Dr. Conor Brady, Niklas, and Brendan answer questions about dog health and nutrition. They discuss soil eating and probiotics, the antihistamine Periactin, raw honey for wounds, skin growths like histiocytomas, and whether vegetables belong in raw diets. They also cover fecal transplant capsules and why antacids don't work well for IBD.
Chapters
Welcome back, Niklas. We've missed you.
Thank you. It's lovely to be back. Yes, it actually is lovely to see you guys. I never thought I'd ever say that, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm having trouble with my vision at the moment though, so that might have something to do with it.
Oh yeah. Oh, where did you go, Nik? You went down south again?
We went to St Ives. We were camping, and you know, the last two weeks have been stifling hot. Our tent was like an oven.
Oh no, that doesn't sound nice.
For the whole day, which isn't very pleasant. We had to go to, uh, we either had to go to the pub or we had to go down to the beach and find some nice shade. And just beautiful, it just— guys, you would not believe it. So, so, so, so beautiful. And so Gwythian Beach, it's opposite St. Ives. Just, I couldn't recommend it more. It's about 3 miles long, and when the tide's out, it's about a quarter of a mile deep. So there's loads and loads and loads of space there.
So I would really recommend it. Anytime I hear St. Ives, I always think of that Monty Python sketch where your man died halfway through, right? Did he say St. Ives? That's the only way I know the place. Other than that, I did hear it's very nice. Uh, speaking of— you've got an inflatable tent, Nick, and I just got an inflatable canoe. I saw an inflatable canoe online, I said, you know what, I saw a family paddle out past me— mom and dad, kid in the middle— so I'm having one of them. So £280, a Challenger K2 it's called. Comes with this cool pump and this really heavy, really good quality canoe, and off you go. Two people sitting there, you can go anywhere. So I've got all these plans. I'm probably not going to do any of it and land up with the boot skates and the tennis rackets and everything else that I don't use.
16-meter swell in the Irish Sea.
Yeah, there are easier ways to get over to this country, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I will see you soon. Um, what about you, Brad? Anything quick to report? Because we've got an absolute bucket of FAQs together.
Um, I did Sorry, somebody told me off for flashing this very quickly last week. Okay, any of you guys have difficulty with a case and you're finding that they're super reactive to the slightest thing, okay, that you add, uh, that could be even food flavor, scent, um, homeopathics, anything, have a look at that book. Wow, great insight into lots of things, um, really interesting about the mold toxicities. And then intracellular stuff, Lyme's disease, we talked briefly the other week about it, but there's Bartonella as well, that's another one, that's cat scratch disease. For the American viewers out there, there are so many intracellular organisms that are parasitic, single cellular organisms, sorry, that are involved in this hyperreactivity of the immune system. And they talk a little bit about the mast cell hypersensitization. Okay, so it's something that's out there. So good read, good thing to get rid of the critters. So yeah, there's a little bit about why they're not always visible on standard tests, how they remain dormant and latent so you can't see them necessarily. Activate the immune system very gently against these critters. And then all of a sudden you start to find them, then you can start to treat them.
Okay.
It cautions you about trying to treat them too firmly from the offset go because you can tip your patient over the edge.
Very interesting.
Just while we're talking about books, boys, this is possibly the best book, best food book, possibly the best book that I have read ever. Okay.
Never heard of it.
My friend Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food. Absolutely. It's just blown me away. It's just a rip-roaring tour through food.
So while Nick's talking, I'll do that because—
I don't have a book, guys, because I feel sorry for you all. I feel sorry for you with the amount of books. But it is addictive, though, isn't it? Because when you see or hear that this book contains information that you need, it's like, well, I need it now, you know. I can't wait till we can just download this information. It's like Bing, you know. I mean, very soon our phones are just going to have the answer way quicker than, than, you know, we are. Surely to God, that's the way it's going. Yeah, that is the way medicine is going. I mean, computers surely can cope with this answer quicker. Anyway, let's not get into that, guys. We have got a savage amount of FAQs to go through. Uh, we've got a huge amount through Patreon, and I've got the same amount again on Dogs First. Um, Nick, do you want to just start calling out a few questions from the party on this?
These are some from the Patreon list, and the first one is, should I be concerned about my dog eating soil? And also, have we got anything to say on soil-based probiotics, fulvic acid, and shilajit, whatever shilajit is? You have to be careful how you say that.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Hopefully the person that wrote that is on here and can explain. Was it a typo?
The soil probiotics thing is very interesting. I'm putting it mentally in the same category as dogs eating a bit of grass. When I see dogs eating a little bit of soil and stuff, I probably wouldn't get too alarmed. I've actually never had a dog that ate soil. I've never seen it. And I wonder, is it something to do with the soil probiotics? I wonder, is it a mineral deficiency? I actually don't know the answer to this. It's been put up on the page a couple of times. I've always just panned it off and said, guys, I don't know why they do it. But I do suspect that the very light burying of bones that they do, I wonder, is it some similar thing? We used to purify meat in the ground, you'd store it in a certain way. Like, that's not gonna save their bone from a scavenging carnivore, a light dusting of muck, you know. A dog's not gonna walk past and go, I can smell it but I can't find it, you know. They zero in. So now I'm starting to think, is a very light dusting of bone the same thing? Is it? So where are you guys on it? Because I'm very—
like the— how they preserve the meat sausages where they, uh, produce that anaerobic bacterial growth. So is it just like the dog's version of fermented food?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
You know, I think sometimes they'll do it if they, if they feel they need gut fill, you know, and I agree with you, Conor, that if they're eating a tiny bit of soil here and there, it doesn't matter. Yeah, I think that's completely normal because in the old days they would be eating off the, you know, the desert floor, you know, off the ground. So they would be getting soil there. But so a little bit is nothing. But if they're eating significant amounts, sometimes it's just— it's— it's— they're just wanting gut fill. Or I think it could be a probiotic effect. They know that they're wrong. Well, somewhere they know that they're wrong and they're trying to sort that out.
Could be minerals, could be salt. And wild carnivores, I mean, elephants do it, hippos do it. So there's soil eaten by them, but they usually scrape it off rocks and stuff. But I mean, that's where your salt is. It might be in the soil and the silt. There's Gabrielle Joy, uh, she's the dingo girl. I'm sure she won't mind being called that. Uh, and Gabrielle's a rock star for that kind of stuff. Here she says dingoes self-select special clays and soils really often. I get asked about it all the time. So, you know, there's another type of dog doing it.
You know, some of the, um, clays that are out there, great for gut soothing, you know, we use the green clays orally all the time.
Yeah.
Um, so there are some medical reasons. It's a little bit like choosing your herbs from the hedgerow. Yeah, stuff, you know, it's, um, yeah, it's a little bit of that self-selection.
I don't think probiotics is a very obvious thing really from this because there's a great study there of Irish soil where it killed 4 of the 6 superbugs in hospitals more effectively than whatever other treatments they were using. So soil probiotics, S. boulardii, a couple of others got really kind of cool there for a while, and every dog with IBS should have been given S. boulardii, but but there's actually pretty good science behind that. The S. boulardii and a couple of other soil probiotics are really good for dogs with IBS, with one study and a couple of other things. But after that, I really don't know because it gets into territory that I'm very weak on, that kind of stuff, you know.
I'll tell you what I have done with several dogs and itchy dogs, for example, is I've just completely run out of ideas of what to do. I've tried everything. Yeah, they're on a great diet, they've got loads of supplements, they've got everything. I've put them onto soil. We take some soil. This is— I'll have a look at the book. You take some soil, you freeze it to kill any parasites, okay? But to maintain the viruses and the bacteria and what have you. And you just put a teaspoon or half a teaspoon, depending on the size of the dog, in every meal. And so had one dog who cured, who was itchy, and then boom, after that it wasn't. And I think it's a great way to give a probiotic.
That's crazy. I totally think there's something very natural about eating off the ground. Now we're probably thinking and it's one of those things like hair and fur where we go, yeah, do you know what, we shouldn't have removed that, that needs to be in the diet. So yeah, it's very interesting, feed them off the ground until we know more. If people know any more than this, guys, because the soil, tough one to start off on, bloody hell, we're supposed to look really good, guys, leave the hard ones till the end. Well, if people have any more insight or they find the study before we do that's related to this, please send it on. But I've had a good look online about this and all I can find is a whole lot of opinion but not a lot of facts.
I think that there is a big growing field on actually how to improve clinical environments by using probiotics rather than, you know, as washes now, just to outcompete those superbugs. That is the way forward. No longer are we in the realms of trying to do that classic issue of fungi versus bacteria, and that's really where our antibiotics have come from, let's face it, you know, penicillins and etc., are all about finding the toxins that fungi produce which out, you know, kill off bacteria. Well, that's a war that has been going on for millennia and is always going to come back into balance, so there'll always be a stronger one on one side which will then overwhelm the other and so on and so forth. So just, I think what we want to start doing is thinking, how can we, you know, how can we make this work better? And that is to starve these soldiers out. You know, if you start to increase the population. There just isn't enough food for the really strong soldier force. You know, just, just there's too much of another population taking away that food. So let's just do that.
Yeah.
Use the friendlies that we've got to outcompete them.
That's where Answers Pet Food got their idea. The Amish community, after washing down the machines, sprayed it with whey wash from the, from the squished cheese. And the guy was going, just spraying it with essentially looks like milk because that's whey wash. It's a probiotic. That's what cleans, keeps the machines clean. The guy never heard of it before. Next thing you know, they're cleaning out skyscrapers' air vents because the air vents get wet and moist and it blows dangerous bacteria, Listeria and a few others that like that environment, down on top of people. You can't send people through with chimney brushes anymore, so they made this probiotic spray and they sprayed it through the vents and now people get probiotics, but it means the probiotics outcompeted the nasties in the air vents. It's amazing. Two hospitals in the UK use it and it worked better than the cleaning solvents they were using. Okay, look, let's move on from that one.
Just very briefly, Kathy Gordon says that just garden, general garden soil, but it needs to be the most most, uh, ancient, organic, pesticide-free, and non-mineral depleted. Because Catherine was saying that there's mineral depletion. There's the mineral depletion where farmers have been putting NPK fertilizer on farms and taking off, uh, farms, uh, food for a very long time. But good, rich, honest, old, many grass meadow.
Hard to find. Hard to find a field that hasn't been treated up the yin yang. And, you know, but got parks, you can't use parks, you can't I think, I think woodland.
Woodland, really?
Oh, good one. Woodland. Yeah, that's obvious.
And you just put it in a Tupperware box, put it in the freezer for a few days, and then off you go.
Actually, you know what, we won't talk about it anymore because I'm going to make a business out of this. I'm going to start selling Irish soil. I'm just going to dig up the garden. There we go. So let's just stop talking about it and look at my shop very soon. What's next, Nick?
You've been already told off for selling your own products. Right, let's have a look.
Any negative side effects or dangers of giving Periactin, which is cyproheptadine, which is an antihistamine which has a side effect of stimulating appetite? There's a few things I'd like to say about that, but Brendan, you were telling us about that just before we started.
There's a couple of things that I've come across with regards to that in mast cell activations. Stuff that's being used where you've got supersensitization. So it is used as one of the detox— I'm going to use that word, that phrase loosely— detox mechanisms. It's really interesting when it's a human drug, it's not licensed either in the States or over here for use in pets, including dogs, but it is used very commonly. We tend to use pyriton over in the UK more than we do this Peryactin. But it is used often for the side effects. Often it's chucked in as just an antihistamine because dogs react differently to antihistamines. I mean, you know, we always get the side effects of drowsiness and things like that. It's quite rare in dogs to get that. And actually the dose that we use in dogs is usually much higher than we'd use in humans because they're less sensitive to it. So it's really interesting. I can understand the theories as to why a lot of people will use these products. But just be aware, yet there is no licensed version. There is no extensive work saying this is particular. It's one of those medications that sort of evolved into the profession as, well, it works in humans, surely it should work in dogs. But it's the same story in my book as a lot of the antacids, where actually now they've done the studies to show that they do not have an effect on acidity in dogs and cats, but yet the profession still use them. So just, you know, there's big mass multi-study sort of reflections done by the American Veterinary Medicine Association, I think, and the WSAVA, BSAVA. They've all said the same thing, but yet they're still used.
Why don't they work? What's the biology to it not working in a dog?
Well, there's slightly different biochemistry in the stomach, I would presume.
Yeah, different stimulants, different mechanisms to get to that, whether the blockers, because that's what they are. They're a histamine blocker, but just a different receptor.
I was talking about the antacids, actually, when you said the antacid bit.
Sorry.
Yeah, sorry. For the antacids, that's why we presume that they don't work effectively. But I mean, we're also into the realms of antacids realistically aren't— the acid in the stomach is not the reason for the ulcers. There's an inflammatory disease in the gut which is causing a failure of the lining, and that's what you get your ulceration from, usually an inflammatory disease. We'll go back to that. But so you need to address that, and chucking anything in to try and stop the acid is really just trying to cover up the underlying problem.
Yeah. Okay, cool. The piggyback question— sorry, Nick, you want to say something?
I'm just going to say If your dog is inappetent, I would be more concerned about why you have to give the periactin in the first place. So I'd be looking at changing the brand, changing the food, changing the temperature, changing the, the how granular, whether they sometimes like a pasty mix, some people like a really chunky offering. That's where I would be going with that and try and get off the periactin.
Yeah. Totally. And same with any of the digestive things. A lady posted on my page, um, acid reflux since pancreatitis in a raw-fed dog. Any advice? You know, um, I, I have my, I have my advice purely because of something that popped up a couple of weeks ago, but it would be German chamomile because BioFunctionate seems to work on it. And people started, you get the reviews and it comes in, and then we posted it, went on to a group about acid reflux. It's going down very well. But I don't know why it's working, but I would like to know why the acid reflux more so than a fire extinguisher constantly. Like, what's the, what's the cause and what's the solution?
So, and that sort of involves this, you know, it's dealing with the underlying IBD rather than just trying to use an antacid. So to answer that particular question for all of those people out there who've had these protocols given to them with an antacid, you know, realistically deal with the underlying IBD reason rather than just cover it up.
And also, if you are using an antacid, even if it is only partially effective, that's going to— if it is effective, and Brendan's saying it's not, but let's say it's in humans, it's 100% effective, and in dogs it's 25% effective. That means your acid that you're producing in your stomach is down by 25%, which means your digestion is 25% down right from the— yeah, so that's going to affect you all the way down the line. So I think it should be avoided wherever possible.
Yeah, it's interesting. IBD leads to like your gut dysbiosis and stuff, but if you're passing more undigested material into your intestines, that's exactly where your dysbiosis is coming from. Yeah, IBD can be very tricky. It can get very bad. Okay, Nick, what's up next?
What's up next? Let's have a look. We've got honey. Is it interesting? Raw honey and young dogs. So raw honey and young dogs, Clostridium Botulinum, a neurotoxic bacteria, causes botulism. Not a very nice thing to have, and hence the NHS advises not to give human babies under 1 year old raw honey. And what are your thoughts?
So all of the clostridial diseases— so there's quite a lot actually of clostridial diseases. Botulism is one, tetanus is another, okay? They're all anaerobic bacteria. They can be found in any situation where you bottle, tin, you know, undercook stuff and then seal it in a container where it's allowed to ferment those particular bacteria. So it can actually not necessarily be the honey that's at fault here, it can be whoever's washed the jar out. So it's often found in riverbeds, you know, the deep silt and stuff like that. So if you've got somebody who's using that sort of water from a borehole or something like that to wash their bottles. They're not sterilizing them properly before they put the honey in. That's the risk. Now we're back to the argument that Nick missed out on, which is where there's proposed risks that are minuscule and may occur in really obscure cases, and all of a sudden we've got, you know, somebody who's identified that as a possible risk, and therefore they've tarnished the whole industry.
How many times has that gone? Yeah, yeah.
So, uh, do you know, if you're good, if you're diligent about where you get your honey, what you're getting, I don't see there being any problem in using this.
Yeah, like, it's not— it's only not antibacterial.
It is antibacterial. I found it in the Pharaohs, in the, in the Pharaohs. They buried it with the Pharaohs and it's still edible. So, you know, that's not Yeah, it's crazy.
I'd love to taste that. There's a lady called Jo Arbon who runs Holistic Hound in Ireland. And Jo, you know, there's nothing you can't tell her about herbs. And she loves raw honey of any fashion, not necessarily Manuka, but local raw honey. But she had a Staffy, I think it was, with a really bad leg wound. Okay, it was a pretty shocking picture, you know, a big chunk of her leg. I can't remember what happened, who cares. Big open raw wound. And she took photographs of it every day for 7 days. She covered it in raw honey and I was thinking, oh my God, imagine having such faith in your ability to heal a dog that you would cover it in honey. And the dog, she bandaged up the dog, left it alone. She knows what she's doing. Within 7 days, the dog's wound was just like miraculously healed. And she would talk up the qualities, the antibacterial qualities of raw honey and stuff. So I'd be very surprised if Clostridium could get a fair go in honey for a long time. But look, That's a really good point.
A lot of people do ask about wound management. Can I just touch on that very quickly? It is really important to keep a wound moist so that the epithelial cells can heal in. It's much quicker to do that. So there's all sorts of things from collagen plasters that you can get where you moisten them so that they actually create a network mesh for those things to go in from. People used to even use amniotic sacs from calves being born and things like that to wrap on wounds. But yeah, packing them with honey, honey, with any sort of hydrating gel that you can then use is brilliant for wound healing and actually will speed up wound healing massively. I've got some amazing pictures of huge wounds that you literally, if you use this moist dressing on a regular basis. And great thing about honey, you can pack it on, just cover it with a light dressing, and then you just replace it. And rather than wrapping them up in big huge dressings to hide it, you're literally just putting it on and then cleaning it off, putting it on, cleaning it off. And that allows, as long as you don't do too vigorously, allows cells to move in and actually heal that way.
I think yarrow root is in the same thing, isn't it? There's a natural version of Elastoplast which is made on yarrow root, which is the same sticky viscous antibacterial stuff that they put on wounds as well.
It was antibacterial.
Yeah, yeah. The thing about honey is also, is it's— yes, it's, uh, it keeps things moist, it's antibacterial, but it's also, it's very, very, uh, osmotic, osmotically active. That is to say, it will suck all the, uh, inflammatory exudate out of the wound into the honey, which is really useful.
So as you're peeling it off, you're peeling away all of the horrible—
does it peel off like a, like a Sticky—
I usually have to, uh, yeah, you can use saline or something like that too.
Okay, somebody just posted up there, Susan Webb, uh, who found on a weblife.com, uh, Geophagia. It's the why humans and animals practice geophagia, soil eating. Can't wait to read that, Susan. Fair play. Uh, that's the sort of research we want done for us. We'll share that up on the page afterwards if anybody else wants to read it. What's up next, Nick?
Okay, uh, let's see what we've got. Uh, One viewer has a 3-year-old Whippet with histiocytoma. Dog is raw fed, no fleas, worm treatment, vaccinated at 12 weeks, no lepto. Is there anything that she could have done differently to have prevented this? Anybody?
So, uh, look, just to give you a background, a histiocytoma is basically the astrocytes, the, the cells that surround and join and communicate with mast cells, okay? So they're not necessarily full of mast cells, like a mast cell tumor, which can be really horrible. They are very commonly found in puppies and often will self-cure within 6 months or so from occurring without doing anything. So you don't need to take them off. You know, if they get infected, just keep them clean, add a bit of honey, you know, some of those things. Just have a look. We don't know why they're incited. It could be that they've had a sting, a bite, something that's just overactivated those communicating cells and create these little nodules that people get very worried about because it's quite hard to differentiate them sometimes. But really young pups, really unlikely to be horrible skin tumors, much more likely to be these histiocytomas, which are really quite hard, can be quite red and inflamed.
And just leave them alone?
Yeah, leave them alone, but make sure you differentiate them from mast cell tumors because mast cell tumors can be really hideous. Okay, just make sure.
Yeah, there's a lady on my page there who was saying fatty lymphomas. She's— the dog's got like, you know, middle-aged and fatty deposits, fatty lumps that the vet actually lanced with a syringe or something, or advised removal. I was Well, no vet, so what do you recommend for fatty? Are they more common in dry-fed dogs? What's the cause? What's the solution?
I don't know. I've never— I'd love to do that study to see. Yeah, because if you feed rubbish fats, you would think that the body will try and do something with them, and that might be why you get a lipoma. Don't quote me on that, I'm just trying thinking out loud really.
But often quite benign type of tumors too. Lipomas rather than liposarcomas. Lipomas are quite benign and quite common in— it may be a neutered issue again because we do see them a lot in certain breeds.
Hormonal issue perhaps.
Yeah. So again, it's something unless it's causing an issue with the skin breaking down because of the size of it or interfering with the walking of the dog. Generally they're cosmetic. And, you know, yes, differentiate them by doing a fine needle aspirate, which is possibly what that vet was doing, was actually—
yeah, could be that—
putting a needle in to draw off to have a look to see if that's the sort of lump it was, rather than lancing it to try and destroy it.
Yeah.
So do have a look at that.
Leave them alone anyway. That's what you're saying, leave them alone. Yeah, okay, cool. Very good. What's up next, Nick? I've got a million from Dogs First and we've got 11, 12 minutes left, so let's—
you want to go with one?
Let me—
okay, yeah, you go with one there, Conor.
Okay, we just talked about this beforehand. Oh, let's start now. Let me do two. If insoluble fiber is so important to the gut biome of humans, why the advice that veg isn't necessary for raw feeding in dogs? What feeds their biome? And the back, the tail end of that is the second question, which is probiotics, you know, for certain conditions, do they differ and that kind of stuff. So the first question was like, it's fiber for humans is so beneficial. Well, look, we're plant eaters and the flora that we have in our slower digestive systems, sacculated and cecums and stuff, likes a bit of plant matter for sure. You know, we are now feeding meat eaters for the very large part with a little bit of veg, and their digestive systems are different. They're fast and short and smooth, and they're not sacculated, they're quick, you know. So the bacteria don't have a chance. The, the plant fiber, the plant-eating bacteria, just, it's not their sort of environment. So the answer would be that like, yes, you know, these, this sorts of fiber, plant fiber and stuff, is good for our, good for humans. And studies show that it can be good for dogs as well. The study of pups with terrible diarrhea where they've used inulin and a couple of other plant fibers, and it's helped with really bad diarrhea and stuff. But overall, you would have to expect that carnivore pre-probiotics would be different to ours because their gut flora is different to ours. So giving them kefir and probiotic yogurt meant for us, even though studies show those are in part can be helpful for dogs as well, canine probiotics look different. There's more of them, full of bacterioids and Firmicutes and groups that we probably wouldn't be eating a whole lot So I think that's kind of— it's a bit convoluted. I'm not sure too many people at the— let's see, guys, do you recommend no veg for dogs? Does anybody?
No, no, no. I feed a little bit of veg. When I first started, like 25 years ago, I was feeding 60, 70% veg. Just I was thinking meat and 2 veg. I didn't know a lot in those days. Yeah. And, and gradually the more I look into it, the more carnivorous I'm making my diets. That's basically it. And so I'm now down to between 5% and 20% veg depending on the dog, because different dogs, different dogs need different— and it's horses for courses.
And really interestingly, yeah, there's a lot of work being done on fructooligosaccharides as probiotics in certain commercial foods that we shall not name tonight. Yeah, but these prebiotics really interestingly also feed some pathogenic bacteria too, you know, Klebsiellas and stuff like that, people. And so yeah, it's great that they can grow friendlies with them, but they actually— you've got to be a wee bit careful about some of them because they will also grow pathogenic bacteria.
Just going back to the Clostridium thing, We've all got Clostridium in our gut. Okay, so that's news, breaking news. It's not botulinum toxin, but we have got quite a lot of Clostridia in there.
Yeah, the same argument for your Salmonella, Campylobacter, all these kind of scares that come up. And, oh, listen, you could go on. And then the tail end part of that question was that, you know, first of all, I don't think too many people are saying cut out veg completely, why veg isn't necessary for raw feeding dogs. I would say most people most canine nutritionists would agree that probably are recommended. There's very few people that are just feeding meat and bone to their dogs amongst the canine nutritionists that I know. So I would say that most are feeding— so I know there's big groups that just recommend prey model only, but I'm not a part of that for reasons I make clear on the website. There's a whole article on— a few different articles, um, but on why you'd feed a bit of plant matter, you know. I wouldn't cut it out. So that should alleviate your mind if you think some plant matters needed, but pop it in there, you know. But which probiotics and why and when? Like, guys, I, you know, I'm no expert on probiotics at all, but, and you guys have your choice, but I like the ones in little pillules that, I like anything that's specifically for dogs first of all, that's the most important. And but really, as regards using certain probiotics for certain health conditions, no, that's not a place that I've ever gone and gone to, so I don't know much about that. But what about you guys?
Yeah, we're using Phytospore if that's— and that is designed for dogs. Yeah, it's only because the thing is dogs are like people, they've got between 600 and 1,000 different— that we know of, there's probably more— types of bugs. And so putting in, you know, even this phytosporin, which is very useful, and I've seen it change even behavior in dogs, so it is, it is effective, but you're changing you're changing 5 fuses on a, on a 1,000-fuse board, you know, and you're just hoping that it's going to have some kind of, some kind of impact. So I think there's a lot of trial and error, but I would be definitely going with— Mercola do a good probiotic, and, uh, Fido Spore is one.
I really like the science on probiotics that, uh, if you don't change the train, if you don't change the issue of what's why you think you need those probiotics in the first place, you're just throwing the troops at the guns and like they're just bouncing off the issue. So you can keep lobbing in probiotics, but if your dog has terrible IBD and you don't get on top of why that— what the solution— that the probiotics are what, you know, it's gonna look like the Somme. Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of a bit of a, you know, it's, it's, it's plus and minus. I talked to somebody that knows an awful lot about probiotics and they put me off a little bit. And so now I just come back and say I would use them for the first— somebody said how long to give probiotics. If my dog was gut sick and I'm trying to fix the issue, lash in the probiotics for a few weeks, a month, great. But then I'd come off them assuming that I've done as much as I can with the probiotics. The rest is going to come from food.
Yeah, there's a few interesting human stuff that you need to be thinking longer term for some of that, you know, especially depending on the length of trauma that they've had. To get them to that point, you know, how long they've been on antibiotics and stuff. You know, Robin Tuck and I mentioned this book of Microbiome Solutions. Gillian Enders does The Gut as well. Both of those doctors talk about it being, you know, sometimes years to, to amend some of the early traumas to young kids that have had continuous antibiotics, you know, to get them right. And this is why, you know, the stuff about doing sort of fecal transplant stuff, which is like colonoscopies to implant fecal material from healthy individuals can speed up this process so much because you are putting in a bigger mix, you are putting it into play, you know, you're bypassing the stomach and all of the other things that go in there. So there are so many different ways forwards, but there is no quick fix to a lot of these things. Yeah, you know, Guys, some of you will need to just realize that actually, if there's been that level of change, there are things that we need to tweak to get them ready to receive those probiotics as well.
Okay.
Do you know what the general name, guys, for, you know, the fecal transplant, if you have it in a little capsule, they're called crapsules.
Crapsules? I thought they were poo pills.
Poo pills.
Ah, that's great. Here's another one. Speaking of poo, I love a good poo conversation. Why would a dog pass completely normal feces in the morning and diarrhea later in the day, regardless of stress level and anything else that I do? This is actually quite common, you know. How come the dogs will put out really good poos in the morning and in the afternoon put out a bad one, much like a wolf does in a single sitting?
It's not unusual, and I think that it means that the gut is pretty good, but you could look at prebiotics, probiotics, protein selection, and also gut motility.
Guys, if you've got constipation, go for a walk. You won't believe just actually how doing physical exercise is great for gut motility. Okay, so the same if you think of the excess. So if you've got a spaniel that's just decided to go absolutely nuts and runs and runs and runs, started off with a firm stool and then at the end of running like crazy has a slightly soft stool. Well, if it's got hypermotility on the outside, it probably has some hypermotility on the inside too. There is no reason why it's not going to come out soft.
Dudley still has a spaniel lip. Okay, so his lips are hanging down on each side for the people who don't know what it is. And then underneath that is nice and wet and warm and you know, everything's wrong with dogs and suddenly, oh, I've got spotty lips. So I've always thought, okay, you know, your breath's been smelly, buddy, for the last while. It's like, yeah, Jesus, your breath smells. So no, I wasn't quite sure what that was. His teeth are looking pretty good. I mean, you might see a tiny fleck of tartar and go, okay, listen, that can't be it. So I never thought more of it until my groomer said, Conor, he's got an infection under his lip. Posted it up on Facebook a while ago anyway. Through my natural efforts at trying to clean it up, I couldn't do it myself. Eventually down to the vet and the vet gave me this really potent stuff that the vets use for, it looks like really dark iodine. I can't remember the name of it, but it's like thick, sticky orange liquid. And he says, put a drop of this in some water, use some pads and clean it up. Okay, so, okay, I didn't have the pads and I was just using the big wad of tissue and I was getting a big load and I was scrubbing his both sides of his mouth with this really potent antibacterial liquid. And after a day, the very next day, his poo was obliterated. It was just like liquid poo. And I said, what's wrong with you, buddy? You get free stuff from people. I think maybe I was adding in stuff. And okay, but now that I realize every time I did that for the couple of days afterwards, I was just completely annihilating— the antibacterial was going onto his lip, it was inevitably going to get into his mouth. So word to the wise, maybe I'm the only person that's this stupid, but use the cotton pads the vet told you to do and take a bit of care and keep it out of his mouth because this is antibacterial. This is the same, you know, dry food companies proudly boast that their food is chemically inert. You know, it's like, but that stuff decimates your dog's gut flora as well. It can't be good stuff to live on. So that's why my dog's poos are getting soft. But that's not what this poster is talking about. This is like a no matter what she does, you know.
We call that cock-a-mouth, when you get that, the little fold under there. I just put yogurt, just put yogurt as a probiotic.
Yeah, I tried my probiotic spray, my yogurt probiotic spray intensely, and I tried colloidal silver. And I, you know, I've tried them. When I say, okay, he's just gonna— he's just gonna—
doesn't matter, put it on 3 times a day.
And oh, we've got to touch at some point in the future on colloidal silver. There's a difference that you've got to be careful about using colloidal silver versus Argentum 274, something like that. There's a different solution of silver.
Um, interesting.
Colloidal silver can have some deleterious effects on the gut flora too.
Yeah, you'd expect that.
That's something to be aware of. Anyway, that's another thing. Yeah, there's lots and lots of stuff that we see. I mean, constitutionally, there's certain constitutions that will have variable stool as well, where they will naturally start off firm and then go to a more liquid stool either through the day or as they're exercising. So a lot of guys are posting up here about remedies, etc.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to look at them. Now guys, I've got one more question I'd like to get to because I know I realize we're a minute past already, but there's just loads of questions here. Um, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, uh, yeah, listen, we covered that last week. Myself and Bren were doing a show on liver, uh, when Nick wasn't here, but we spent half of talking about that study that's scaring the pants off everybody. So just check it out, we break the study down, a number of posts on the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I've posted on my Facebook page. So, you know, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria thing is still kicking around. But here's a good one just to end on from my questions. Are raw premades okay for large breeds such as Bernese puppies? Do they need more than 10% bone? My breeder says so. So there's a question about bone contents, and no, it's fine, just crack on.
I would say it's just that whole thing Because what they did in the late '90s is they thought, oh, we've got Great Danes and large breed puppies, we're going to give them extra calcium. And that what they found was when they gave them synthetic calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate, chalk or something like that, they gave extra because they're growing big bones and it suppressed their calcium metabolism and they got bone problems. It's not actually, uh, if you're giving them real natural normal calcium in, in, in as bones, then, you know, a dog is a dog is a dog, whether a Chihuahua or a, or a, or a, a large dog. You will eat, you know, the Chihuahua will eat a small amount of food, small amount of bone. Yeah, the big dog will eat a large amount of bone and will absorb or not according to their—
Exactly, there's a crucial point, isn't it? It's like you can leave a big meaty bone on the ground and the dog will take what he wants. Pups will take what they want. A growing bitch, a whelping bitch will take what they want. But if you leave a load of calcium supplements on the ground and they start helping themselves to it, you would get worried because your body just does not treat them the same way. And the whole 10% bone thing is completely out the window, guys, because as my book goes into painful detail on, like, you know, we're killing chickens at 11 weeks old. Those bones are not the same as a sheep being killed at 6 months old or a cow at a year old. Those bones are just completely different from each other. The amount of water, calcium zinc, iron in them. They're different things. So the idea of 10% bone, which is like a decent average, it's not the average amount of skeleton in a rabbit. It's not the average amount of skeleton in a rat. They've got less, but the bigger animals have more. But like, bigger, the bigger are, the heavier skeleton. But like, you know, it's hard to see why you think dogs would be eating large animals. They've stopped hunting large animals long ago. Now they're on the small whole prey, little fellas that they find on the ground. So I would say actually the 10% bone thing is more than enough. They've got plenty that they need in there calcium-wise. You only need a small amount of natural calcium the figures that we have today are these really high value because they're putting them in from conical flasks, which the body doesn't like. So you have to use more of it. Zinc oxide is a typical one, iron oxide. They use huge amounts of it, copper. But it's not the same as a natural bit of calcium, which you only need tiny amounts of.
Because they can't absorb it. The absorption is like 10% on zinc oxide and calcium carbonate, things like that. Whereas with normal bone, it's much higher, 3, 4 times higher.
Yeah, so it wouldn't be worth it.
Just dealing with a very linked question, which is about how much exercise to give those puppies, is, look guys, as long as you're not, you know, running them up and down hillsides by you sitting at the top with a tennis ball and throwing it all up and down, you know, the bike, gentle exercise, or riding, yeah, dragging them behind a bike, you know, if you're walking and they're keeping up with you and you're taking it gentle that's fine. This whole thing about restricting large breeds into crates, all that you're doing is creating a weakness around the joint because they're not exercising, they're not creating the fibrous tissue to support those joints. And then when you do let them out, they're then going to injure themselves. Yeah, actually, just as we do with our own children. I mean, if this was true, you know, you'd be crating your child up on the way to school and say, don't let him out of that crate. Just educate him and bring him back. You know, that's crazy. We want them to run their socks off to get them tired. It is about they've got to build healthy tissues, okay, with a sensible amount of exercise.
Yeah, I actually shared that from my Facebook page recently, that exact same topic. And there's plenty of studies to show a worked joint is more robust, as you'd expect. It just learns its licks when it's young. So like, you know, pups are running around playing, and when they're tired, they'll sit down. But 'You need to be— you're the mum or dad, you need to be wise to what they're doing.' Okay, fair enough, within reason, but you know, at the end of the day they need to be running around doing their thing. Why would you stop a 4 or 5-year-old sprinting around the beach all day? You know, you just wouldn't until they just fall over and you drag them to the tent.
Gentle continuous exercise, yeah, you know, just give them that opportunity to rest and, you know, don't think that you can sit at the top of something, a big hill, and chuck a a ball thrown through.
Yeah, Catherine says there, you don't take a little baby, you don't take a baby puppy for a walk really at all. You just plonk him down and he goes exploring. That's all he needs. You don't need to drag him around the city on a lead. A baby puppy doesn't need that. But when your puppy starts going up a bit, he needs a bit more activity, and maybe you don't have the off-lead kind of— yeah, so it's a whole balancing act that we would, uh, we're probably treading a fine line there. Um, so yeah, look guys, I think we got to— what, Nick, have you got any left there? We've got— it's 10 to 8 now. Yeah, we've got 20 questions.
Yeah.
Yeah, 32 more questions. We'll save them, uh, you know, Patreon guys. And thank you very much for everybody who supports us via Patreon, um, and Facebook people. Yeah, um, yeah, we'll, we'll do another— we'll do one of these every month, you know. Yeah, yeah, kind of thing. It's great to do.
Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, so you'll find us on Patreon, guys, at www.patreon.com/rawpetmedics. It's coming up in the bottom there, uh, and yeah, guys, if you have the price of a cup of coffee a month for us, this will be very, very handy for us. It keeps the lights on, helps us do things, helps us prepare for the show and spend a bit of time on it because it does take time to get all this ready. And so we would deeply appreciate it if you can. If you don't have it, absolutely fine, totally understand that. It's always free to view, so you'll find our old videos back here as well. So some of the questions we can get to because we actually have previous videos of them.
But yeah, and then some of them on Facebook, guys, I am going through and giving you some notes, uh, pre this show and we'll be doing some more post. So if you go back to that one where you posted the questions, we are going through some of those and giving you some answers where we can as well, just as reference points. Okay, so great, thank you from me. And guys, thank you for joining me.
What are we doing next week, boys?
Well, I won't be here, I won't be here.
Okay, Ben, what are we doing next week?
Me and the Well, we touched on hearts. There's been a few questions in the Q&A actually just wanting to know about electrical issues with hearts and some other bits and bobs, so we could deal with that, talk about atrial fib and other inflammatory disease. Nick's looking a little bit, oh my God, no, maybe not.
So, well, it's I'd say the number of people who've got dogs with heart disease is not high. Those who've got it really, really want that information, and I totally see that. But every single dog is going to get arthritic sooner or later, and we seem to still have quite a lot of pictures.
There are a lot of questions about that actually as well.
Should we go there?
Yeah, let's go there. Let's go some alternatives to NSAIDs. Yeah, let's talk about alternatives to NSAIDs next week.
That sounds great. All right, have a great holiday.
Yes, I will do, absolutely. I'll see you when I get back. All right, brilliant.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks very much for joining us.
