worldwide, how does that fit into epigenetics, longevity, nutrition of say a dog? Where does that fit in with you?

If you would like your dog to have half a lifespan, and if you'd like your dog to go to the vet loads and loads and you spend lots of money, and if you'd like to cry loads because you see them suffering, then go buy kibble and get cancer over the age of 10.

Lovely. We're going to take that and use that as a soundbite for the next year. I think that's a fantastic answer. Good stuff. So what do you, what do you recommend nutrition-wise for dogs and cats? I mean, this is one of the pillars. You've got a few other pillars. I see you're into some kind of cool, mad therapies. I really want you to do a quick elevator pitch on stem cell therapy because that's so interesting. I wonder if it'll help with my knee. Um, look, where are you with the nutrition thing before we leave it? What do you think dogs and cats should be fed day to day, roughly?

Right, I like to say it like this: no wolf has a barbecue. They just don't. They just don't. We are the only ones who cook our food, right? And if you want your dog to be healthy and have all the— think how cool a wolf is. Like, a wolf's not just like, oh yeah, he's all right. Wolves are an amazingly cool animal. They're in literature and mythology and all the things because they're super cool, right? Wouldn't you like your dog to have all those super cool things of having a pack and being a team member and problem solving and being crafty and, and being fit and strong and all the stuff, right? Yeah, of course you would because you love your dog. So give them what the wolf eats because their digestive system, their biology, their internal stuff is the same. So don't give them a second-class thing because they're not a second-class citizen.

Yeah. Great stuff.

Yeah, always, always going to be hit, aren't we, by the dogs aren't wolves, but yet they still don't get the anatomy is on the inside the same. And it's not, you know, the fact that slight genetic changes, still not significant enough to change the anatomy that your dog has got.

And further to that point, you're exactly right, but further to that point, it's even closer for cats. Cats don't have that morphological diversity that we do in the pet dog industry, right? Because they still look pretty much the same. They're even more conservative to being what a lion is. And again, a lion isn't sitting there around the barbecue in the fire pit saying, oh, tell you what, I'm going to roast that a bit more.

Yeah, I bet so. I bet if you gave a wolf a choice between a bit of cooked meat and raw meat, I wonder which one he'd go for. Because in food trials, dogs will take cooked meat. Because I don't deny that, that little blackening on the meat, it's a Maillard reaction and it's tasty, it gets the tummy going. Vegetarians want to eat that stuff, it's a fact. I mean, I spent 10-15 years trying to avoid it and now I'm back on it. But like, I bet you wolves would like the ketchup, but I suppose it's over time what's good for these animals. Zoos were just absolutely central to getting this going. In the 1930s, there was a guy called Coyler who was wondering why animals in the zoos were dying so quick in British and Irish zoos, and he was all about dentition and their teeth were going rotten, they were getting disease and they were dying of septicemia or whatever. And so he brought in the idea of meat eaters eating meat on the bone. And so he was the first guy to start doing it. He goes, these guys need to chew. He was the first guy to coin the word hassle factor. They need to keep their teeth clean, they need checkups, he said. But if you're going to be living longer times, they need meat on the bone. So that was the first kind of nutritional leap that I thought, that's kind of handy. And the second one was when they started taking the hide off the outside horse legs they feed in Dublin Zoo. I think Dublin Zoo is one of the more advanced zoos. I worked there for a year, I was very impressed with it by the time I left. But, uh, so they feed horse legs, but they used to take the skin off the outside, the hide off the meat, and then they started realizing, yeah, that the big cats were suffering more colitis, gastrointestinal issues. And when you start leaving the hair and hide on, they suffered less. So there's a good study on that actually, which I mentioned a few times, but it's one of the few studies of carnivores which shows actually no, it's the whole thing. You can't just take these bits out from the animal's life. At least leave them on and let him choose and tell you what's going to be going in or out. You can be guaranteed they'll eat the whole— well, not the whole thing, but a certain quantity of it. That's how they poo. It's how the wolf has this congested plug at his butt first before he has a poo. He's got this harder indigestive material that comes out first, you know, and the poo gets softer as it comes out. I believe. I haven't seen a wolf taking a poo.

And there's an amazing vet in South Africa, Dr. Adrian Tordiff, who has done incredible research into this same question but with cheetahs particularly. The captive cheetahs getting these diseases and the wild ones not. And he's very in-depth research, he's got a lot of papers and he does presentations which are, I think, are amazing. But found that cats need to have about 30% collagen. The collagen is coming from the skin and the hair and the knobbly bits, you know, the connective tissues around the joints. Cats aren't gonna eat bones in quite the same way as dogs are going to 'cause their jaws are again a little different. But they still need to have bone, but it's the cartilage— excuse me, the collagen in particular. And it was the deficiency, the very, very severe deficiency of collagen in the captive environment. And we see the same thing with pet cats. It's a big contributing factor. The second thing is hydration because of course when you've got kibble, if there's no moisture in the food, you've got to draw moisture out of the body in order to soften that food down in order to process it. And by the time you've done that, it's just junk slurry in the first place. So, and because cats are a desert species, they're not designed to drink gallons of water. They just don't. They conserve their water in a different way and they get it through their whole prey food. They get most of the moisture that they need from those mice and rodents that they're catching in the desert. So to put a bowl of water in front of the cat doesn't solve the problem. And so the kibble is creating massive chronic dehydration their entire life. It's no wonder their kidneys are clapping out, you know, 10 years too soon. And that's absolutely so easy to fix.

So we've got species-appropriate food, we've got stem cells, which Conor would love to hear about. What else are you going to be presenting And when is the conference, the presentations that you're going to be doing, Penny? From the 22nd, I think you said.

That's right, the summit starts on Monday the 22nd, this Monday coming up now, and it's running for 9 days. We have talks from the scientific and the veterinary and the human medical community all presenting where there's an overlap in this sort of concept of one health, right? We're all talking about— we're talking about mammals, just to clarify. So anyone has a pet snake or a pet goldfish, we're not probably not going to help sort that out this time. But across mammals, the one health model is so real. And so what applies to human health, medicine, and longevity applies to the pets and vice versa. And so we're presenting a speaker each day from both sides of the camp and just advancing that knowledge. As well as food. Gosh, let me think. We've had some— you know, touch is such an incredible thing for longevity. Touch as in Tellington Touch or touch as in physical contact, like the other sense. We forget about this other sense. We're so focused on the ones that are all up here. But so we've got talks about that. We've also got talks about how owning a pet, having a pet in your life, confers longevity onto the human. Not just general immunity things, but it actually changes your brain and gives you greater brain resilience. We actually had a laugh in one of the talks about how doing handstands is even a thing for longevity. But I mean, most of what we're talking about, you know, is a bit more scientifically based. But movement and exercise, I mean, it's so foundational that it's easy to forget. But if you don't move, you don't get rid of your lymphatics. System drainage pathways, right? So they don't have a heart pumping the fluid around the body the way the blood does. You have to use your body to move to get that out. And so pets that are sat inside all day, lying on a sofa because they have nothing to do because you're not here, maybe they don't have a brother or sister, maybe you're too busy to walk them, I, you know, all the things, right? That's conferring a lifestyle disbenefit onto them.

That's all comes back to that whole balance of the parasympathetic versus sympathetic system. You know, all of those things that you've just talked about there about how to reduce that sympathetic drive of, you know, fear, flight, you know, all of the things that are going to really increase inflammation and move them towards parasympathetic enjoyment, touch, you know, getting movement to help. You know, we all know that if you want to get your guts moving, go for a good walk. You know, those things just confer good parasympathetic tone. And that's the polyvagal theory stuff that sort of comes in. So many things— sound therapies can help, you know, that it's great. A lot of complementary medicines go down that route, you know, when it comes to it. And it's great to hear that that's part of the longevity story in there and how it reflects two ways, not just onto what your pet gains, but onto what you as a pet parent can have too.

Yeah, you gotta hit, you gotta hit them on all sides. I remember the, um, there's a, um, not a zoo, but yeah, some sort of a zoo down in Photo Wildlife Park in Cork in Ireland, and they breed lots of cheetahs. They're known for their captive breeding program, very successful. And what these guys stumbled across was that a big cheetah enclosure, you know, and the meat comes out hanging from a rope and it shoots up the, shoots up the enclosure and the cheetahs go bombing after it. It is spectacular to watch. So you get to see see the cheetah running in something of a dramatic kind of chase. But they realized that the cheetahs were getting up— there was a bit of a mound in it, and the cheetahs were getting up on the mound. And when they could see the zebras walking, they were happy to mate. And so they— I mean, I'm sure this was— the mound wasn't there by accident, but what they realized was a higher mound and more view of animals that they would like to predate. They see the animals and go, oh, that's a good time to have babies, there's loads of food around here. And so they get out, and I just thought, Alison, That's brilliant. It's just like you've got to hit them on every sensory thing. They've got to see their food moving. I'm like, that's what makes kibble so miserable. It's just like, it's just this crackers in a bowl, a horrible same taste, same smell, same texture every day in a bowl at the same time. How boring. Duddy is getting them like his food is just degenerating into random scraps and bits and pieces out into the garden, like less bowls, less and less bowls. You know, random bits and pieces thrown out. Now I love seeing them foraging, so I bring little bits and pieces on a walk and I get to sit down, use my phone for 10 minutes while Duggee's off doing something else. And that stuff really works, like they need that. And in your aloe grooming point, when we were in Guide Dogs, you weren't allowed to have your own dogs for the first 3 months. You just follow the trainers around 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 3 months and pick up poo. And so, but in that time they told you to groom all the time, a lot of aloe grooming. So the 3 or 4 dogs you were going to be getting you spend a lot of time just grooming them. And so a lot of that— we had a few talks on the fascia underneath the skin, and, and but just the zoom groom we would use on longer-haired dogs, and just that constant grooming, and they gravitate towards you for more. It's so important. That's why prison is so cruel, because it's the idea of it is that isolation and that removal of touch is just— is desperate for group-living animals. And why a touch is so soothing when you're upset. It's why you touch yourself when you're— when you're— it's a will that tells in poker. When someone starts touching their face, they're weak and they're about to do something weak because they're looking for solace before they do something. So there's something to that touch thing, but God knows everybody isn't here is touching their dogs enough.

Let's face it, I mean, in the human world, and you could probably know this, but I'm just going to share it very, very briefly. There's a thing called Blue Zones, which is almost like a natural experiment all around the world, from Sardinia to Greece to Costa Rica to California to Okinawa. And very simply speaking, these are the oldest productive living people in the world. That is to say, they're not all, you know, reaching 89. They're reaching 89 and they're dancing and they're working and they're running up hills in, you know, to do— to get the donkeys in and what have you. And there are— and this is bluesones.com, you can see this very, very simply. And they have right outlook. They have a purpose in life. It's their family, it's their farm, it's their community. It's downshift. In Sardinia, for example, they have every afternoon in certain regions, they have a little 5 o'clock happy hour where you have a glass of wine. Yeah, they eat wisely. They eat 80% of what they need to be absolutely stuffed. They tend to eat quite a lot of plants. They do eat meat, but they eat a lot of plants. And again, this wine at 5— many of them have alcohol as some part of their environment. They have the right tribe, the first loved ones, and they have a sense of belonging within their tribe. It's absolutely fantastic stuff. And if you said— I guess if you say all of that stuff to a zoologist, they'll go, oh yeah, we've, we kind of worked that out 50 years ago. Lions and tigers and cheetahs. And yet we're only just coming to realize that that's what people need to be happy. It's not, you know, nice holidays and fancy cars and shiny things. It's community and great food and sense of purpose and all that stuff. It's, you know, it's really very interesting stuff. And I imagine some of your speakers will be going down those lines. Talking about the Blue Zones. Would that be correct?

Indeed they are. Yes, we've had that come up several times.

Yeah, that's interesting. What about stem cells? Tell me, is there anything you can do for my knee? Um, what is— can I regenerate a, a, a, a Banjax knee?

I was going to say a third leg. Don't do it.

Oh, he said he wasn't going to go there.

No, I, I absolutely love stem cells. I'm such a fan of them. And I think without question that this is the, this is the new face of medicine. This is where health and healing is going into the future. Without a doubt, it's revolutionary. It's natural. There's practically no downside. The cost is the only thing at the moment, but like anything, wait for it to become normal and it'll be, you know, $50 to go to the, the doctors every year to just have your stem cell top up thing done. But, but to your point that in, in, so we used to think that stem cells could magically become anything because they had this sort of blank check approach. They can become whatever they need to be. And that's true if you're talking about in the test tube or in the petri dish or in the lab. When you put them in the body, they actually act a little differently and they become more important for who they talk to and what chemical signals they put out than what they actually turn into themselves. That's what they decide to grow up into. So you get a magnification and a multiplication effect of these exosomes and of these communication chemicals that are being sent out. So regeneration is 100% real. We take it for granted that if I had a gash on my arm, like let's say that I've just wrestled a crocodile and I've got a very big gash on my arm here, that's gonna heal. And none of you are gonna be surprised when I come back 6 weeks later and I've got a weak scar, but I'm not still oozing blood, right? There's a different thing. We don't think about the same thing happening in our organs, but they do. You can regenerate your organs, most of them. There's one or two exceptions, right? But you, with the right things, you can do that. And so if I didn't wash out that wound, if I just put a bandage on it with, you know, crocodile gunky teeth marks in me and all that, you know, then of course it's going to go fetid and I'm gonna get septicemia and probably die, right? But so if I treat it the right way, clean it out, put a bandage on and let it do its thing, right? So the concept's the same. Look after your organs and heal them. They will heal and regenerate and you'll get new for old. And that's what stem cells do is they give you new for old. And I love that equation because that means you can age backwards. That means you can spend more time doing the things that you like doing. Your body is fully capable of doing the things you like doing because because you're not there going, oh, my leg, you know, lost in the war, I'm still limping because of it, right? So you can regenerate. And in fact, it can even reverse a broken spine, right? You know, you think, oh, you've broken your spine, well, that's it, you're in a wheelchair forever. No, no. And so with, because there's two types of healing, very, very quickly, because I could go on forever about stem cells, I love them. Very, very quickly, when you're young, when you're a kid, you heal with stem cells. That is your healing modality. That's why kids like bounce back from everything and heal super fast and their scars fade in 5 minutes and all those things because there's stem cell healing. As we get older, our stem cell production goes down, there's less of them and they're also a bit less potent. And so their ability to do all the healing that you require is a bit diminished. So up comes this other guy who says, oh look, I'll help with healing too. I'm scar tissue. I'm going to heal that bit there. The problem with scar tissue is It's like a plaster that sits over the thing and blood flow can no longer get through that. That is a barrier. When you don't have blood flow going somewhere, it's dead. You're not going to regenerate and regrow that. You've solved the problem in a clean and antiseptic kind of way, but you can't— and that is how come people end up being paralyzed. It's not because their spinal cord got cut in half. No, you can't cut one of those things. There's so tough, you know, you couldn't do it if you tried. It's because the scar tissue around where that injury site occurred means that there's no blood supply now coming into that area here because you've got this, you know, casing around it of scar tissue. Now you've got no— without the blood supply, you're not going to be able to feed the nerves and keep that stuff alive. So everything south of that turns off. Your legs don't go necrotic and die. They're not dead flesh. Right? You'd have to have an amputation if that was the case. Different scenario, we're not talking about that. That's still living flesh, but because the scar tissue is there, you cannot get that stuff working properly. If you have an operation now and take the scar tissue away out of that site, scrape it all away, put the stem cell injection in instead, stitch you back up again, you will get your use of your legs back. Stem cells are phenomenal.

Oh, I'm interested. I heard that a lot of the sports people are getting their knees refixed and stem cells being used. Where do the stem cells come from?

Okay, you can do— you can be your own self-donor. So you can take a sample of your own cells. You then have to— it depends which country you're in, there's different legislation, all the things, right? So, but I mean, basically it's you spin them, spin down the sample to separate out the other bits that you don't want from the what you've taken, and you can then amplify those. So you multiply— you might have taken a million out, but if We're going to make it so you've got 20 million that's going to go back in your body. So it just takes a couple of days to multiply your cells to get to that level again. So you've got a really potent dose. Then you put it back in. Now you can put it back into the bloodstream itself. So that would be a systemic approach. So now it's going to go all the way around your body and those stem cells are going to find anywhere that there's a problem and start fixing it and sending out those chemical messages to rejuvenate and youthify your body everywhere.

Everywhere.

I mean, people are having facials, stem cell facials, instead of the surgery, right, for facelifts and things like that, because it'll do the same thing there. Or you can have it directly injected into, say, it's a joint. So, you know, I mean, I nearly broke that when I was skiing one time and went over a jump crooked, so I've got a dodgy shoulder. But I could, I could have the injection done particularly into the, into the joint itself. So not into the bloodstream, but into the joint itself. And now it's particularly going to to fix my shoulder. But you can also get stem cells from donors the way you get like a kidney donor or a heart donor or a lung donor or something like that. So you match the types up, and with animals it's pretty easy. They do have different blood types the way we do as well. They're not the same as our different blood types, but you get a donor match. Or alternatively, even better than that, is you take a cord sample. So cord meaning the placenta that connects the mother and the child. Don't have genetic information in the cord. So without the genetic information, you can't get a mismatch. So if you were to take fetal, and this would be ethically horrendous, but if you were to take fetal stem cells, you are going to have a rejection problem. And in actual fact, fetal stem cells cause the acceleration of cancer because what's a fetus designed to do is designed to grow really, really fast and multiplication. So you put that in a grownup, they're not designed to do that, you get end up with cancer. That's a bad idea. Do not use fetal stem cells, right? Bad idea. But the cord blood, the cord that connects them, there's no DNA there. There's no ethical problem there. It is day zero. They're the youngest possible stem cells you can ever get, and they are at their fully pluripotent selves to be able to do all the things that you want. So you can take 10 years off your life by having cord sample.

Oh, I want some. And has this been done in dogs at all?

It is being done, particularly in dogs and in horses, because you have a lot of orthopedic injuries with the racing and things like that. So a lot of the work in stem cells at the moment is more on that injury side of things rather than the organ and the general longevity side of things. But they are still starting out to do a fair bit more research in organs, particularly for cats, which pleases me no end. So there will be more and more of that. And in actual fact, there are some amazing zookeepers, well, kind of zookeepers and research scientists who work together to do stem cell therapy on some polar bears in captivity in the United States and had amazing outcomes as a result of that.

So definitely in the veterinary industry, there is this ability now to collect stem cells from from effectively bone marrow. So you need to take bone marrow. So unlike the platelet-rich plasmas that just are blood samples that are spun down to a certain degree and they take off the rich plasma, the stem cell is a little bit more invasive and they have to take bone marrow. So there is a downside to that. But, you know, enriching that, as you've said, and then effectively reinjecting it into the joints, there is variable responses noted in the veterinary industry, and I think that's down to how they're collected, how they're enriched, and how they're put back in. So there's always going to be— it's worth investigating which method they're using. What's your thoughts on some of these supplements out there? There's some algal supplements, things like that, to try and actually, rather than creating a solution that you're injecting back in, just to try and get the body to generate more stem cells and actually flood the system without actually having any surgery. Have you, have you got anybody talking about that in the summit itself?

No, um, that's not a topic that's coming up, but that is definitely a fascinating— oh, actually, no, I tell a lie. Um, one of our speakers was talking about, um, phytoembryonic therapy, which is the plant stem cells and how you can use the plant stem cells that you would sometimes ingest but sometimes put under the tongue or absorb into the mucous membrane that way to get to the bloodstream to co-opt the amazing power of the plant juvenescence as well. So that does come up in one, but we didn't have a talk specifically on stem cells there.

Sounds like the person to ask though, Bren. That sounds like anybody talking about phytoembryonic therapies is definitely going to have the answer to that question. There's a girl, there's a lady there, Sue Makepeace, my Westie had stem cell treatment on his knees, it worked really well, and a person as well. So that is very interesting. Would stem cells help with Cushing's is a question. I have no idea what the answer to that might be, but I imagine it's going to help with everything. I mean, is it not going to? Would it help with autoimmune diseases? Would it help soothe a raging immune system, I wonder?

I'll just step in for Cushing's, not so much because it's usually a tumor side of things, whereas Addison's is usually an immune system attack which has depleted the organ. So actually stem cells coming in to re-enable normal cortisol-releasing cells within the adrenals would be something that would be indicated for. But I think where you've got to deal with tumors, there's a slight difference there. Would you agree, Penny, or is that, um—

I would. The temptation might be to think that now stem cells is the holy grail, the silver bullet, and the fountain of youth all in one. And as amazing as they are, no one thing does everything except your own immune system. So again, if you haven't got that up, and this is the big problem when you're doing organ transplants, is in order to facilitate the donor organ being kept in the body and not rejected, you have to massively depress the immune system of the recipient so that they don't reject it. The beauty with stem cells is you don't have to do that. If you're taking what it's taking from yourself and giving back to yourself, you have no problem at all with rejection. And again, if you're taking from the cord blood, you have no problem with rejection on that. So you can have your immune system fully optimized with supplements, with raw food, with clean water, structured water, hydrogen water, by getting rid some of the environmental toxins, by having movement and exercise, by getting the red light therapy from sunrise and sunset. And the list goes on. These are some of the pillars that I talk about with the work that I do. But all of that works together. And the nice thing is they're all complementary. You don't ever get a thing where you can't take that drug with that drug because they hate each other and you'll get a side effect. Everything works together. It's complementary and you get a multiplication effect. And also an acceleration effect. So typically, you know, there's a sort of a speed bump that, you know, once you start doing anti-aging and longevity extension through these natural things, you kind of go up, you know, it gets faster and faster, you get younger and younger, you know. I mean, you will eventually stop, you're not going to all become babies again and have puppies and kittens and no grown-up dogs, but, right, but, you know, it's really powerful stuff.

How long, uh, how long, um, so a lot of this stuff is coming from human kind of longevity work, and there's a lot of, uh, Silicon Valley who place a huge amount value on this. A couple of names, obvious names, but these lads reckon they're going to live to 150 years, but they're 30 years old today, 40 years old. Is there any hope for a 40-year-old man to expect to live to 150 today? Is that sensible?

It's not unsensible, if I can say it that way. I think it's really very realistic for people who are alive today to have a life expectancy of around 120. I think that's really acceptable based on what I've seen in the science. Remember, I'm a consumer of this. I'm a scientist up the other end, the applied end. I'm not running the experiments, but what I'm seeing and reading in the papers and what I'm seeing coming through and just the speed in which some of this is being discovered and, you know, brought into practice. Absolutely. I don't know about 150. That's starting to push it a little bit, I think. But 120, yeah, no problem. Wow.

Yeah, but guys, you've got to remember that we're dealing with healthspan, not lifespan. Yeah, the Americans have got very long lifespans. They're only about 38th on the list, but they spend more than everybody else on the planet put together. So, you know, it's healthspan. I don't want to be around from 100 to 120 dribbling and wearing pants, you know, wearing, wearing a nappy. Thank you. No, But if I'm, if I'm good to go and I've got something useful to do and gardening and everything else, then absolutely fantastic. My children will be really sick of me by then though, that's for sure. They're sick of me already.

I think you've just given everybody, all the ecologists out there, a heart attack because they're now trying to work out how they're going to deal with that excess population. I think we've used a massive amount of your time. Do you want to Just for the guys out there listening, just go through how they sign up to your conference coming up. Just give them the website that they should look at, you know, how they get on to buy tickets.

Yeah, thank you guys. If you do want to join us for these talks and take some of this information to put it— we've designed it to be very informal, very approachable stuff. Like, we haven't gone highbrow and deep into citing lots of papers. You don't have to sit there with pen and paper. This is stuff that you can learn some principles and go, oh, that's cool. I now know a thing. Plus, oh, this is what I can start doing today or tomorrow and bringing it into my life. So it's really, really approachable. If you'd like to join us for that, the URL, the website to go to is petandparentlongevity.com. Oh, I know that.

She got it out.

She just—

she got it out.

Oh, she dropped out just at the wrong moment. But there you'll find a link through to a conference. And please go along and enjoy.

I think, yeah, it's free.

There you go.

It's free. Next, from next Monday, it's going to be fascinating. You can dip in, dip out. You can take it in your own time. It's not going to be a heavy, as she says, it's not going to be a heavy scientific thing, but it's going to give you the stepping stones if you want to go deep on something. It'll give you a lot of pointers in that direction. I think that that was super, super Fascinating. She's got a lot to say. I think we'll get her back maybe 6 months' time.

The zoo work is so interesting. It's not like, you know, here's just another person with no foot in the kibble industry, no reason to say anything else, who has studied this stuff intently, is obviously very turned on with this longevity idea. And you ask her about kibble and processed food, and she's just like, yeah, if you want to, you know, your dog to live half the time and spend your days crying and going to the vet every month. And I thought, oh yes, everybody says the same thing. It's like we're not making it up. So it's, that's just, I was happy she said that because we didn't, it's not like we had staged these questions beforehand. We don't, we make a deal of not actually grilling the people before and want to do it as it comes out. So I wasn't quite sure where she was going to be. I thought maybe, oh, a little bit of kibble and add a little bit of fresh food. It wouldn't have been enough for me. I want, you know, death to dry food and kibble and processed food and just go and make the leap, you know. So I'm really happy with that. So interesting.

So can I just quickly do a quick shout out for all of our cat listeners out there? We've got on Friday, we've got another Feline Friday this Friday on feed transition. We're going to raise a few things of what she's talked about tonight, I think, when we're talking cats on Friday at 1 PM. So it's an earlier start. You can see that also on recordings. And just again, another great thank you to all of those on Patreon that are donating and supporting us. It's great for all of you. Thank you very much. Hopefully we're answering some of your queries. You know, please do get in touch if you want anything else touched on in the lives.

And the thing is patreon.com/RAWPETMEDICS. We always get told off by Pete for not mentioning.

Yes, yes, tap and tear, as he said. Absolutely, guys, thanks very much. That was great. I enjoyed that last night. I'm off to have a regenerating glass of Resveratrol, and then I'll let you know how I feel in the morning. I have been going to the gym a little bit more over the last week or two, and I'm telling you, it's just mad when you start getting into it again, whatever your thing is, if it's bloody walking or swimming or running or eating healthy. It's once you get over the first few days of this is a pain in the arse, I couldn't be bothered doing this. But once you get over that initial hump, it is addictive, and you can, you can feel it if you just listen to yourself a little bit. You go, I'm running up the stairs here like a young lad. But before that, just like, oh, and you're holding on to the banisters and pulling yourself up. It so quickly comes back, like the muscle memory. Your body is just dying to get into shape. If you can get over those first few days of, you know, the habits and the temptation to go back to the old way. But 3 or 4 days of doing any one of those pillars she's talking about, you do feel the difference very quickly.

In the Blue Zones, they say it's movement. It's all about movement. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you move, possibly every day. Yeah, if you're a walker, walk. If you're a runner, run. If you're a swimmer, swim. If you're a gardener, garden. Well, doesn't matter. Movement doesn't matter what you do, just get that movement going. So amazing, guys. That was super, super, super fantastic. I'll drop Penny a little line just to say thank you and sorry that Brendan chucked you off 3 minutes before you were meant to go.

Yeah, yeah, you cut her longevity short, ironically.

Nick, can you also, uh, we'll just put a little post up for everybody. They're all asking how to get onto the talks. We'll put the website link on the Facebook page. You can just click through on there and follow the instructions. You'll be able to join that conference. It's free.

Or just, or, or have a look on Instagram or Facebook on Dr. Zoo Little. Zoo with a Z. Dr. Zoo Little. She calls herself Dr. Zoo Little. So sooner or later you're going to find the link. I think it's going to be really interesting stuff. It's the leading edge of human stuff applied to dogs and cats. Amazing. We all learned something. Amazing. Guys, what are we doing next week?

Drinking wine. We're back to being, you know, less respectable because obviously tonight we put the wine glasses down so that we could actually try and talk some sense. Still got outshone by a lady who knows a lot about it. More than we.

Us three put together.

Yeah.

So brilliant. Great to see you guys. Look, just keep an eye on the posts, we will follow through. Oh God, yeah, it's Q&A. We're getting towards the end of August. Is it really?

Yeah, it's not quite Q&A yet. I'm actually going to share a couple of paragraphs from an excellent book there that, what was it called, Feeding Dogs, and I'm just going to share a couple of paragraphs on the longevity bit where the kibble companies were caught with their pants down. Making claims about longevity. Have you still got that there? I'm not looking at the screen. I use it as a mic prop now.

I've got two copies, one there for any other reason than it's a good platform to put my mic on.

Good and solid.

So I'm going to share this paragraph on this longevity claim that this dry food company make and are made and, you know, very bold. They didn't get away with it. But what is very alarming is that longevity is going the wrong way in dogs. There was a huge, huge double study done by the UK Kennel Club in 2004, and then exactly 10 years later, 15,000 dogs in the first sample, 6,000 dogs in the second sample, covering over 150 breeds. And the news is all bad about longevity in pets. We've never fed them more high-expensive pet food, more drugs, more, more, more, more products, and they're getting sicker just like humans. And that's, I would say, the way the industry wants us to be.

Human longevity in the States has reduced in the last 2 or 3 years for the first time in 100.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, maybe we could do case studies. Oh, case studies would be a good one as well. We always reckon that we would do, we would run through a case study too. We'll announce it in the next couple of days, guys. We'll have a think on it.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Right.

All right, guys.

Guys. Right.

Talk to you soon.