RPM Facebook Live: Anal Glands, The big squeeze!

Yeah, well, yeah, that's right, we just expanded. It's not just lockdown expansion. Yeah, so, um, yeah, we've got the big squeeze tonight. Um, so we've got a few bits on anal glands we're going to talk about. Um, but, uh, it's good to see a lot of people commenting on a number of things, um, on the Facebook page. Uh, thanks to all of you guys who are joining us also on the Patreon page and the support that we're getting from that is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. So yeah, that's— we've got a few bits to talk about.

Yes, it's been very, very good. I was, yeah, I was on holiday and I haven't got the photos. Yeah, you guys were very generous to me to put that photograph. That was more generous than I would have been with you. I was thinking, oh my God, what sort of photo is going to go up? And I look and I go, oh my God, Nick was now packing and I'm a diver. That's brilliant. What a bum.

Yeah, unfortunately nobody's following Nick around Cornwall, so we don't know what he's up to. Yeah, but, uh, on that very secluded beach, you know the one.

No, no.

Oh, there.

Yeah, so, uh, I was waiting for that. I'm actually going away again now in 2 weeks, but the weather's kind of coming in. It's going to be warm. We've got something called an Azores high or something where you get a bit of heat. So, uh, I'm definitely looking forward to that. I'm getting a bit of feedback here, Brian. Are you hearing that? No? Okay, it stopped. Oh yeah, so look, we've had a very busy week. We were going to do a 45-minute slot on anal glands up until a couple of days ago, and then really the poo hit the fan, to keep with the analogy. So let's— do you want to start with that, Brian? I'm sure you've been mobbed in the Raw Feed and Veterinary Society end of things and stuff. Do you want to start people off and just tell people what's happened and let's get straight into it.

Yeah, yeah. So there is an article that came out in The Guardian professing just to publish, you know, there's a new bit of information they published. But I alluded to this because actually it's a bit of money for old rope in the sense that this is the article that came up. For those of you who can maybe see it, I'm going to just stop this video for a sec so you maybe just get the video and then I'll bring Conor back. So this article is all about multi-resistant enterococci species. So these are often found in the faeces of the animals that are slaughtered for our food, and we have been seeing a number of issues being brought to our attention that some of these are multi-drug resistant. Now, they're naturally drug resistant anyway, and bacteria have been drug resistant, believe it or not, for millennia, very much because, you know, they are competing with environmental things like the levels of sulfur in their environment, all the way through to competing with their arch enemy, the fungus. Okay, and so there's got competition in there, and that's where these genes effectively have come from is them developing a way of surviving in a toxic environment.

Yeah, that makes sense.

What we've unfortunately done is that we've pushed that more by putting these toxins in front of them, and therefore we self-select those bacteria that are more resistant every time we inadvertently use or abuse antibiotics.

Yeah, low, low-dose antibiotics as well, which is even worse. The crammed animals cramped into a barn and then low-dose antibiotics, so not even enough to obliterate the life you're trying to kill, but just enough to take out the weak ones and leave the strong ones behind. And they were saying that the antibiotic resistance in the slurry pits outside the concentrated animal feed operations in the States are just like the most nuclear of places. They can't get rid of that slurry, you know. So Anyway, I'm intervening, sorry.

No, no, absolutely. Well, look, there's so much that goes on. There's the whole farming issue that we need to talk about that comes from this. But I think there's a few bits that we— this originally was published as a poster presentation that was given at a conference online way back last year. And in fact, actually, if any of you guys want to see Nick's view on this, he did a discussion on antimicrobial resistance and the rise within raw food industry. For one of our conferences last year, and that's available through the RFVS page to take a look at. So it has been— this study has been out there, but it is a very specific Portuguese study, and it just happens to have picked up on 2 brands. I think it's 9 food lines but 14 samples, okay, but in 2 brands only in 1 store in Portugal. So it wasn't a widespread of raw food, you know, it's very specific. And there are some food brands that I would be steering away from myself. And we don't know— they won't release the name of the brand that's there. So at the moment we're waiting to find out. I mean, there are some great foods in the UK that I would— well, I do feed for my own dogs and I would just reiterate to everybody to take a step, to take a moment and not let's paint everything with the same brush that this is absolutely defining the whole of the raw food industry from this one study on a relatively small number of samples from only two brands. Yeah. Okay. So that's number one. Number two is some of the methodology that's within here. You know, there's a lot of culturing at 37 degrees. That's going on in antibiotic soups, which effectively are stripping out any other competing bacteria. This is not just given frozen or defrosted, you know, and this is the number of bacteria. This is actually then, you know, they grind it up, put it into a culture medium, grow it at 37 degrees, repeat that process to grow it on and then having stripped away any other bacteria that may have been within that meat that may have outcompeted because this, you know, this is missing a big step as to why we use fermented foods and what we're talking about with probiotics. It misses out the fact that actually we can get over antimicrobial resistance quite often by using competing bacteria rather than trying to throw a stronger antibiotic or a stronger cleaner.

Probiotics instead of antibiotics. So outcompete with the good guys as opposed to try obliterate the bad guys, which is clearly not working, you know?

No, absolutely not. You know, we've seen how badly it's been, you know, going into the, the system that we've, we've seen this for years now that we've been promoting probiotics as a way forward.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So I would say that's number 2, is looking at the methodology. There's a bit of a critique there. Number 3 is some of the media sensation that they've taken a jump from Enterococcus species to Salmonella, E. coli, to the fact that that will mean that if your dog has eaten this that actually the, the dog, not the food, but the dog is now going to be, uh, risking your family, especially your kids, if they, you know, get in contact. And that's just like totally unproven. They're saying this is now following the science and they knew it was always going to be the case, but there is no science there whatsoever that suggests that link, whatever, is the third part. But I mean, you've, you wrote a post on this. I saw your post too.

So yeah, I was just gonna say there, as you're saying that, like, you know, It is the— it's the— it's the rules of science. It's the guise of the science which really annoys me, that these— particularly The Guardian, let's face it, that was a very influential piece. Now on Euronews, which is incredibly influential, so many different places, so many countries. So, you know, they're all pushing the same story and the same story, it's identical on their news sources, the same quotes, and it's just the same repetition. And it really, really annoys me that there's very little balance. But like you said, going by the science, the fact is there's been two colossal surveys of raw raw food. Dry food does not analyze itself in this way, but raw food does to keep checks on itself. The University of Helsinki, Heimborgman, and Nikki Desakrantes is bringing out the new survey as well, another 5,000 on top of the 8,000 we have. And you're talking the hundreds, thousands of dogs, dog years, because, you know, it has your— have you ever been infected by your dog in its lifetime? So it's not just a small sample size from June to August, you know. So Look, it shows that it's remarkably safe having a raw-fed dog in your house, and Anaheim Board would push it a little bit further and said there might even be a vaccinating effect of having, but that's just going down another road. Look, the fact is, like you said, Bren, the science is not on their side. The science is completely on the side that it seems incredibly safe to be feeding raw food. I took a good few notes, something south of Honey's Pet Food fame. Pretty sharp on the science himself, that guy. He did the study himself, remember, with the Hundes Petfood to show us safe it was compared, or according to AFCO stuff. But I just wanted to go on a quick little 5-minute speech here based on a couple of things from John's piece in mind. And I'm reading it off the screen, so if my eyes look a bit funny. So specifically, The Guardian states European authorities must raise awareness about the potential health risks, okay, when feeding raw diets. So they say raw diets to pets, and the manufacturer of dog food, including ingredient selections, they specify raw diets. As Bren said, Enterococcus was found in all these products. That is an anaerobic bacteria that is found in the insides, intestines of humans and the animals that we're eating, okay? And if you're going to take a chicken, for example, or keep them together, you slaughter them en masse and you eviscerate them with a machine, which is a hoover up the bum and it just sucks it out and it snaps the throat and the anus and the guts are sucked out, you are going to get splashed into the carcass, which is why the carcass is notoriously one of the ones that will blow higher for Enterococcus bacteria, not necessarily Salmonella coli, but yes, they do come along in there too sometimes. Okay, so that's where Enterococcus comes from. The problem is that there is now multidrug-resistant Enterococcus. There's okay Enterococci bacteria, but there's also bad ones. There's a meningitis one in there, and there's all sorts of ones that can sicken you. But now there's now multidrug-resistant ones because of the drugs that Bernd was talking about in the food chain, right? So the very first thing is, before we get into the methodology, as Bernd was saying there, is that raw here certainly in Portugal in that study, is acting as a canary in the gold mine. So, you know, if there is this multi-drug resistant bacteria in raw dog food, it is most certainly in the meat chain because raw dog food doesn't invent this bacteria, you know, they have no way of doing that. They only process the pieces of meat that are given to them by the human-grade meat sector. So that's the first thing. If those guys are finding a lot of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their raw dog food in Portugal, they need to sharpen up quick smart on their meat industry, which is less where the media likes to focus for some reason. It's very, very strange. But yeah, as Brian said, the Guardian piece was supported by two pieces of research. One was the poster presentation. You should check out Nick's talk on that. Nick loves this sort of stuff. He's going to be raging you missed this. Um, but maybe we'll put it up again, Brian, up on Facebook or something to—

yeah, yeah. So I, I've put a Facebook link to, uh, what we've done to the RFBS, and there's a bit of information on there too for that video for Nick.

So yeah, He'd appreciate that. He's hot on this stuff. And then the other was this, was this study. Okay, so the first thing about the study that Brian has up there is that it didn't kind of talk about how much of this bacteria was there. They used a process called PCR, which most of us are very familiar with because of COVID certainly in Ireland. I'm sure it's the same in Britain and everywhere. They're now using PCR to detect if you have the DNA of the virus in you. And PCR is pretty good in that if you're in hospital and you've got some weird virus and the snot pouring out and you're gasping for breath, and the hospital will make a diagnosis based on your symptoms, but to be sure they're talking about the right disease, they do a PCR test. And how many times they have to replicate that DNA— they grow it in some magical way in the lab— and how many times they have to replicate, spin that PCR, once, twice, 3, 4, 10, 20— if they have to spin it a small amount of times, it means there's lots of that viral DNA there, so they know that's probably the disease. But once you get up to past the late 20s and into the 30s, it becomes irrelevant because you can just have all sorts of DNA bouncing around your body. You've picked up stuff from everywhere. You can touch someone and take DNA off them from different virus, bacteria, fungi. It doesn't mean you're suffering the disease. It just means the DNA was in there. It might have crossed your nasal hairs. It doesn't mean you got sick. So, uh, the WHO says not to spin it more than 32 times. Uh, anything more than 35 is irrelevant. That's by the guy who invented the PCR, who died a few months before COVID hit. And Ireland is doing 45 replications. So in other words, that it detects the DNA in the, in the, in the animal, or we've tested pears, chicken wings, all sorts of things have failed in this respect, doesn't mean that it was an infectious, a viral replicating in your cells, you know. So it didn't say in this study how many times they replicated it, which is a little bit sus. You, oh, you should always state that. You would think that was the first thing. I needed to read that study again to make sure about all these things, and I will contact the authors about that question. I haven't yet. And the most important, as Jonathan Self highlighted, is they didn't mention if they did these tests on the other products. They also had canned food, dry food, all of the products had enterococci in them, which they're not supposed to. Well, they are, you're allowed a certain amount. But did they mention, Brendan, if like the dry food had, was tested for multi-drug resistant bacteria?

So there were two wet processed foods that actually had the multi-resistant bacteria in. Okay, so these were processed foods that had gone through a heat kill step, right? Supposedly, there were a further 3 that had enterococcus in, right? There were 2, 4, 6, 8, 8 dry foods that actually had enterococcus faecium in. Yeah, believe it or not. So they should be absolutely clear of bacteria if you're going to believe anything. They haven't said whether they had MDR in.

They didn't test. Yeah, they didn't state that of the 8 that we tested all for MDR, they were negative. All they said was that MDR bacteria were found in the raw. That would instantly, as a researcher, say, let me see your data, because, you know, they don't have— so look, that is just a big red flag. First of all, they didn't specifically state none of the dry had MDR in it. So for all we know is they tested it and didn't like the results.

They did have enterococcus in. So how many times would a child handle a dry kibble and the parents not even assume to clean their hands?

Yeah, not at all. It's just so terrible.

You know, it's like feeding your dog a biscuit, you know, would you think that that would be something that they need to wipe your hands down before you picked up your glass to drink your your wine, you know, you're not going to necessarily see that happening. And this is what's so important. It should be that they are pushing vets to educate people on how to handle food materials, full stop.

Totally.

What they also haven't said is whether this is just from the meat, because what we need to understand is how many vegetable matter—

there you go.

Coated in feces.

Exactly.

Fertilizer.

That's, that's a critical point. Like, did you know that in the States, the number 1, 2— this is my concluding point in my hazardous microbiology chapter in the book, which I love to drill in any time people get their knickers in a twist about this— the number 1, 2, and 3 causes of Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria in the States are dominated by fruit and veg. Yeah, not meat.

You know, would they put a thing out in The Guardian about fruit and veg?

Or would they say, we need to clean up stuff here, what's going on? Uh, you know, so, um, look, as we just touched on, Brand, crucially in the paper, because this is clearly a human meat, uh, issue, okay, because it comes from the human meat sector, they didn't actually say what is the prevalence of MDR bacteria in Portuguese meat off the shelf for Tesco's, but Because as Jonathan Self shared in 2012, up to 80% of US meat contains MDR bacteria off the shelf of the supermarket. Up to 80% of US meat. And that figure, I'm not sure if that's done with PCR analysis, 'cause if you PCR anything, you'll find MDR bacteria probably on it. So that's a—

I think we're really fortunate in the UK that huge inroads have been made into reduction of bacteria. I mean, they were talking, you know— You've got salmonella out of your eggs. 80% reduction in farm use of antibiotics in the UK. They're talking about 50% reduction in overuse of antibiotics in our pet population, you know, over the last 10 to 15 years. That's, you know, that's quite big inroads into what the UK market is doing, but we're still calling you know, this is part of the RawSafe stuff. We're still calling for those will be the next levels that we need to be looking at general meat production. We've already announced, I spoke in front of a One Health conference back before the pandemic, and we were talking about, look, not all bacteria are bad. You know, we've got to be looking at what our slaughter policies are, how we manage that, you know. They're not looking at probiotic washes. You know, Answers did a great thing on, on this. You know, Billy Hultman, I know he's no longer with Answers, but he did a great thing talking about how they prepared their foods and reduced bacterial numbers of aberrant bacteria, of pathogenic bacteria by using probiotic washes.

It's crazy looking at this as a great piece on a hospital, two hospitals in the UK that took on the idea of probiotic washes. And the spaces where they use the probiotic wash actually takes about a couple of days to sink in. But the space where they use probiotic wash was so much cleaner than where the chemicals that they normally use. And the plus side is it's not chemically inert now. It's— there's probiotics on it. So now they're going back to actually wood is a better source, a better thing to use inside of hospitals because they didn't like the nooks and crannies in wood when actually it's almost not self-cleaning but antimicrobial in itself. Look, I had a couple more points to make there, okay? Just conclude that everyone keeps glossing over is the fact that in the last, you know, 10 years, there's been 20 colossal recalls for salmonella. And in fact, in 10 years, there's been 70 times more dry food recalled for salmonella than raw dog food. And that's with 4 of those years, the FDA looking only at raw dog food. In 2015, the FDA announced they're going to be looking at raw dog food for salmonella. And they stopped looking in dry food. This is despite there being the 5 years before that a horrendous amount of recalls for salmonella. They go off a cliff in 2015 and the FDA in all their wisdom go after raw dog food and still they only found 2,000 tons as opposed to 140,000 tons of dry food. 70 times more likely, somehow missed by the article, which really annoys me. Where is the balance? Why are you warning us about raw dog food when people like the Associated Truth About Pet Food, Susan Tickson, she just randomly selected 12 top brands of dry food. She ordered them from an online supplier and sent them straight to the lab. Very smart, so she doesn't touch them with her hands and get accused of bias and get done in court. And she found of the 12, all failed in some hazardous microbiology respect. 12 random products all failed. 9 of them contain bacteria that the FDA terms as qualifying pathogens, including strep throat of fame, Streptococcus 10 of the 12 Bacillus species that are involved in food poisoning. And more to the point, as I keep drilling home, there has been numerous infections of people from pet food of Salmonella. People have been— have gotten sick. And before 2018, every single one of them was dry dog food. Okay, so we had it in 2010, where Haveresh revealed 79 people in 21 states were sickened with Salmonella Schwarzegund. Half of them were children under 2 years of age. That was all attributed to dry food. Mars Petcare ended up recalling over 23,000 tons of pet food, somehow missed by The Guardian. In 2012, the CDC in the United States reported that 53 people from the United States and Canada contracted Salmonella infantis, which are really sickening, from dry dog food or their dry-fed dogs. 20 again were under the age of 2 years old. So high chance that your toddler is going to get sick from a dry-fed dog one in three of those kids ended up in hospital. So like, it really infuriates me that this is missed, and yet, 'well, doctor, it may happen,' when actually the very first chance it might have happened was this thing that happened in Minnesota, Ben. I'm not sure if you remember in 2018, two possible cases in toddlers identified by the FDA, not peer-reviewed unlike the other things I just said. So perhaps, because I've lost all faith in the FDA for telling the truth. Um, so the very last thing I'm going to mention here is that Ironically, when it comes to multi-drug resistant bacteria, there's only two studies out there where it has been linked from pet food to human, and both of them are dry food. Van Borg in 2004 isolated the same species of multi-drug resistant Campylobacteria in a girl as in their dry food pet food product, and Leonard et al. in 2012 assessed the antimicrobial resistant patterns of Salmonella and E. coli recovered from 132 dogs in Ontario between 2005 and 2006, 96% of them were shedding antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in their feces. Unless these guys are suggesting every single one was raw-fed back in 2005, it clearly shows commercial diets haven't got on top of this issue. So to conclude, who the hell do The Guardian think they are? And any of these newspapers that spill this bile about an industry that's working its ass off to put out really good quality products to the benefit of all these dogs and pet owners and they can just, you know, shit on the industry in a very bad way. And like, like they did the grain-free industry, they get on board and they just use the media somehow or other, whether it's through sponsorship or not. I don't understand how the papers keep making the same mistake and never once look at dry food and go, Jesus, actually the body count is way higher for dry food. That goes beyond the fact that a lot of dogs are dry fed. It really annoys me, and it should be alarming to everybody that that this stuff continually goes on because, you know, you think it's just happening in pets. This is the way of the world and it's the same crap regurgitated. You know, it really annoys me. I think the Guardian have dropped the ball. I was giving them €12 a month actually because I read an awful lot of our stuff to see what's going on in the UK, and now I've stopped sponsoring them. I'm not saying everybody should do that, but I bloody did.

So yeah, well, I mean, look, when the original thing came out, the New Scientist actually did a publication on that poster and I actually was interviewed and made comments. There is a New Scientist publication around that study already, which is why I'm really surprised that any self-respecting journal published a study that had already been published. It was really interesting that that's something that, you know, they demand that it's not being put out there is any of the information.

That's interesting. The New Scientist fall in the hole. What did their spiel sound like?

So they were very much trying to understand because they were on the back of a Telegraph article on exactly the same thing last year that they were trying to understand what is this issue with raw food and multi-resistant bacteria. And this is what we're trying to say is, well, look, they're naturally resistant anyway. There is a level of issues with how that study was put together, and they certainly cannot be making the links that they were. But lastly, it's so important that all of us are educating those that don't know about, you know, if they do eat meat, how they store meat, if they do feed with, you know, their pets. How they store that food, you know, how they make sure that it's not festering with stuff.

Don't snub the guy.

The recall, yeah, all of that should be part of what's going on in this whole process. So look, bear with us, guys. You know, it's a little bit of stuff that went out there. We wanted to make sure that we shared it. It squeezed what we— pardon the pun— what we were going to talk about with anal glands, but I think it's well worth doing.

Yeah, right, let's get into anal glands, Bren. I can't believe it's actually gone past 25 past 7, so I want to cool down a bit. So do you want to start? Look, what's the vet's perspective on anal glands?

You know, well, I sort of teed this up because I think a lot of people don't understand why on earth this was, you know, anal glands are even there. You know, they surely just cause so much problem and it's sort of like And I was going to bring down the book and show everybody, and I was thinking it's tea time. Well, everybody really wants to see a dog's body on the video. So we're just going to use this as the archetypal, you know, what we're talking about. What you need to understand is that there's two glands, okay, you know, that come in at about— if you look at the clock face, okay, you're talking about at 8 o'clock and 4 o'clock, okay. On the clock face, and there's two little ejection ports of scent. So this is musk. This is the stuff that you would think of that some of you guys are putting in your perfume, okay? It has a very pungent smell. Well, that's, you know, from the musk deer. Well, it's the same glandular type secretion that comes out in our cats and dogs that effectively marks their feces as it's expressed normally and therefore tells the story of what's going on to mark a territory, or, you know, whether there's an animal in heat, or, you know, what they've been eating, how big I am, how old I am, how fit I am, don't cross that side of things, you know. And so that's what the purpose of those glands are. Now, fortunately, as humans, we don't have that, okay. The majority of herbivores don't have that. So it's great that that's—

We've got it from our armpits, by the way. I saw a really interesting behavioral study in college. I love the behavior side of things. I ended up doing my doctorate in that sort of stuff. But there was a really interesting study. Do you ever remember something called Spanish fly? It was a chemical that used to be sold in the back of men's magazines in the '80s and '90s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. And it was a pheromone that men could put on them to attract females to them. And yeah, but it turns out it works until you open your mouth and you go, oh God, you're a tosser, and off they go. But apparently the guys that were inventing that were like, we're sitting on the bus and people come along and sit close to them on the bus when the bus is empty and everything. But to test this, there's a brilliant behavioral experiment. They set up a dentist's and they have a— it's a rectangular room and they had seats up the side and seats at the top and they had a counter with a woman sitting at the counter, the lady sitting at the counter. And when women— they put a spray in the chair directly opposite the counter, okay? So the chair right on the other side of the room, they put the pheromone under that chair. Now, normally women won't sit directly opposite another woman. They'll sit to the side so they're not in direct eye contact because it's a challenging body language thing from, you know, back in the day, okay? When men go into the room, men will just sit in the chair directly opposite so they can stare at the woman. That's just something that we will— we won't sit at the side. We'll just tend to sit in the opposite. Look, Anyway, the fact is women don't tend to do it for some reason. When they spray the pheromone, you want to see that women naturally gravitate to the top of the room and sat closest to the chair. So there's actually a lot of science to this pheromone. Anyway, that pheromone comes out in our sweat, but, um, we now block our sweat with Lynx and all sorts of stupid things. So not that you want to be going around sweating in a nightclub and thinking that's gonna work either. I don't know where I'm going with this. Where were you, Ben? Sorry.

I was just gonna tell you about a week's holiday. Anyway, so anyway, guys, let's talk about this. So there are 3 things. So people say, uh, Brendan, why, uh, does my dog suffer from anal gland problems? Yeah. Um, and I would say, look, uh, number 1, we talk about all the time, and all of you guys made comment on the pre-post for tonight about raw food feeding. So diet. You know, what is inside the bowel of the dog and how that expresses the glands as it passes through the anus, okay, has definitely an impact on how those anal glands empty. Okay. However, it's not the sole thing about that. There are a couple of other things. So conformation is so important. Okay. And that means with breeding. So we see certain breeds are definitely predisposed to this. There's some little toy breeds that we see that definitely have a problem. Labradors definitely seem to be big on that list, or certainly were, less so now. But I'll talk about why that might be as well, because it may not just be conformation. But we definitely see certain breeds having a problem with this. So that would suggest that rather than them being at that 4 o'clock and 8 o'clock, and therefore as the feces passes over, easing them out Okay, that they can be set at wrong angles, sometimes even at the top of the anus, okay. Also, these glands should sit in the muscular ring of the anus, okay, and if the muscular ring of the anus isn't conformed correctly and the gland actually sits outside of that, as the ring of muscle compresses and squeezes and opens up the bulb of the gland can be outside of that, or is not properly expressed, okay, in those circumstances. So that's also confirmation.

Okay, yeah, somebody else said obesity might mask it as well.

That's the third thing. This is where Labradors come in, okay? So, you know, if you've got obesity, so excess fat, again, you've got cushioning around the rectum and around the anus. So as the feces is passing, you've effectively got something that's absorbing the pressure, if you like, and rather than it starting to press from the bulb of the gland and pushing out through the duct, you actually almost even out the pressure so that they don't express those glands. So think of those 3 things, you know, going backwards: obesity, conformation is in there, and definitely diet.

Okay, so the diet thing is interesting, right? Because there's another thing going on with diet. There's another vet I was talking to, I can't remember if it was you, Ben, or somebody else, but there was another vet who's absolutely sure it's all about inflammation. And I said, oh listen, a good poo, instant— not instantly, but certainly can help with a lot of cases, just a well-formed poo, just to express those glands. Surely that's just it. And she said, well, no, raw feeding decreases inflammation and that's what it is. So it's a real tough one because we've got a great study there again, University of Helsinki, when they looked at homocysteine, immunological marker for stress, something like that in the body. The less homocysteine you have in the body, the better. Dry-fed dogs at rest had 10 times the level of homocysteine than raw-fed dogs. Is it the chemicals or the high carbohydrates or weird protein or, you know, immune responses to the food? Who knows the dizzying amount of issues that can be in dry food. But what we know is that dry-fed dogs are more inflamed and inflammation is not going to help here. So like, it's very interesting. I initially thought, no, no, it's all about poo formation because I would say, yeah, listen, you want to try psyllium husk. If you're a dog, first of all, coming back to the diet thing, look, it's almost certainly if your dog, when somebody comes to you with anal gland issue, that dog historically has been putting out a lot of soft poos. And I would say, look, if you sort out why your dog is having soft poos, then the issue will hopefully resolve. Once you start popping though, once you pop, you can't stop. Sometimes it can become a bit of a habitual thing that you have to do for whatever reason, Ben, we can get back into it. But it's when you fix the gut and you start putting out good poos, yes, you create better stools again, which express the glands, but you also decrease inflammation because all the inflammation is coming from the gut. So win-win for the glands. You must find out why your dog is putting out these cigar-shaped malformed poos. The joke shop-esque poo that you see in joke shops, that is a dry-fed dog poo.

Or these perfect cigars, Mr. Whippy, you know, it's that soft, you know.

Yeah, and they're not— these things are going to skate over the top of the glands and not express them. So you can understand why they're not getting expressed. Whereas we all know a raw-fed dog, we don't want them hitting the ground and bouncing on the ground, but it's usually a nice well-formed poo that you'd pick up and go, it's quite a good poo, into the neighbors, and it doesn't smell and everything else.

So, oh, your poor neighbors.

Cat, if you don't mind. But, um, so I don't know why that makes a difference.

The thing about inflammation is really important. Um, so we know, and there is a study out there, of those dogs that have atopy, um, and inflammatory skin disease increase their anal gland problems. So there is an increased output in, um, glandular material that they—

Seriously, I have never seen that.

So that— there is a study out there, I think it's about 2000, 2002, something like that.

I can't wait to get my hands on that.

So have a look in ATP, dogs, and anal glands, link those two and have a look. But it's way back when, in fact, actually it was around the time that a guy called Jack Hall was doing some work with Bristol on ATP and homeopathy, and they were doing some research and work on that, and it came up in one of the conferences after that study. But That's an aside. So we do know that there is an increase in output, we think, in glandular secretion where there's an inflammatory disease, which could obviously also compound all of the other things that we've just talked about, the three main predispositions. So, so think about that. I would say what we do need to talk about is how to express— whether we express whether he's also about, you know, somebody's already commented about certain antibiotics and what's maybe going on with that, and is that an appropriate thing? And we also need to talk about the operation because there's a lot of people talking about, I've been advised to have my dog's anal glands taken out. Yeah, we need to talk about pros and cons. So we're going to whittle through that little—

yeah, what we don't get to, Bren, before you start off, because we also have to talk about, look, even before we start thinking about expressing and all that sort of stuff, again, you've got to go through your diet and get your single protein diets, find the best. Is he good on beef or pork or chicken, which puts out the best poos. Get simple changer splitters, all the stuff we talked about before. But guys, just before Bren goes into the, the, the, the science of, of, of this issue, of all the questions that are now starting to come in pretty heavy, we will get to them and we'll put them up in one solid quick post, maybe in Patreon. I'll put up the study that I just mentioned and all the things that we miss. We are going to make a concerted effort to get into Patreon. So Bren, in case we've run out of time, you don't need to fly to it, Bren. We can put up a lot of it.

Well, I think, and that's really important to consistently talk about, you know, how we treat fiber in our carnivores. Okay. Remember hair, so fur, feather, hoof, you know, all of that side of things. Bone material will increase formation of harder stools. But yeah, the improvement of bulk of motion can be gained through some of those other factors, you know, using the rabbit's ears, using you know, bits of fur and feather, a bit more sinew, a bit more sort of outside material is there. But people do use psyllium husk. You've got a great product out there, Stoolrite, with some kelp fiber and stuff.

Yeah, it's a seaweed fiber. Look, I'm going to give it a quick plug because it would be absolutely insane if I didn't. So look, this is Stoolrite, and, you know, it comes in tubs and zips. I sell it in zips, and we send it all around the world, but it has a money-back guarantee, guys. If it doesn't sort out, fix your dog's anal gland issues to at least some happy regard, you get your money back instantly. It's part of the deal, okay? So any of my products that say they're for a specific condition, it's the same deal. No quibble. You tell me it didn't work, I send you the money back. I don't care because you look at the reviews online, look at the reviews on my website, 15 5-star reviews on product review websites in the UK as well. It works. It's a seaweed fiber. It works in two ways. There's two types of fiber. The one you want here is soluble fiber, which imagine it soaks up the water of the poo and creates a firmer— holds the poo together into a more shape and thing. Insoluble fiber in the poo actually draws water into the stool and makes it like, you know, makes it, makes a mess. So you want soluble fiber. So this is a good source of soluble fiber. So you should use it while your dog has bad poos. But as always, the caveat, your dog shouldn't be having bad poos. You should find out why that is and address that. You shouldn't have to use bandages or plaster on gangrene. So steroid works, but it's also anti-inflammatory. Seaweed is highly anti-inflammatory. Yeah, and it's got antioxidants and all sorts of things, and the nutritional benefit of a dog that's just been pooing his nutrients out. So a lot of different reasons why this works, but it works very, very quickly. And there's the code NEWCUSTOMER20 gets you 20% off on my website dogsfirst.ie. If you haven't tried it, guys, once I said, there's money-back guarantee. We ship it worldwide. That's my promotion done.

Still, for your dog.

There you go. Yeah, you can give it a go. Anyway, Brent, so listen, let's say we can't get on top of the issue and for some reason we've started expressing the glands. When do you know when to express or not or push it on?

Okay, so the classic is the scooting. You know, we tried to find a picture of dog scooting, the closest thing we got was an embarrassed dog. You know, that's the classic where the dog has planted their front feet in the middle of the park. Okay. They sit their bum down to the ground and then they start to do the bum shuffle. Okay. Just to really embarrass you in front of the person you're talking to. Yeah. Just to get your attention. So those are things that we would classically see. Sometimes a metallic or fishy smell on the dog's breath. Okay, is another one, because they will try and clean themselves around the back end.

Oh, that's interesting.

And they will secrete a little bit, but we almost get this buildup of this smell and odor from your pets. If you start to see a little bit of seepage on their bedding, or, you know, if you allow them on your own bed, you know, more for you, you might get some little bits of seepage in those areas. So just be aware of overflow when they've got too full. Okay, but what can happen is as they fill from being a relatively small gland and they sort of fill up and fill up, the pressure on this exit becomes more and more, and they— it almost seals itself, and you can get compacted or impacted material in that express. And so to express these glands, what we say to people, again, if you're just thinking of this as the the gland is you need to lift the tail and that protrudes the anus towards you, and then you should be able to put a finger and thumb either side with a glove, please, guys. Okay, this day and age, don't want you catching any nasty bacteria.

Yeah, in the face.

But so we tend to hold the tail, that pushes the anus back towards us. We then can, you know, put in around that and feel the two glands about the size of a cherry either side, you know, for a classic, you know, 20-kilo dog either side of the anus. And if you're feeling that, you need to reach behind that and express outwards. Now, as vets, we may do an internal to one gland at a time to be very careful not to rupture these, because if you squeeze the wrong way, it is possible to rupture these glands. That's extremely painful. It can cause all sorts of infection problems. And can lead to fistulas. That's effectively a bypass of the gland opening, and actually you get an opening direct to the skin surface of the infected gland material. Now, this can also happen naturally with infections because remember, they're right next to the anus, so bacteria can track up into that material and start to sit as an abscess and form an infection. So that can be extremely uncomfortable and painful for them. So be aware to look at that. Very, very few animals also get a little glandular tumor that can occur in those glands. So if you're having persistent problems and you've done all of the things that Conor talked about to resolve it with diet, and you know, we've talked about reducing inflammation, please get them checked by your vet so they can feel the individual gland and make sure there's not a tumor in there that's maybe causing a problem.

Yeah, not so much. I don't think the groomers are supposed to be doing it anymore, Ben, are they?

So groomers do do it. I do know a lot of groomers that do it, but they should not be doing an internal emptying. They are allowed to do something as long as it's from the outside, okay? But they must, you know, you need somebody who's experienced. So a lot of them will offer it You want to ask the question, well, do they do that a lot? You know, what's their experience level? You know, make sure they're doing it from the outside. Vets will be able to do an internal examination and check the individual glands. We need to very briefly just talk about the pros and cons of the operation. So where you've had dogs which have continually had problems and they're getting infected and they've maybe caused fistulas and anal furunculosis, and there's breakdown, there are operations to remove these glands. So we fill them with a special cement that highlights the gland, and we very carefully dissect around them. Now again, I have seen some great surgeons do this. There is always a risk of fecal incontinence because all of the nerve feedings to that anal ring are coming in and around those areas. So just be so careful. This is an operation of absolute last resort. Yeah, you would even deem to go there. Yeah, there's all sorts of things from laser therapy that you'd go to first. There's all sorts of things to, you know, using, um, you know, remedies to, to help with the chronic infection. There's all of the stuff with diet that we talked about. You should absolutely doing every last thing before you even resort to an operation here, in my view, because the risk of incontinence, the risk of constant problems, the risk of breakdown of the surgical site, because you're right next to the anus, you know, we don't put a colostomy bag on these dogs. They, you know, effectively have the operation and they're passing feces the very next day.

In goes your enterococci that we're just talking about.

You know, so we need to be aware that you, you know, you are running a risk of, you know, side effects, of risks with that operation not succeeding. So please be really careful, okay? If you are going in to, to go for that operation, just, you know, discuss at length the experience of the vets, what they're doing, who's doing the operation. What the risks are, you know, in their view.

Yeah, and I think, I think as somebody asked there, you've already said it, Ben, but, uh, as somebody asked previously, so should we be doing it every 4 to 8 weeks or when your dog goes grooming? No, not as a matter of course. It's not a service that is doing your dog any favors. You are creating an issue there, in my opinion. If your dog needs his glands expressed again, please— there's a look, I have an article on my website on anal glands because, you know, I, I, you get a lot of it. It's on Dogs First. I, I give a lot of different tips. Psyllium husk you can try at home, the animal hair one was— Brent said was brilliant. It was a fabulous study of cheetahs in the zoo that were pooing their way to early death, and they couldn't find out why this was happening in the '30s. It was because they were feeding them pure meat and not meat with any hair or hide on it. And as soon as they started doing that, the cheetahs, who poo like all carnivores, which is a plug, a plug of hair and hide and indigestible material, builds up just in, in, in the, in the colon, I imagine, or before. And behind that, the rest of the poo is. So the first poo of a wolf is usually all the hard matted hair and stuff. And after that, the poo will get— will be normal dog-like poo. And then the last bit might be a bit soft. So that plug might be all you need. So animal hair is a brilliant thing to try. It's worked in carnivores in the zoo. It might work in your dog. And after that, if you can't, you know, you can try something like stooleride or whatever. It's going to cost you €18. So yes, you can try those things, but there's other things you need to try first because this is an issue that's popped up for a reason and you need to put it back in the box. I like to avoid the manual expression until absolutely necessary, and then the first one, in my opinion, should probably be done by a vet because I want him to— her to see, is everything okay? Is there something going on that I've missed? And then if your groomer is doing external expression, then yeah, I love groomers, they're just deadly at everything, so like, why not? But as a service, because this is the breed you have, no, no, no, no, no, that's not something that you would say.

And having some glandular material in there you know, is normal. You are going to get— they'll never be totally empty. Okay, you know, they are there as a purpose and they will build up with scent. So what can then happen is if your dog does get an episode of constipation or diarrhea, then yes, they may build up. But if they resort to normality, you know, does that all calm down? That's the thing. So if it does, you should be able to leave them well alone. If you're getting repeated problems. I've seen a couple of comments about, you know, impactions and things like that. Just be sure. Yeah, I've seen it go to a thick paste and be really almost solid dry material coming out. That is just an abnormal secretion that's coming out of those glands because of other health issues. So get the health sorted, you know. Great. I've seen a few people talk about probiotics and phytospore. You know, a few things in there. Use all of those, you know, going through that first and foremost. Yeah, you should, you know, you may need a gland emptying, maybe needing it repeated just to check that it's got rid of the infection by repeated, you know, emptying of its own volition with a dietary change, you know, 2 to 4 weeks later. But after that, they should really be doing it themselves unless you've got an obese dog that you're working to get that weight off. Yeah, okay, need some support in those circumstances. Maybe that's a reason. But yeah, as Conor says, please don't think that this is the thing that you should be doing for the rest of their lives.

Lou Haff there says, my vet says I should get my dog's glands expressed regularly every 2 months. Shall I not continue? Look, we can't tell you not to do it, Lou, because like, you know, your vet knows what they're talking about. But I would just say that if your dog is not crying out for it at 8 weeks and isn't showing signs of great discomfort and he's raw fed and he's putting out really nice poops with texture and he's getting raw meaty bones twice a week because they always put out a quality poop, well then, you know, I would personally be able to say— I would treat the symptoms I see. I'm no stranger to going to a vet, but I would definitely, if a dog has symptoms, I would be thinking about it. If he's not, I wouldn't be in a rush because I don't want to prolong that issue. I don't want to make it worse. And is there any chance, last thing, Brendan, is there any chance of like muscle fatigue in the— is that true that you can keep squeezing on the the muscle just gets fit. You can ruin it. Is that true?

No, I think the concern is that when you're squeezing, you're not actually dealing with the primary problem, and so you're constantly just bypassing the issue as to what's going on. So you're maybe not addressing the obesity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only caveat— and this is why I say go back and speak to your vet, do these changes that we've talked about, and then discuss with them about what's going on and why you want to you know, reduce this. It should be a normal function, and therefore we want to reduce these visits that are needed for these anal glands. Discuss that with your vet and get to the root of why they think there's a problem. You know, have they got a perineal hernia, you know, which is effectively a weakening of the muscle layers around the perineum, so around the anus and that area, that's causing the feces not to pass through the, the anus properly and not express the glands. You know, are they not talking to you about these other elements? So please go back to your vet, talk to them about what you want, what you're planning to do, and what you want to achieve. Okay, and then start to look at moving the process forward so that you're not having to go every 8 weeks.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's leave it there, Bren. We've gone over time. So guys, thanks everybody for being here. It's just, it was not a great week I'm not sure if we picked a subject for next week. We'll put up any questions we've missed and the studies we've mentioned and I'm gonna find the pheromone study tonight as well. We'll pop that up on patreon.com/rawpetmedics. If you like what you hear, guys, and you can afford a cup of coffee each month, we would really, really appreciate that. That really helps to keep everything moving for us so we can spend more time preparing for it. So things are becoming more and more fluid as you can see. So we do need a little bit of support there. So if you can afford it, great. If you don't have it, we totally understand, but You'll find us on Patreon, and we really appreciate those that are coming out there.

Nick will be back next week, Brian, or will he be back the week after? I think he swapped. There's a whole juggle here. He's having 2 weeks off, then, so he's gonna have a photo next week, I tell you.

Yeah, yeah, this week, so he got away with it. Okay, so we'll pick something next week, guys. We'll get to chatting, and yeah, so we'll announce it on Facebook and all in all due course. So yeah, all right, and great for all of your support.

Thank you, guys. Great to see you all on there.