RawSafe Tuesday night live: Summer Fun or Beach Bum!

I hope we're live. I always love catching him out. He's just like, what is going on? He can't hear us yet because he's just plugging himself in.

Putting my gear on, getting ready, phone off. Apologies, we're normally way more organized than this. It's the heat, Brent.

Is that right? Heat?

Yeah, that's what it is, right? We are live. Are they listening to us?

Just a few. I think most of them think that we're not going to be live. So yeah, look, they're all in today.

Tor Hoops. Tor Hoops, that looks like a new name for me. Tor Hoops, very good. First in. Rachel Mack in 5th position today. Rachel Mack, she won't be happy with that.

She will not be happy.

Yeah, sure. Brad, where are you? You are not in your usual studio. Where abouts are you?

Spare bedroom. No, no, I'm actually— it's probably a little bit echoey, I don't know. It's— I'm actually I'm actually in a place in Cornwall near Padstow, opposite side of the estuary, enjoying thankfully cooler weather than I would be at home. At the moment, my daughters are doing a sterling job of looking after the goats in just under 40-degree heat. So good on them.

Whoa, 40-degree heat in the higher parts of England. My God.

And do you know what blessed thing happens? So just before I come away, just after I'd been on the last broadcast, did I tell you about the kid? I did. I must have told you about the kid. Must have been just before the last broadcast. So one of my goats escaped into the male pen back in February. Not the males escaping into their pen. She escaped into Yeah, the male, a little baby. And so here we go, all of a sudden I've now got a kid in late July.

A kid with a kid? Whoa!

No, no, well, obviously one of my, yeah, one of my does has now turned into a nanny. So she is, um, she's currently nursing a newborn at home with my daughters watching over them.

What do goats do in the chronic heat? Where do they go?

Oh, well, they just— well, the good news is the field, they've got lots of shelters, lots of shade, lots of water, you know, so they're able to sort of find themselves where they want to be. So there's none of this out in a baking field with nothing there. I mean, let's face it, many people would consider them fairly hardy. You see all of these, you know, African countries with goats Brilliant. But you know, you've got to think, actually, some of those goats are also under the tree, you know, in the absolute heat of the day. Yeah, they've got ways of monitoring their heat, and they actually don't take a lot of water, relatively speaking. They, unlike cows, which take litres and litres if they're milking, you know, the goats aren't so bad. So yeah, pretty—

What about cows? Cows and particularly sheep, I mean, obviously sheep have a lot of their coats removed, but even still that lower coat would still be, um, but even when it's shorn would be hot enough. What do they do? Do they shed their winter coats?

Goats?

Oh my God. No, sheep.

Cows and sheep.

Yeah. Yeah, sheep and goats.

So they've got rid of their winter coats, my goats, so that's really useful. I did make, uh, because as I was trying to shear the alpaca ready for the heatwave. Unfortunately, the goat was also delivering the kids, so I was a little bit distracted. The alpaca started to get upset because he knew something else was going on, so he was spitting. So he was in a halter spitting at me. So I left him with the weirdest haircut ever. And I do apologize to my daughter. She sent me a photo and said, Dad, what have you done? Thank God you didn't cut my hair.

I've something of a Wallace and Gromit image of you of this alpaca running down the field and you, whoa, Betsy, slow down. And then eventually giving up halfway through. Do you actually have to restrain the alpaca while you, or does he just willingly come along for a haircut?

No, no, you have to, well, he willingly comes along, but he really did not want to have his hair clipped.

No, okay.

He was, especially when I started with a stripe right up his back just to really make him look like a fool.

Reverse mohawk.

But anyway, here's your first mohawk. But it's so thick, that coat is so thick. But actually, this brings us into a really good point that we've got to talk about tonight, which is to clip or not to clip.

Oh, indeed.

So we must, we must deal with that. So many people have been asking, so many other forums are asking, and I've got to take on this. And there's a couple of other well-known resources that have talked about it. So Yeah, and a lot of our followers are like small business owners.

We've got a lot of groomers, pet shop owners. So any groomers that are here and you've got an opinion on some of the things we're talking about, particularly when we start talking about coats and whatnot, please give it to us. You guys are surrounded by us all day. You'll notice we are Raw Pet Medics, and patreon.com is where you'll find us, patreon.com/rawpetmedics, and that's where you can leave us a price for a cup of tea or coffee if you like what you're hearing, or if you just feel sorry for us. Also, Nick is in absentia, but while he's gone, he has given us a video of his beach bum kind of stuff that he's doing, and he is talking, giving us some cool info on adders, which was very news to me, I have to say. We don't have a lot of snakes in Ireland, but I did see a lizard recently not too far from my home, little tiny green lizard, which— yeah, so that's a lot for us because we don't have many of these sorts of creatures here on this island. But so that'll be put up on Patreon. So that's the sort of stuff we're trying to do for Patreon as a thanks there for the help that you're giving us. So we appreciate all that.

So, yeah, tell us what you had going on because you've had an eventful week. I think you need to share it with the guys out there.

I need to get it out. I need to get it out. First of all, the drama. I was in a little bit of a car accident and it was not nice. I think I've been in a few before where I've been in the backseat passenger and a couple impressive enough. But this one was particularly impressive. Blind corner and pulling out and not great. So a bit of a shocker, but I was more interested in kind of analyzing myself afterwards to the kind of delayed shock of it all where people are asking, are you okay? And you know, the front foot of the car was in disarray. It's terrible to see, terrible to hear obviously, and then you're, you know, and you can't get out of the car and you realize your seatbelt is on. But for the next 3 or 4 hours, I was getting words wrong. I was trying to tell my wife Elaine, where like it was, you know, it's on top of the thing in the bedroom with one thing in the bedroom. There's like a bed and a dresser. I couldn't get dresser out. It's on top of that, not the bed. It's not, not the bed. I couldn't get these words out. And I found that very, very interesting. And people are asking me for days after, you included, Ben, how are you doing? And is everything all right? And I'm grand, guys. Would you like, you know, I'm Irish, you know, just bury that deep down. Don't face your emotions. And so I was in a funk. I was in a real funk for 4 or 5 days, as Karen Reid will probably testify to. And, uh, yeah, strange effects that I could, um, yeah, it was quite, quite a shocker. So you had mentioned something to me, aconite. Tell me why I should be taking aconite in this situation.

Oh, so, so really, you know, for anybody out there, especially if you're in an accident and your pets are with you, you know, this, and they seem to be changed after the accident, um, you know, aconite, just for the shock value, the sudden change, that massive flow of anxiety, Aconite can be a really useful remedy. Okay, so see your homeopath. You can get high potencies. But even for those that can't find a homeopath or aren't local to one, a lot of the first aid kits will at least have a 30C potency in them, and it's a really good remedy for shock.

So how do we take it? How much of this, like how often?

Literally, you can just take a tablet, suck the pillule under your tongue, or crush it if you're going to tip it into the side of the dog's mouth or cat's mouth, and literally just let it dissolve there. For a 30C, you might need to take maybe even up to 6 doses in that first day just to, you know, get through. But even if it's a week after, you can just go, okay, I sort of cope, but I'm still having flashbacks, or, you know, I'm still my pets have still changed, they're doing different things and they seem overly scared, just go down to looking at twice daily for 5 days or so. And that's an easy way to use that. So that's A-C-O-N-I-T-E. So Aconite is a really useful one. And of course, there is also a really useful remedy for those people that like to bury things, okay, that really think that they can cope. A very Irish sentiment, okay? And actually, it's a disease that does the same thing in its own right, and it buries itself, okay, walls itself off from the immune system, and that's Tuberculinum, okay? So that can be a really useful remedy for those people that really truly bury things, okay, to try and avoid that. But they always want to be out, you know, they can be quite outgoing, quite quite gregarious looking, but yet actually, you know, they want to escape, but actually they like to bury stuff. Okay, so that might be a remedy for you.

It might be, but like, even the fact that they call it tuberculina, because tuberculosis is buried down into the liver, isn't it? Liver?

Yeah, lung, lung, lung.

It's a lung thing, of course. Okay, yeah. So, but, so, but isn't it interesting that the thing that, you know, it's buried down there, and so that might be useful for people that are burying emotions? I just think that's fascinating. Who came up with this?

Who could possibly You know, there are huge tomes of books writing about this stuff. You know, people say, oh, it's all a bit of flim-flam, and you know, there's not much research into it. God, guys, there are tomes, there are volumes and volumes of people noting down cases and their response to certain, um, remedies, and also what remedies do to prove. So I mean, it's You know, it is nowhere near flimflam. There is just so much stuff out there to say, you know, look at these provings, we call them, you know, to how remedies will act, etc. So yeah, so that's good.

Would it be useful? So a dog that's been attacked— I just had a terrible case of a dog that had been attacked by a Pittie in New York, and the Pittie was holding onto the dog's neck. So a real proper aggressive attack, and that dog in mega shock after it. And so would you use Aconite then? Is that the sort of—

Aconite, absolutely. Aconite is a first line. Arnica is also a really good shock remedy. So where there is actual physical injury as well as emotional injury, Arnica can be really useful. A lot of people don't literally see the sort of mental shock of Arnica as that bigger thing, but actually it's huge in the remedy. Okay, so never write since an accident. Okay, even if it's mental change, Arnica can be really useful.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

And that can be an attack, you know, as you've just described. It can be, you know, falling off something and, you know, having a big bang. It could be, you know, being daft and running into a tree. You know, we've seen dogs that do that as they're trying to chase sticks and stuff like that, you know.

So dealing with some terrible news, dealing with some terrible event, you know what I mean?

Absolutely, yeah, things like that, that can really be an emotional shock too.

Yeah, yeah. So I didn't take any of those things to be nice, I was like, no, I'll just ignore it and I'll have a gin and tonic.

I'm there giving him excellent advice over WhatsApp and what does he do? Ignores me. And now he comes on tonight going, I'm sorry.

Oh, but, uh, and then there was one, there was one other thing, although I do want to get to the show, there was one other thing where after we talked about byproducts last last week was interesting that one of the, what I would consider, white coats, one of the forefront kind of vets that do a lot of talking for the industry, to the great benefit of the industry and possibly themselves, was then talking about the benefits of why by-products are such a fantastic ingredient for pet food. And I kind of thought, well, that's not exactly what we said, because I kind of felt that that post came out after we mentioned by-products. I just want to set the record straight that by-products in tiny little bits a little bit of this and a little bit of that from, you know, the extremities, not the end of the world, you know. But for, you know, when they list the byproducts that can go into pet food, blood is siphoned off. That's not a byproduct that goes into pet food. Blood is used in a myriad of industry uses, so that doesn't go in there. Bone goes for rendering, so that doesn't go in. The good quality organs are gone for food, you know. You're left with, you know, heads and arse essentially, and with gut contents. So it's kind of like, how much of that do you want in your I, well, like a little bit, not a whole lot to say it's a really quality ingredient, a little bit misleading. And I did find it very interesting that this white coat said, after all, wolves go for the stomach contents first. And I thought, oh, how interesting. I said, we're not talking about wolves, are we? Why would we be talking about wolves? Because it's exactly the sort of person that gives out for comparing dogs to wolves, and here they are saying erroneously that dogs go for stomach contents. They absolutely do not. She has not got a single reference to support that point. It was rubbish, but it was well shared and well liked by our followers, and I thought, um, I thought that was very interesting.

Anyway, we put this to bed, didn't we? Because we said that actually they may go for organs within, um, the abdomen, but they don't necessarily go for the gut content.

Definitely not.

And that's the difference. And let's, let's face it, that a lot of the meat and animal derivatives are often the bits that they wouldn't be able to sell any other way. And let's face it, liver and kidney often go off for research.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're left with intestinal tract, and so they might take small intestinal tract, but to suggest they eat— like, we've got lots of videos of cows, of dogs bringing down cows and sheep. They never eat the tripe, ever. They never take— they pull the belly out and then they get the organs, but they never eat the belly. So they don't take the belly away and leave the grass in a pile. Uh, they don't. Hyenas might, that I've seen, but I've never seen a video of a domestic dog doing it, or a wolf. They just leave it there. It's just full of grass. Who wants that anyway? Bren, we're talking about hot dogs. Get us started. What's the story with hot dogs? What sort of dogs can overheat? What are we— who are we talking about here?

Yeah, well, look, there are one or two particular breeds that we are especially worried about, okay? But in this, for those breeds that are within, let's say, the UK, you know, we're experiencing really high temperatures for the UK right now, record-breaking temperatures. And realistically, those dogs are not really acclimatized. Pretty much like our railways, they're not really acclimatized to working at this temperature. There are going to be some dogs around the world which are much more acclimatized to high temperatures, and even then, those dogs are going to be more sensible about what they do in the middle of the day. We're not going to expect them to be running a mock doing lots of hard work and thinking that everything is hunky-dory and fine. So I think particularly the ones which find it hard to heat exchange are going to be the ones where the airways are compromised. Okay, so for the normal panting to happen, you've got to have the soft palate lift out of the way, you've got to have good airflow going through the mouth so that they can properly heat exchange through the tongue vessels. Okay. And we know that brachycephalic breeds, long soft palate, they can't really move it out of the way. Often the air is diverted away from the tongue, so they find it really hard to heat exchange. They also, you know, if you then run those dogs around in the middle of the day, and we're talking about, look, We're not talking about air temperature alone here. So a lot of people got confused when I talked about, you know, between 18 and 21 degrees is optimal. That's all of the textbooks say for dogs in an inpatient environment where they can't control their own temperature. 18 to 21 is the best temperature to keep your clinic at, to keep your ward at, to keep them safe in that environment without them getting hyperthermia or hypothermia. Okay, so we talk about if they are ill or compromised in their ability to heat exchange and you are above 21 degrees and then you add into that radiant heat from the sun. Okay, so i.e., you don't give them shelter, you don't give them shade, you stick them out, both the sun beating down on them but also the warmth of the pavement beating back up underneath them, then you're at risk of overheating that patient. And that is where hyperthermia and excessive heat can be really problematic. Okay, so definitely brachycephalics. So boxers all the way through to bulldogs, Boston terriers, French bulldogs, all of those breeds that we think about. If it's got a squashed nose, or if it's got laryngeal paralysis. Remember back to Karen coming on and talking to us about laryngeal paralysis. Anything that interrupts their normal heat exchange could compromise that patient in the heat of the day. All I asked was, please, guys, help out your vet. Try to keep your dogs away from the heat of the day, especially between 11 and 4. Everywhere you go on the continent, they talk about that's the time of day to avoid the sun. Okay. And then, you know, for, for those particular breeds, even consider first thing in the morning walks, last thing at night walks. Okay. And if there's ways to cool them down in water, you know, give them— I love a little green turtle, um, sort of sandpit that, that is hard plastic because then you can fill that with water instead of sand, and my dogs don't puncture the bottom of it the first time they dive in and dig at it. So that could be really useful just to let them in. I know there's going to be some people out there with pools of their own, brilliant, you know, but in the UK we don't generally tend to have those. So give them an opportunity to get into water or to wet them down, and I've got some tips coming up on best ways to cool them down if needs be. In a hurry.

Yeah, definitely. And like, so what are the signs? Like hypothermia, what's it do to you? What happens when you get too hot? I mean, is there any sort of physiology there we need to know about, or is it just we all know what happens when you get too hot?

Yeah, so you get all sorts of triggers that happen. Okay, firstly, dehydration. Okay, so you tend to go into water loss, your body's trying to compromise things. The muscles are releasing lots of extra carbon dioxide into the system. You're going to start to get acidosis. You can sometimes get your trigger zones of the brain which affect nausea to start vomiting. That further acts on fluid loss, and that can mean that the salt levels within your system get compromised. That can also affect brain function, so you can get neurological syndromes. With staggering, even seizures. You will get the consequences of having an acidosis and dehydration alone. The organ damage and the pain that can be associated with that is massive. So, yeah, really, it can be heart-stopping stuff. Okay, so it isn't just, oh, they got a bit hot and they need a fan on them and that should be fine. There are some really interesting things people talk about, do they ice the dog? Okay, do they chuck ice on the dog? Do they, you know, cool the skin down with cold freezing water? Now, ultimately, if you've got them in a bath of cold water that is circulating and constantly cooling them down, you might think, well, they will cool down eventually, and they will. But the downside is in that initial process, you will shut down their peripheral vasculature, okay, the vessels. And what that means is that they stop heat exchanging through the skin because all the blood is then centralized. So their core temperature stays high. So they struggle to heat, to do the heat loss adequately quickly enough. So actually better putting on tepid water, putting fans on them and getting the water to evaporate.

Oh, that's cool. That's a great tip.

So a lot of people get worried about this whole ice thing, you know, internal ice. Okay, so that would work, would help, but you've got a dog that's probably vomiting, probably got some neurological problems, often struggling to heat exchange through their mouths and panting like crazy. You're not cram ice creams down it. Now, if it's getting warm and it's got no other symptoms, then obviously giving them something cold to eat is not a problem. I've done a little video, I'll post it on Facebook, you know, giving my dog some of the frozen mints. Okay, um, it's, you know, they can perfectly happily eat some of the frozen raw food without any problems whatsoever. That's a good way of just giving them a way to, to cool down. Um, don't overdo it because the body can sometimes try and compensate and then go into this overdrive. And somebody reported that that's what dogs would do, but generally that's only if it's on a cold day and you give them something cold. The body would respond to warm itself up. Very homeopathic thing to do, actually. Okay, how to warm yourself up on a cold winter's day is give yourself a dose of cold and body will— should respond and overwhelm that chill feeling. That's a homeopathic principle.

So on a cold day, I'm supposed to eat an ice pop to heat up?

If your body is working well, you can stimulate yourself to warm up by giving yourself a dose of cold.

No way!

Yeah, you will feel warmer. So if you go out— go out for a cold swim. So the classic So ask those people that do the cold swim thing. Okay. And then when they get out, they very quickly warm up.

Yeah.

Now this is not about staying in the iced water for 3 hours.

Yeah.

Yeah. Hypothermia. This is—

I'm getting— I subscribe to that for sure, because what I do, if you know, you've got a few bits of gym that you're doing, but is the, you know, the sauna and the plunge pool, the cold water. And there's a study came out there a few months ago from the Scandinavian lady. Who else is going to produce them but a Scandinavian? And they're showing why, you know, they love these. Everyone's got a sauna. And so the sauna gets, feels quite hot, you know. So you jump into this plunge pool and she was saying you need to move it around a bit because if you stay stationary, you heat up the water in a film around you and you need to move it around to keep it cool, to brush that warm water off you, as you just mentioned about the cool air off the dock. So that's perfect. Get rid of that a little bit. And she says 3 minutes, 4 times a week is the magic number. And while yes, it does increase metabolism a little bit, which is good news if you're trying to lose weight and whatever, the big thing is the kick in endorphins and those sort of neurotransmitter type cool compounds, 2.5 times, and they realize it lasts for hours. So you get this, it's the cold which your body's producing these endorphins to say, you know, you're okay, you're having a good time, you're fine. And for hours afterwards, and I've seen it working in a couple of my friends who had a few little mental wobbles and into the cold sea, you know, 10, 20, 30 days in a row, and they were different people. They were off the things that they'd been prescribed. So yeah, that cold water stuff is amazing. But for you to recommend that on a cold day, it goes completely against my Irish principles of drinking as much hot tea as you possibly can.

On the reverse, on the reverse, this is why in India drinking hot tea is a great cooling thing because it stimulates your body to do all of the things like produce sweat to fight against it, to cool yourself down. So yeah, having a cup, not 15 cups, but yeah, because I was going to say my mom's a terrible addict, so she doesn't get the tea.

God help you if you're around a complete addict for tea. And so like, you know, whatever, 5, 7 cups of tea a day. And so on cold days it has benefits, and on hot days it has benefits. And I imagine that's something like a heroin addict probably says. It's like, oh, it's just great for everything. It's just like, well, it's because addicted to. So, yeah, that's it.

So the ice thing, just to go back. So just for those people out there, something called hormetic stressors are meant to be really in at the moment, okay, as a way of longevity, building longevity for ourselves. And as Conor rightly said, really, there is an optimum, probably 3 times a week that you need a hormetic stressor. Now, cold water bathing, things like that, is a hormetic stressor. Wim Hof, I think, has been mentioned already on the thing. But you shouldn't do it every day, because if you do it every day, your body actually goes into a chronic stress metabolism. It produces loads of cortisol all of the time. It makes you insulin resistant. It starts to switch off all sorts of mechanisms and flips your whole sympathetic parasympathetic balance out. So whatever it is, whether it's fasting, whether it's cold bathing, whether it's, you know, strenuous exercise, you should limit those a little bit. Yeah, a little bit of something is far better for you than trying to do a marathon every day. That's a real stressor.

Okay, we always do, we always latch on to something, we find something that works, and then some people just do it to infinity, and it's like, well, that's probably not the most useful application of that. So tell me, so let's say I've got a hot dog, Bren, what are the options for keeping our dogs cool in a hot climate?

Yeah, so I've got a few things that I mean, definitely, look, we're talking about Beach Bum here. I've got, you know, I'm down by the coast, bought this ages ago. Fortunately, we're actually in one of the cooler spots of the UK right now because we've just had some rain flush through and it's just cooled things down. So we're back into the low 20s, so that's all good. But, you know, taking my dogs down for a swim early morning, late evening— I've got a little video post of them. In fact, I think for tonight I posted my dogs swimming late last night. And yeah, think about that. Do it safely, okay, if you're gonna take your dogs for a swim. So really interesting. Favorite dog toy for Artie. And we literally saw that yesterday morning get sucked under by a riptide. So really, guys, be careful wherever you are, okay? Just check what's going on. It's a great surfing beach, it was, but they, you know, the tide was going out and literally just, just went under the water as it's thrown in. And, you know, not not 6 foot from where I was because I was just testing the water and literally saw the tide just suck it out underwater. So immediately put the dogs on lead, out of the water, you know, we're not going to take them swimming there. So be safe wherever you are, be warned, you know, there are some of those, even if they're really good swimmers, which my dogs are, you know, they, they will swim and swim and swim, they're really good swimmers, but I will not risk them in that environment.

Labradors have webbed feet and big oar-like tails because that's kind of what they're kind of designed to do. But that's— it's a different animal when you're getting sucked out and he's just trying to get in, you know. So you can't tell him, no, swim to the side, Artie, and all the other instructions that he might benefit from. But, uh, yeah, so, uh, yeah, definitely no.

Yeah, so, uh, so that's one thing I would definitely say: early mornings, late evenings, get them in water if you can. There's another great person who does a lot of posts from the Lake District, so it's Max in the Lake District, and he's got spaniels, you know, fortunately blessed with rivers everywhere. You know, even if it's those safe rivers that you can just get them into, let them cool down, I think anything like that is really good. Water in your back garden, if you don't have those luxuries nearby, is also great. The next thing, there's a couple of bits. So we've got these. So some people may have seen them, they're like a gel mat, okay? And they basically are a cooling mat so your dog can lie on them. I saw somebody post this with their dog, basically the mat on the bed and the dog laid off on the soft duvet to one side of it, saying, what's that for? But actually, for many dogs, I mean, they will either find a cold floor like a tile floor or something like that, or they'll find one of those. They actually will seek that if they are warm enough. So have a look at, you know, those mats as an option if you don't have a tiled floor anywhere.

Yeah.

And also remember, your house should be reasonably insulated. So don't necessarily open everything up unless there's a really good wind. Shut everything down, close the curtains, insulate your house.

That's Spanish.

And that is far more likely to keep it cool through the heat of the day than opening everything up on a still day and the warm air just seeping in.

If anyone's got a baby, like, you know, the baby's not digging this really hot temperature. So you learn very quickly the sun comes down behind our house and streaming in the window And if you let that happen, and then you bring the kid upstairs to go to bed at 7 o'clock in the evening, the room is 31 degrees. It only got up to 27, but the room was like 31, and it's baking hot. So what you learn at lunchtime is you shut the blinds. So when the sun comes over the house, it's just bouncing off the blinds. And that's the heat you want to avoid. It's interesting when you said about the tiles, how many of us listening— now be honest— how many of us listening think tiles are colder than carpets or wood or cork? And we think that tiles are colder. I certainly spent the first 30 years of my life believing that tiles were cold. But actually, what they are is excellent conductors, obviously. So when you step on a cold tile or a lion, if you're a dog, it sucks the heat out of you good and quick, as opposed to a carpet or wood, you know, very poor conductors. So we don't have wires made of wood and carpet and whatnot. So they don't suck the heat away, so your feet stay warm. So when you're walking around the carpet and cork tiles, it's lovely. And then you walk into the bathroom, it's like, oh, those tiles are cold. Well, you're supposed to think they're excellent conductors. Of heat, but nobody thinks that. So I bet a few people thought, I thought so, because like it's not like a substance has some way of staying colder or else your fridge would be made of it, wouldn't it? You know, anyway, side note, I always— there's a few people that were caught with that. I want them to admit it.

But anyway, so I definitely would say, you know, watch the underfloor heating, make sure that's not on. But other than that, because you're conducting warm air into the rooms, But realistically, you will want to have your dogs inside, cooled, you know, maybe put fans on. That's absolutely fine. Give them plenty of access to water to stay hydrated. Okay, so that's number one. Keep them as hydrated as possible regardless of any other thing, because that's what's going to help them.

I've got the same bottle, Graham. Does it have a button that it flips up? Yeah, I've got the same bottle. That's weird. I don't have it handy. I'll show it to you. I'll show it to you. That's nuts.

Anyway, all right, brother.

What about sunscreen for dogs, Bren? Is there such a thing? And how do you feel about sunscreen?

Yeah, so, okay, so most dogs shouldn't need sunscreen, and I think this is, you know, because they're pretty well-haired all the way up, or they've got very dark areas. Now, there are some dogs which may have had an autoimmune disease which has left the pigment removed from their noses, from around their eyes, from, you know, other dark, you know, skinned areas, or they may have in fact lost their hair for one or two reasons as well. And if they do do that, then realistically you do want to protect them. Now, for most people, that would be keeping them out of the sun. Giving them shade to stay in and trying to keep them in that shaded area, even if it's to some degree penning them into a shaded area. You know, realistically, there are some screens that you can apply. I have a natural one here. It's a human one, but it's only got natural ingredients in, so it's got none of the classic zinc oxides and, you know, other weird things sort of weird stuff in there. Okay, so I will just show that up there. Okay, so they only go up to a maximum of 30 SPF because they find that's really good. But again, you've got to reapply it frequently if you're going to apply it. Yeah, I'm going to talk about that on Friday. I'm going to talk about Friday in a moment, but, um, because especially for cats that go out and sunbathe, um, can be really useful and when it's full of natural ingredients, that one I find safe even if they groom it off to apply to the bridges of their noses and their ears, particularly for squamous cell carcinoma. So certainly sunscreens are there. Realistically, the fur is the protectant, and therefore this argument that is going on about do we clip, don't we clip clip. Okay, I'm actually firmly in the don't clip camp. Okay, only on the proviso that you don't exercise your dog, because any internal heat generated will not be lost easily. Okay, so if you've got a dog that's running around like a fool in the sunshine, okay, then yeah, clipping might be the only way you're going to stop that, okay? Because you're going to have to allow them to heat exchange through skin by applying stuff to their skin, you know, allowing the airflow past them, allowing them to get into water and cool off, you know, those sort of things. But realistically, even if they've got an outer guard coat, okay, which is long, which when the sun hits it the outer part heats up, but they are trapping a cooler part of air which insulates them from that radiant heat. Okay, that is the purpose of the coat. Okay, so really, that can be really useful for, you know, big dogs even in the summertime. And this is why what tends to happen in the summertime is they don't sort of lose all of their coat. They tend to lose their undercoat. Yeah, thick downy stuff, the fluff you find.

Yeah, fluffy stuff. Yeah.

So a lot of groomers will say what you should be doing is spending time grooming out that thick undercoat. Okay, so they're just left with the larger guard hairs.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, I remember groomers saying the same thing. There's a certain comb that was all the rage, and there's many copies of it called the Furminator, and the Furminator's fine teeth, fine-toothed comb. But the amount of fluff it takes off your dog— my old dog Meg, Shepherd cross Rough Collie, had the thickest undercoat. Like, you'd swear she was a polar-type dog. And, and every spring, that's the fluff you find, just really fine white hair everywhere. She was a black dog and the hair was white everywhere. And it took a while to cotton on that, oh, that's the stuff underneath and you get a Furminator to her and there'd be like a dog of hair lying on the ground. You know those images where people make dogs out of their hair? Mark Roberts is always doing that with his huskies. There's a typical breed with that sort of coat. And so, so yeah, that sort of Furminator tool was fantastic for removing the undercoat. And that starts in spring as it starts to heat up and coming into summer. Yeah, it's really important because they can't just shake it off themselves. They can to a degree, but it's getting hotter, guys, it's a fact. And you can help them out by— you see the hot weather coming and you give your dog a solid grooming to get that, that undercoat off. If your breed has that undercoat, quick Google will tell you, tell you that. Yeah, I love that tip, Ben.

So I know there's a couple of people that are getting confused because there's people out there firmly in the clip-off camp and there's people out there firmly in the don't clip off camp. And I think I can understand that whole basis, but, you know, ultimately Heat exchange is about getting the heat from the body. Most dogs will do that through panting, but actually they will heat exchange through their skin if they're given the opportunity through, you know, evaporation. They don't have natural sweat from their skin to evaporate. Therefore, the only way you can do that is to wet their coat down, let it evaporate, and then reapply.

Oh, that's nice. Like a little spray, a little spray of water, give— make the coat a little damp and then let her move around a little bit.

Just keep doing, just keep going. It doesn't even have to be— you could just hose them down.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, you know, Dudley loves it.

Cocker Spaniel just loves it. I mean, he hasn't got— I mean, I slag him off all the time, but the dog really doesn't understand the difference between sun and shade. He'll just sit there in his patch and just bake, and you have to kind of pick him up and move him into the shade and kind of say, sit in the shade, you eejit. Just so like you can actually leave him outside by himself because I honestly don't trust him enough to move into the shade when he starts to overheat. But, uh, there was somebody saying what was the name of that natural sunscreen, if you could hold it up there, Bren, just to, just to get that, um, going again. And also, uh, people correctly mentioning about sunscreen. Yes, lads, there is a, a, a darker side to sunscreen. And I was sitting beside a Washington Post journalist in a gig we were doing up in Finland at Anaheim Borgman's talk a few years ago, and she was a Washington Post journalist, and she was the person that is fronting this campaign about sunscreen. We've got mega problems in the sunscreen industry. They're not all the same. There's some really worrying chemicals, uh, in sunscreen. The Washington Post is who covers it the most, the— of these articles. And the one that I thought was pretty impressive was this one in 2017, What You Need to Know About the Chemicals in Your Sunscreen. That was in 2019. And it's pretty worrying. And you can just imagine, you know, you could name them all. But the fact is, your skin is the most absorptive organ you can possibly imagine. And a lot of those chemicals, we now realize we are absorbing at a terrible rate, far higher, and bioaccumulating them more than we thought. And now we know it's having an effect on fetuses. So there's— that's— this is not to say don't use sunscreen. It's to say get smart about the sunscreen you're using. Sunscreen, skin cancer is a huge thing and it's very prevalent. You should be using some sort of protection in that respect, but that doesn't mean you use, you have to use a shitty dodgy sunscreen when you can use good quality natural sunscreen. As Bren was saying, I'm sure there's a bevy of solutions there because they name the top 3 or 4 compounds that you have to be very, very careful of. A lot of them don't make the label. It's not like zinc oxide would be something that myself and Bren would know about, but these, we're getting into chemicals here called Oxybenzone. Anything with benzene on it is mega carcinogenic. Oxybenzone is a huge one for pregnant women if that's in your sunscreen. And there's heavy science behind all these things. American Academy of Dermatology recommending against a lot of these products, um, and over and over overwhelming evidence.

A lot of those, you know, and often derived from the petrochemical industry, you know, the organic chemicals, but they can be carcinogenic in their own right, you know, with we're sort of panicking about, you know, filtering out UVA and UVB, you know, to stop ourselves getting skin cancers, and then we're sticking on, you know, carcinogenic chemicals. It just doesn't make sense.

Yeah.

Uh, one more thing. I know we're getting close to the end here. There is one other thing, um, just to say. I know that there are some dogs out there that just do not get it. They will be pests to chase a ball, to, you know, throw something, you know. And I've got one of those. I've got a spaniel who, you know, she will insist, don't care how hot it is, she would run and run and run until she literally dropped off the, you know, the heat register and just collapsed. So things to consider is removing these from sites okay, of not only them but also people that like to use them, okay, especially in the heat of the day. Fine if you want to throw them something into the sea, you know, and you know, all the rest of it, but all the ice pops, yeah, yeah, but please, you know, these things, I've seen people stood at the top of steep hills throwing the ball as far as they can to get the dog to run as as they can while they just sit there, you know, eating an ice cream. Please, yeah, think of these as really deadly in that situation. Okay, you're running your dog into the ground, so avoid that at all costs in this heat.

Okay, I thought it was very interesting. I just wanted to pick up a comment that Karen mentioned earlier. Karen Reid has got a very interesting syndrome— would you call it a syndrome, Karen?— where she goes, she she gets an anaphylactic shock response to cold. So she goes into cold water, she has had 2 or 3 times in her life an anaphylactic shock to it, which is more the extreme end of your allergic response. All allergies are pretty dramatic, let's face it. But this is where, you know, this is the proper scary stuff. And she's had that 2 or 3 times in response to cold water. So it's not just hot we're talking about. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can have people like Karen, and I'm sure she's not on her own, that have this kind of response to cold as well, which I thought was, was very, very interesting. And in relation, you actually mentioned earlier about dogs eating cold as well, eating cold food. Guys, over in Australia and a lot of the hot countries, I'm sure in Texas and all sorts of places that are used to way higher temperatures than we are, cold and frozen food is a very big part of these dogs' diet. They can handle this. It takes much more energy to digest a cold meal, but for sure it's going to cool you down. It's going to take away some of that heat from inside. Small amounts of it. You don't need to give your dog a kilo frozen food, but you know, a frozen duck neck will just be no problem to my cocker spaniel who enjoys it because my duck necks come in a flat bag. I smash them over the ground. I've got individual duck necks into the garden so they can have those frozen items. And there's a million cool little treats you can make, you know, where you make them cool ice cubes where you can fill them with water or broth and you can put one little treat in it. People are filling up like plastic drinkable cups or cardboard drinkable cups and they put water in and 2 or 3 treats where the dog has to break apart the ice to get at the 1 or 2 or 3 treats inside. All those are perfectly good solutions. If you type in ice cube dog treat ideas and little natural yogurt with little bits of flavor and a blueberry, like incredible stuff.

And those silicone paw prints. Yeah, you know, you've got to make them yourself.

It has to be paw print and bone shape or the dog won't know. I don't know what to do with it. So, but they look divine. So all that stuff is great for dogs and doggie ice pops. There's great products out there that come in the freezers of supermarkets and they've got various names where they make these doggie ice pops. But guys, there's no, it's very simple stuff. If there's a banana and peanut butter one, it's yogurt with banana and peanut butter. It is not some, you know, amazing kind of scientific stuff behind it. It's very simple. So you can make this stuff yourself and your dog will absolutely love it and you definitely can feed just frozen on hot days, small amounts, you know, feed right for the type and all that kind of stuff, for sure. Any last thoughts, Brad?

Last thoughts, be safe, be safe by, you know, the water. If you don't, if you have a dog that can swim well, I would still advocate one of these, okay, because it allows you to grip them and pull them out quickly, especially if there's any problems, especially if there's riptides or anything like that.

That.

So I always advocate having one of these. I even actually have this because when they're swimming late at night, they can be seen where they are.

How's the dog using this?

Little light.

I'm only joking. Oh, that's so cool. I love this. I love it.

So Artie had that on last night, so she was swimming along, you could see her.

Oh, that's so cool.

They actually do little life jackets kits for those that maybe aren't so competent. Okay, so just have a little look at those, and that would be something. So swim safe for your dogs out there. And yeah, that's really things. The last bits are, we've got a little bit on— guess what this is?

It's a douche.

Oh yeah, it's a bladder. Okay, so we've got cats On Friday, so we through popular demand are doing a Feline Friday, okay, hashtag Feline Fridays with Dr. Amaya Espandola, who's a vet currently in Spain, but she's a fel vet, so she's a feline veterinary specialist. And also through popular demand, we've got Julian coming back. So Julian Thorne, who you saw a couple of weeks back, is coming back to join us. So watch out, I'm going to post on RPM just after this. There's a look— well, it's quite a lot of things to post actually, because there's going to be some information from Nick because Nick couldn't post tonight. So we've got a little video from him on Adders. Okay, and things to look out in the dunes around Cornwall. So really, really lots of information there.

So a funny snake story. I was in Australia, and Perth has, you know, has snakes, has serious, serious snakes, and in the outskirts, but you get some serious snakes inside the city. And the biggest, most impressive one is called the dugite, big black snake. That's not a small snake, it's a big snake, and they're in the dunes. And to get to the dunes the car parks are always separated from the beach by dunes, particularly Scarborough where we were living, big surfer beach. And so there'll be tiny little paths through the sand dunes and everybody walks through them. So I'm there in the first couple of weeks, you know, and you're Irish and you're red and you're carrying your 15 things down and all the Aussies just go down in shorts and whatever. And I'm just coming down with all this apparel and Walkman and my earphones, Walkman, I don't know, whatever it was, an earphone. And I'm just carrying all this stuff and I'm totally distracted, right? And I'm walking down towards the beach by myself, and suddenly I look down and there's a massive snake on the ground. And I thought Aussies just see snakes all the time, so I just kept— I didn't even break my stride, I just stepped over and kept walking. And my heart was like boom, boom, boom, but I wanted to act normal and cool and not stand out as a weird kind of paddy with all this stuff. And then like there's an Aussie couple behind me, and they must have thought I was such a legend because they saw the snake and they went, oh my God, snake, snake! You're supposed to point it out to everybody, and I just casually look down and step over this massive brown snake on one of my first days there. But yeah, so anyway, I'm going to be interested to listen to Nick's team. And also, guys, I have taken pictures of 7 of the most common Irish seaweeds that you're going to find. Not probably the most common, I couldn't find one, which is ridiculous because it's one of the most common, which is quite ironic. But I found 6 or 7 pretty little seaweeds seaweeds, and I'm going to be posting them up on Patreon. And if the person who names the most amount of them gives me the species name of the seaweed you're looking at— a few green, a few brown, a few red, beautiful— and I've numbered them 1 to 7, and whoever gets the most correct in 24 hours can pick what they want from my shop. Okay, so a simple little quiz just for a bit of crack. So that'll be posted up on Patreon after this.

Okay, great, brilliant. So look forward to seeing some of you guys on Friday. And we're back next week with Q&A. So it's Q&A week next week. So I think we're all back for that, aren't we? The three of us. Keep an eye out for Nick's video that's going to be posted on the Facebook page for ADA treatments and that side of things. And yeah, great to see you all. Enjoy yourselves. Keep cool, guys. Hope you stay safe.

Cheerio.