Show 30: Dr. Conor Brady: The Amazing Benefits of Raw Food for Dogs — Doggy Dan Podcast Show

Welcome to the Doggy Dan Podcast Show, helping you unleash the greatness within your dog.

Hello and welcome everybody to another Doggy Dan Podcast, and today I have Dr. Connor Brady from Dublin, Ireland with us, and he's going to talk to us about nutrition and dog's general health and the fascinating dark underbelly of dog food.

Yes. How are you?

Good to have you here.

I'm good. I'm good, Dan. Yeah, I'm raring to go. Absolutely. So thanks for having me on. Appreciate the opportunity.

We've already had a bit of a laugh, so this is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to this.

Absolutely.

So first question, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who on earth are you for people who've never heard of you and what do you do?

So my name is Conor, and yeah, I'm from Wicklow, Ireland here. This is a kind of a Dublin accent that everyone can hear, and I do a lot of canine nutrition. I'm one of the kind of canine nutrition lads over this end of the world. So, you know, my background was in college, you know, I grew up in the dog shelters and that kind of thing. So I've been mad about dogs as a kid, but I went through college, zoology degree, and I got a doctorate studying the effects of nutrition on behavior. And that was the kind of start of the of the love bug for nutrition, you know. And then I joined Guide Dogs and as a pup supervisor, you know, 9 to 5 puppy immersion, it doesn't get better than that, as you can appreciate, Dan. You know, making a living from working with dogs is just a, you know, it's a treat. So that's what I had. And then suddenly there was an opportunity over in Australia, in Perth, Western Australia. And I thought, well, you know, training dogs in the sunshine is a hell of a lot better than training them in the lashing rain at home. So I thought maybe I'll take a trip over with the wife. And so we're over in in Perth for a while, and that's where I really encountered— I was already doing nutrition stuff, but it was when I bumped into the Aussies, they were really the first to the whole fresh, raw, you know, real food movement in dogs. They've got a huge portion of the population who are already doing it compared to anywhere else I'd been, you know, they're all talking about it and that kind of thing. So I, you know, had a good few sick dogs, you know, you'd start doing a bit of training on the side as you do to supplement your income, and it's easy to do, and I think I remember counting of the 18 dogs I had, I think 7 of them were on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. I mean, this is crazy. Could you imagine having like a classroom of, you know, 18 kids and 7 of them are on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories for some random allergies? And, you know, Australia has the most dangerous everything. So it makes sense that its pollen is vicious. So I just thought, okay, well, maybe it's just crazy epidemic of itch. And that's really— I started rooting around and I made a few changes to their diet, took them off dry food, put them on raw. They got really better. The usual kind of story you'll hear from people. But it was the fact that I said to my superiors, look what I did with a couple of dogs. And, you know, it might make sense that we try this with our own dogs. It was the fact that they didn't really leap with me, you know, and they didn't really kind of get it. And that kind of annoyed me. And then I couldn't convince the vets at all to come with me. And that really annoyed me. I kind of said, well, look, I've done a little experiment here. Why don't you have a look at some of the worst dogs on your books and you take them off you know, ultra-processed food. Some of the dogs were occurring gut issues, just as a starter. I mean, gut issues, food, let's give it a whirl. And, but they wouldn't. So I didn't like that stonewalling that I felt I was being— I don't like not being listened to, you know, it's kind of like— so really then I start rooting around trying to make friends and you do, you had like Ian Billinghamhurst, Dr. Ian Billinghamhurst, Lonsdale, those two were the two top vets, the raw fathers they called them, both of them Aussies. And you get chatting to them and then you meet Brisbane Guide Dogs. And this is a pretty interesting story. One of the revelations in the book really was meeting this CEO, Chris Lane, and she was just an amazing woman, an amazing CEO. And in 2009, Chris— it's actually documented in the Courier Mail if people want to check out the article online, it was a journalist interviewed her— but Chris kind of decided one day, you know, there might be something to this raw thing. They've got you know, 80 dogs in training, and she did a little experiment. She was encouraged by what she saw, so she changed the whole population over from like 180 training dogs from dry to raw dog food. That's a big leap, you know, that's a big leap.

That's a good sample size.

It's a good sample size, and it takes balls to do something like that, you know, that's— it's not an easy thing to do. And so she makes the change, and then you start hearing— I saw the Courier Mail piece and reports of veterinary bills plummeting. And the 4 or 5 things I remember that were leaping off the page were recurring skin conditions, recurring gut conditions, orthopedics, or recurring ear conditions, orthopedic surgery and consult. There were the 4 or 5 topics or headlines I saw and they were plummeting. And the figure was something like $80,000 savings in a year. Now for a charity organization, That's a staggering figure because every penny is hard earned when you're a charity, you know. So if you can save that sort of money, can you imagine what you could do? If you could put a lot more paws on the ground helping people. So that was a staggering figure. And there was lots of other small things when you're talking to people in the organization, you know, the kennels are quiet, the poo doesn't smell, the dogs were way more focused, you know, not less silly. They were still like, they're Labrador pups and they're jumping around, they're doing what pups do, or Labrador cross retrievers is what they use. And it didn't change that side of their behavior, but they were better able for the training, which was something that a lot of training organizations were repeating already. So that really hooked me, and I took that information back and I said, guys, look what Brisbane Guide Dogs are doing, we got to do this. And, you know, they weren't going to come on side, so I kind of knew my time with Guide Dogs was up because I said, look, if these aren't going to change, there's something seriously wrong that people can't see this and there's no vets coming on board. What was interesting was what happened really to Chris Lane. They— she saw the change it made in their dogs. They thought, you know what, if we stuck the Brisbane Guide Dogs badge on some raw dog food, sure, we could sell this food on the market. Loads of people would buy it. Everyone wants to support their guide dog organization. And like, if the food's good enough for guide dogs, you can be pretty sure the rest of the public are going to buy it. So they developed this range called Leading Raw Dog Food, and it took off, and it was a top seller, and they started dominating. Now Pet food, people don't understand what sort of a business it is. There's more money in pet food than there is in the music industry. There's more money in dog food alone in the UK. It's £1.1 billion a year in the UK alone. And the music industry for selling music is £1 billion a year. When you add in cats and treats, it's twice the size of the music industry. And the margins are colossal. So it's a big, big business. So when you're selling the top product in Australia, you're not talking small money for a charity organization. And suddenly you can use that resources to do good stuff. So all it was on the up. Yeah, Brisbane Guide Dogs. And then suddenly, you know, 2015, I hear Chris Lane is fired, out the door, and in comes a new CEO. And I have her words there in my book, which I probably should be quoting, but I don't have the page open to hand. But words to the effect of she believes she was let go because the CEO that came in to replace her was going to bring back in the pet food range that all those organizations are sponsored by. So I That was the start of the darkness for me. And I thought, whoa, I mean, these are healthy dogs. These are proven to be healthier on this food, although there isn't a whole lot of stats behind that that I can use here because I do like my papers on my— but so that implies that if you change them back, they will be less healthy. And that really bothers me to this day. It's kind of like, could you imagine for the people working in the kennels, the people training those dogs, Dan, could you imagine if it was your dog and you thought somebody was going to do something that was going to make him less healthy and it wasn't going to be you, it was somebody else? I mean, that's—

it crosses a line, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. It's kind of like messing with me kid. So anyway, you know, that was the start of it. And then I kind of hit the road and I started doing a few seminars and visiting veterinary university libraries and looking at what the vets were learning and checking out the top books that they use and trying to talk to some vets. You know, Murdoch University there in Perth is one of the biggest veterinary universities in the southern hemisphere. So I thought, I'm going to meet some serious nutrition heads in here. And there's just very little for me to talk to. And I kind of thought, well, where are they? Where are these people I can talk to? And then turns out there's only about 100 veterinary nutritionists, veterinary nutritionists, vets that have studied nutrition in the world. And it's like, okay, so, you know, I needed to do something about this. I started learning more about it and then developed a pet food range. I came back to Ireland then, and that was the start of things. I developed a pet food range myself for a couple of years. I thought Irish— I thought I could lure in maybe a guide dog organization here. That didn't really happen, but it took off. It worked a little bit, but manufacturing is hard work and I dumped that.

What was the gist of your food, Conor? What was in?

So I think raw dog food, like, you know, they wrap it up in many different ways. Some companies are brilliant at marketing, but at the end of the day, like cereal-based pet food, it's all quite similar. Okay, it could all come out of the same factory and you wouldn't know, they just changed the label. So raw dog food is based on this premise that dogs eat, you know, rats, rabbits, that kind of stuff. You know, they might eat a bit of plant material, we can get to that later, but I do diet studies, that's where I'm really strong, and they do probably eat a little bit of plant material, but for the large part, left to their own devices, the studies show dogs eat predominantly meat and bone, and they eat anything. They will eat any frogs and they'll eat, you know, mice, rats.

This is dogs in the wild you're talking about, is that right?

Dogs in the wild, free-to-roam dogs, even dogs that live with families at nighttime, we call them village dogs or free-roaming dogs, not truly feral, even those will just solidly eat meat when they're left to their own devices. But there is a very strange quirk in dogs which fudges the whole debate, because if you have a dog or a cat when they're very young and you feed, let's say, a cat, because we all know cats are total carnivores, but if you feed a cat a bit of broccoli when it's a kitten, you'll see videos online of cats chewing broccoli. Now, that is a completely strange thing to see because cats are obligate carnivores. They absolutely don't eat vegetable material. But here we have on YouTube videos and videos of domestic cats eating it. How come? Because this stuff was fed to them when they were, when they were babies. And as you know, Dan, like within training, there's a period in the dog's life, in the pup's life called the imprinting period. Maybe the name has changed in the 15 years since I trained, but, you know, the first 4 or 5 months for socialization, it's just everything in a dog's life. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Of course you can. I mean, you're doing it every day. But in the first 4 or 5 months in guide dogs, it's really important that the dog gets exposed many times in a positive way to say a bus or a train, because a bus is terrifying, you know, air brakes in the face and all this horrible smell and heaters under the seats and rubbish and chewing gum and everything. So once the pup has been on the bus 4 or 5 times, they're okay with it. But the same applies to food. If you want a dog to have a varied diet and enjoy eating some funny textures like chicken breast meat, if they've never had that before, and then suddenly you give a chicken breast to a dog that's a year or 2 old or 10 years old, they'll look at it and they might have a face in them like a dog chewing a tomato, you know, that face of Jesus. I want to, excuse me, I want to eat this, but it's a funny texture. What is it? So this kind of thing can be developed in dogs, the taste. You can actually spray apple in the air of pregnant females and the pups will come out and fight over the apple-tainted nipples. That's how sensitive your environs are to absorbing proteins and you come out looking for the stuff your mum ate.

So basically what you're saying is you can get a dog to learn to enjoy things like broccoli, but it's not necessary. Necessarily good for the dogs.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And then it fudges the diet studies because you have most of the diet studies come from dogs that are free roaming, so they're not feral dogs, they're hard, you don't see them very often. Free roaming dogs are studies of populations of dogs that populate dumps in like poorer parts of Italy, Zimbabwe, Brazil, that's where the diet studies are coming from. But those dogs return to their humans at nighttime, to their villages at nighttime, and they get fed scraps of plant material. Poor people don't waste meat material on dogs. They get fed the plant material. So when you do diet studies of these, they have a bit more plant material. Anyway, to come back to your initial question, Dan, you asked me what my food was on. My food would be on the premise that you'd feed this ratio of 8:1:1. In other words, lots of meat, a bit of bone, and a bit of organ meat, which is like liver, heart, and kidney. And that's really the basics. You can make duck variety of that, which is essentially duck with duck heart and liver and you know, you can make turkey, chicken, beef, whatever. So I brought out 2 or 3 of these ranges to the Irish market and slowly started convincing the Irish public, who are not ready for it at all, I have to say. I did leap a little bit too soon, and I slowly brought a good few of them over to raw dog food.

Well, tell me, what is the primary kind of— what's your primary concern with traditional, you know, the main manufacturers of traditional old school dog food? What's going on there, just for people who don't really know? I mean, there's obviously a mix of different types of food. There's really good dry dog food, is there? Is it all bad, or what's your take on the dog food and dry food?

Yeah, I think there's probably a ladder of, you know, good, a ladder of goodness. And it's, I would say, like down the very bottom, down the very bottom of that ladder, at step 1, is a cereal-based pet food, it doesn't matter if you tell me it's wheat, corn, rice, if it contains 50-60% ultra-fastly digested carbohydrates, your dog's in trouble. He's eating a very high starch, which is a high sugar diet. You know, people believe that spaghetti isn't sugar. Spaghetti is almost sugar to the body. It's one tiny digestive step away. So if you eat a lot of spaghetti, you are eating the equivalent of a very high sugar diet. It's this whole glycemic index, you know, the slower to digest food, the better for you. So, you know, So when dogs are eating rapidly digested pellets made on 50-60% wheat, corn, I'd say they're not made with the dog's interest at heart. They're made with the bottom line at heart. That's not what dogs eat. I mean, you wouldn't feed 50-60% wheat or corn to a human, although, you know, some nations are trying and look at the state of them. So it's just not a healthy way to eat. We're supposed to eat maybe at most 30% very complex carbohydrates, you know, a good bit of fiber in there. They're your whole grains and your strange grains that come from you know, South American stuff, they're the sort of tough, kind of hard to digest, slow to digest grains you should be eating at a maximum 30% of your diet. And here's a meat eater that's being fed ultra-processed food. We know ultra-processed food is the whole cause of the obesity epidemic. And if you've got, if you've got an obesity epidemic, you've got diabetes, cancer, pancreatitis in dogs, and all the other things that go with eating too much carbohydrates. So the very first thing is when you ask me what's good food, I'd say, well, any food very high in carbohydrates, it doesn't matter what you call it. Is no good for the dog. So like step one is your cereal-based pet food, then you go up a bit. Grain-free is generally a bit better because they're going a bit more natural, they drop some of the nasty chemicals, they don't list any of the chemicals in the back of the pack, and they try to use a bit more real meat, less of the meat meal, which is a shocking ingredient. It's the lowest of the lows, the dregs of the rendering industry from meat waste. Why would you feed that? Why would you pay good money for that? And then you go from grain-free and you go to slightly higher meat-containing foods and Some companies mean well and so they give the dogs more meat in the pellet, you know, so you might have these products called 80/20, which is 80% meat, but I would say that's 80% cooked meat or ultra-processed meat, and ultra-processed meat probably isn't the most gut-friendly thing you need to be eating. Your dog wants it fresh and easy to digest and really good quality, you know, so they all mean well. Then there's all sorts of things like dehydrated pet food, cold-pressed, which means they try to use less heat and stuff, which is great. But then you get up to the better foods which are starting to use real ingredients, cooked foods, home-cooked foods. People wrap that up a number of ways, which is great because they use real ingredients. You can see them in the bowl. And then you get up to your raw dog foods and stuff. And there's some really good— yeah, but probably the best you can do is make it yourself. It's just that people are afraid, you know.

So for people who are going, I'm interested, some of this is making sense, there's a lot of information, how— you've written a book.

Yeah.

Tell us about your book. Is that— I mean, I'm basically wanting to help the listeners who are thinking, I want to know more about this. Tell us a little bit about the places, maybe your book, website. How can people find out more? Not that we're coming to the end of the podcast, guys. Don't get worried. I'm just thinking it feels like a good point to chat a little bit.

Yeah, no. And you're right, Dan, because like when people hear this initially, it's quite it's quite a lot. And so if you get bombarded with a lot, you tend to go a bit inactive. You don't leap at it. Simple messages are, you know, build that wall, 3-word messages, we love them, you know. And the more complex the message, the scarier it is. And my vet's not on site. So I get all that. I think a good place to start is, of course, my website, but I would say that you can go to my website, dogsfirst.ie, D-O-G-S-F-I-R-S-T dot I-E. And I've got lots of articles there, all the raw FAQs that you're going to ask me and all the health issues. So I put out health, their solution to health issues for free on the website because I want people to have the diets to hand for, you know, cancer and kidney disease and stuff that's so rife in dogs. So dogsfirst.ie is a good place to start. But as you kindly plugged there, I do have a book that's doing, doing well now, and that's called Feeding Dogs, which you'll find online. It's probably Amazon if you're in New Zealand.

And I had a look at the book and it's getting some incredible reviews.

It's going down well, thank God. Yeah.

Yeah, hundreds of 5-star reviews. Tell us a little bit about the book. What, what's in it? Is it recipes? Is it your journey, your story? Is it behavior or is it food?

I would say that I'm into research. I'm an academic. So this, the whole point of this book, it's a monster. But the whole point of this book was to give science behind the debate because everybody kind of says, oh, I'd make the leap, but there's no science. The vets would say that. So I brought out this book which I tried to make it as legible as possible. I'm inspired by people like Bill Bryson and, uh, you know, I don't know, people that write science books that you want to pick up and read at the airport. So I like those. That's what flicks my switch. I love those sorts of books. And so I wanted to write us— take the most academic debates that people seem to be having behind closed doors, and I bring them out and write them, hopefully in a way that people can pick up. So, you know, it's no point writing something very complex because we know our GPs and vets aren't reading the journals and academic papers because if they did, I mean, one of the major things in the book, the book is divided into 4 sections, I'll get to that, but in the second section when we're talking about dry dog food, the first section talks about what dogs eat and their digestive kind of physiology and that kind of stuff, you know, looking at the biology of the dog and the ancestry, which is interesting because people always talk about, well, the dogs aren't wolves, and you go, yeah, okay, fair enough, but the dog is very close to a dingo I mean, a dingo 4,000 years ago is your domestic dogs. They're so close, they're interbreeding with each other. Wolves and dogs don't interbreed very much at all, but dingoes happy to do it. So forget talking about the wolf. Look at the dingo. The dingo is a domestic dog 4,000 years ago. The Papua New Guinea dog, I've only just discovered him. He's so identical to the dingo, it's ridiculous. And that's where they came from. There used to be land bridges there. But anyway, total carnivore, the dingo. So forget talking about the wolf. But even that, look, that's the ancestry stuff. But the second section starts looking at dry dog food and highlighting, you know, many, many of the major issues. But it reveals one big, big thing. It's this statement. It's that there's not a single study in existence to suggest cereal, ultra-processed cereal-based pet food is better for a dog than normal food. Not one study. So the whole ethos of this thing, science and prescription pet food, which is a complete misnomer because there's no medicine in the product. It's, you're not allowed to do that actually, because newsagents can sell your product, it can't be under prescription. But anyway, so this whole idea of science and stuff, is there basis? You know, we have no evidence to say that real food is good for a dog, but look at all their science. But when you do look at their science, you realize it's just foundations of muck, of sand, you know, because here we— they've got a lot of studies, no doubt, but there's studies of like a group of dry-fed dogs compared to a group of dry-fed dogs. So let's say you wanted to study itch in dogs. You'd feed one group of dogs a standard cereal-based pet food that's going to keep them itching, and you feed the second group of dogs the exact same diet, but you add a cod liver oil tablet to their bowl. And after 2 weeks, you realize that this you know, Group B are itching slightly less because of the cod liver oil tablet. Well, now they wrap that product up, put the cod liver oil in their usual standard pellet, and they wrap it up as magic dermal care skin benefit pet food, sell it to you 3 times the price under a prescription. So that's called an unfalsifiable comparison. We know adding cod liver oil reduces, or fish oil reduces steroid need and reduces itching in dogs. But is that really relevant is the question. So those studies are nearly irrelevant because the question would be, why are the dogs itching? Why don't you just You know, the idea would be a big group of dogs, like what Brisbane Guide Dogs did, a big group of dogs, and they have some of them on cereal-based pet food and the others on real food, biologically appropriate meals that are designed by people that understand what dogs eat. And then you compare those dogs after 3 or 4 or 5 years, put them through fitness tests, get them pulling sleds. You know, it's like if you're watching smokers If you pitched 11 smokers against 11 non-smokers in football, in soccer, you know, the first half might be pretty okay to watch. It's the second half where the non-smokers are gonna come up trumps, you know? So they're the studies we don't have. We have no, zero, not a single study. They couldn't, I love saying it when they say, what studies have you got to prove raw is better than dry? I say, well, here's a couple of head-to-heads that have been done in the last 3 years, but the deal is if I show you one, you show me one.

Yeah.

So I'll go first and I show them a study that, you know, one or two of the studies produced by Helsinki who are bringing out lots to good studies at the University of Helsinki, and they don't have any. So they'll switch the conversation very quickly to the dangers of raw dog food. And that's, you know, it's just a— that's where we are. Yeah.

You know, I, as a behaviorist, I went around people's houses and I worked over the last decade, I've worked with about 3,000 dogs in a one-on-one capacity.

Bloody hell.

Yeah, it's just a lot of houses.

Yeah.

It's a lot of time. I've sat down for hours with 3,000 families and their dogs. And obviously a lot of them eventually, you know, a lot of them talk about their pets which have passed, and they tell me stories about, we had a beautiful dog. And, um, over, over the years, you start to— you chat to a lot of families who have lost pets at a very young age.

Yes.

And they talk about, my dog died at 6 or 7 or 8.

Yeah, yeah.

And you think, this is a breed which really—

it's like it's normal. Yeah.

And you think, well, this dog still looks 14 or 15.

Yeah.

Now, I've always kind of inquire a little bit, how did the dog die? And they say, and very often I spotted a pattern of owners saying, oh, he died of like kidney failure or ulcers. And I started asking them, what did you feed the dog? What was he fed? And I totally independently started to spot a pattern of a very specific, very well-known, very large brand of dog food. And that name kept popping up.

I don't doubt it.

And after you see it 100 times, you go— and I actually used to say when people said, my dog died very young, actually he had ulcers, I would use— I would say this name of the dog food. I said, did you feed him this? And they'd go, yes. How do you know?

Yeah, that's scary.

And I didn't like to say, well, I did. I'd say, well, it's just a guess because I've heard of so many people who fed the dog food. And I chatted to a very holistic vet and he said, yep, that dog food has— I don't know if it still has it, but, you know, he said it had and or at the time it has a preservative which has been banned from the human food chain for many, many decades because it's poisonous, causes cancer and all sorts of illnesses.

Okay. And pet stuff.

And it was like, yeah, it really turned my stomach when I went, wow.

Yeah. So, like, I don't doubt that. Look, Dan, I'll share with you afterwards, and if the listeners are interested, I've got this fantastic TED Talk that was given by a vet in Lithuania, and it's— I can't remember the exact title, and you're going to need the exact title to find it, but it was something like, I blew the whistle and now I'm fighting for my career, or fighting, or, and that I lost my job, something like that. And it was about the rise of megaesophagus in dogs. And if you want to see some dark stuff talking about specific brands causing damage, this Lithuanian vet was a top microbiologist, I think she is, top veterinary microbiologist, and she was flown back from the States to her homeland in Lithuania to investigate why there was such a spike in megaesophagus. Megaesophagus is these videos where you see dogs having to eat standing up because their throat doesn't have any musculature around it. They can't swallow anymore. They have to kind of glut their food down their neck and they can choke on water. It kills 30% of dogs that get it. And the 70% that survive is because their pet owners are just superheroes. So it's a very terrible disease that you can't get over, and they thought it was genetic up until there was a massive spike in it, and then they thought, well, something has to be causing this because genes don't suddenly cause huge increases. And this lady produced a couple of studies and eventually narrowed it down to an exact brand of dry food. I'd love to say the name because she says it in the TED Talk, but I'm still reluctant to say it, so I won't bother because people can see it on YouTube themselves. And anyway, the thing about it is this is one of and this is section 3 now in the book for the real dark stuff, the dark science, the nonsense that goes on, the corporate shenanigans that go on. So this was a nice little story to begin it with because this vet, after, you know, kind of saying I need another €30,000, was all she needed to do one more study and then she'll be able to say exactly what in the dry food it was, you know, was it a toxin or a parasite or whatever. And she already kind of knew what it was, but her Department of Agriculture came in and said, we're shutting you down, don't produce another word. And the— here's the thing, here's the rub. So she gets shut down and her Department of Agriculture were happy enough to shut her down. And you start to see a money trail there. And she reveals that 2 years later we hear nothing more about this product. Nothing happens. There's no recalls. So she's shut down for daring to suggest it was a brand.

Yeah.

2 years later, Guide Dogs Sydney or no, Sydney Police Dogs and 6 out of 8 police dogs in the Sydney force came down with megaesophagus. And ABC News over there are very anti-kibble, and they came in very heavily and they said, what's going on? And they said, well, apparently it's this type of dry food they're feeding. And ABC News do a little bit of research and say, it appears we've known this for 2 years. This brand was pointed out 2 years ago by this vet, and it's been sold for 2 more years. How many more dogs got megaesophagus? So that really That shows that that stayed on the shelf. I mean, bloody hell.

I think the thing here for me, and, and is I've always been very aware of people's motives, and often it's money and power.

Yeah.

And so when people become whistleblowers, or when people put stuff up which goes against the grain, when people become truth seekers and say, hey, I'm going to look into this a little bit deeper, and there's no financial reward from them.

Yeah.

Because the big the big organizations, the multinationals are all against this change. I mean, if you think of it, it's like the pyramid or the structure that is currently in place. All the people who are at the top making tens of millions, hundreds of millions, they are in place because of the current structure. Now, when anybody at the bottom starts to rustle that structure, you've got to realize the whole thing could collapse. And so they are really fighting against it and they have to have They have to have such guts, such bravery. They have to be so brave. And the number of times I've seen thousands and thousands of people who have become whistleblowers or told the truth or told their story and they've been shut down, lost their jobs and been financially—

No doubt. Oh yeah. And you do see that. That's a fact. I mean, even when I went to release this book, because there's over 1,400 references in it. And every time you say something, you've got not already have people waiting to get the book so they can just pull you apart online, because that's, that's just the way it is. I had to hire two barristers, two barristers that were experts in copyright, to go through the book, the entire thing. Cost an absolute fortune. I had to get insurance. I live in a little bit of worry that, you know, someday they come and squash you, because as I recount in the book, there's plenty of instances where they step in to squash you, not because they think they could win— they probably won't win in court— but you'll be so wrecked by the time you get there. That your message would just be drowned out under all the stuff that you were fighting. So that kind of stuff is kind of real and dark. Hasn't happened yet. In fact, there hasn't been a single dissenting voice to a single point I've made in the entire book, which is testament to the fact that if I was an absolute lunatic, surely some people would be coming up with some science of their own to say, well, carbohydrates aren't the cause of pancreatitis. Well, they are, I'm afraid. People, the vets, unfortunately, you go in, your dog has pancreatitis and the vet will say, did you give him a bit of fat off your steak? You know, that's a real trumped-out line. And the point— whose fault is it? It's your fault. It's like, it's my fault because I gave a bit of fat to my dog. I gave a bit of sausage to my dog. Why couldn't my dog eat a bit of fat or sausage? So this is the thing. If your dog's going to live on high carbohydrates, we have all the studies we need to show that eating high carbohydrate diets increases your blood fat. People just thought, well, if there's fat in the blood, it must be because you're eating fat. No. It's from eating carbohydrates that draws up blood fat. It's a type of process that happens. It's a strange thing. It's like during the obesity epidemic, they thought, well, eating fat must make you fat. I know, we'll make low-fat food and high sugar. Boom, obesity epidemic. So carbohydrates have a role to play in everything. Cancer— dogs are 10 times more likely to get cancer than humans. 10 times more likely. I don't use those words lightly. 10 times more likely.

Scary, isn't it?

And everything's okay? Give me a break. So we've got twice the amount of vets per dog in the last 10 years, 20 years. We've huge drug sales, we've got drug companies, pet drug companies floating on the stock exchange. It's a great market because people haven't a clue, they'll spend anything on them and it's just, people are just getting done over. It's not right.

Yeah, look, I hear your passion, Conor, and I felt it at the very start of this podcast when you talked about how you love working with the puppies and you worked at a, you know, a guide dog place and you worked in the in the rescue shelters and, you know, you feel like a brother in terms of loving the dogs. And it's not about the money. It's about you love these animals. They can't speak English. They can communicate with us, but it's very tricky for them to actually say, you know, we hardly sometimes whether what's causing our problems medically. So sometimes it's very hard for a human to know what food's causing it. But even if a dog does know, it's very hard for them to actually say this isn't causing the problem. So I hear your passion and it is an absolute minefield out there.

So it's kind of sketchy. You know, I'd like to say that at that point, it just reminded me of something just to highlight to people. Not everyone's going to come along with this and that's fair enough. You know, we're just talking. But like, I think it's important to say that it's not the individual vet on the ground that your ire would be directed at. It's not them at all. These, as I say at the start of the section on what vets are learning in college nutritionally, was which is not a whole lot, you know, that's the short of it. But like, what they do learn is taught invariably by dry food companies. But the thing is, vets, these are kids, our brightest kids going into university. It's harder in Ireland to be a vet than it is to be a doctor, human doctor. So these are bright kids going in there, or these kids are excellent at regurgitating facts in exams. And in they go to college and they work their asses off in college. Very difficult to degree. I mean, GPs have to worry about, or general practitioners, human doctors have to worry about one animal Vets have to learn everything about every science, every ology you can think of— genetics and biology, physiology, anesthesiology, surgery— like all these in not just one animal, but every animal.

Wow.

Rats, cats, dogs, rodents, birds, fish, you know, cows and birds, all this sort of stuff. And then after 5 years, they've got to learn to run a business and staff. Like, it is a savage workload. They are highly stressed. They've got one of the highest suicide rates. And when they get into practice, they work their asses off. So really, these people aren't driving around in Porsches, and if they bloody did, they deserve it. I mean, if we're going to look at some jobs, they don't deserve the money they got. So I would say that these kids get in with an unbelievable work ethic. They're passionate, they love the animals, but they believe what they heard because they don't have time to believe otherwise. It's like, just give me the facts and I take in the facts and then I speak the facts. And that's what happens. And then after that comes in a huge amount of, sadly, ego and cognitive dissonance because it's like, I can't possibly be this wrong. I can't possibly believe— yeah, like, when you think about it, like, the suggestion that a candy company's product is the very best product. I mean, these, these are candy companies. These are companies with the world's worst nutritional backgrounds.

You know, here's the thing, Connor. If you actually take the, the comparison of what we've been doing with our children, feeding them fizzy pop, feeding them all the bars, feeding them all really bad food and then look at their behavior in school, how they can't concentrate. They're not physically well. They're not healthy with all these issues. It's exactly the same. The difference, of course, is with children, they can always say, Mom or Dad, I feel sick. Mom, I'm not happy. The dogs can't speak, though, can they?

Yeah, that is a bit of a problem. And I'm just making sure that people don't go— when they do realize what's going on here, and really this they're not to blame or to point the fingers at vets, but if they do figure out that, you know, it's about bringing them along. It's interesting though, this whole raw revolution, and it is happening, and 20% of the UK market is feeding real food to their dogs, you know, so, but it's happening from the ground up. As Jim Morrison said, you know, they've got the guns, but we've got the numbers. Not a single vet— I'm a part of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I'm the only non-vet in the group. There's only 120 vets in that group. It's a global organization. So we are a tiny number of scientists and the vast number of scientists are against us. And yet the movement is happening. So it should encourage people that, you know, you don't need top echelons to do anything. You just need to speak with your feet. It's like, you know, I'm not picking up what you're putting down, buddy, and I'm just going to buy this food and make a leap myself. Do a little trial yourself. Try a bit of food yourself, a tin of sardines, you know, crack an egg on top of the food, give them your leftovers, give them a nice meaty bone, you know, throw a handful of blueberries out into the dirt. That is a fantastic thing to be doing if you've got a nosy little dog, any of your scented dogs. I have a cocker spaniel here who's just insane. Dan, I desperately need you. I don't say that lightly on air, but you know, I do. My wife keeps saying, can we get a trainer in? It's like, I'm a bloody trainer, we're not getting a trainer in. But this dog's nuts. But anyway, I get a handful of blueberries and I throw them out into the back, into the hedges, and he's out snuffling around for his blueberries, you know, full of antioxidants, beautiful little treat.

So just on that, vegetables and, you know, fruit and veg and nuts for the dogs, what's with that stuff? Are you saying don't give the dogs any vegetables, or a little bit's okay, or they should, or—

I'm in the vegetable group. I'm in the plant matter group. I think a little bit of plant matter is okay. I think, you know, if you should ask me about some exact figure, which I hate giving percentages because people freak out, but coming off the back of dry food, everyone wants percentages, you know, as if that's how we feed ourselves, you know. Like, if I was to ask you how much calcium you gave the kids last week, you wouldn't have a clue, you know. What's your RDA of manganese? You don't know. That's not how we eat. Meat, and that's not how you're going to feed your dog. But initially, so I would say maybe 10% plant matter in the dog's diet is about right. And then there's certain types, like, I mean, you'd give most plant matter. Obviously you don't give your onions and you don't give that sort of stuff, but dark greens are fantastic, your bit of carrot. I would probably chop up the veg instead of giving it to them whole. If they like a crunchy carrot, give them a crunchy carrot. If your pup is teething, well, then frozen carrot battens in the freezer are fantastic for a pup's sore little gums. Teething all those teeth at the same time. So that bit of material is okay, a little bit of that, a little bit of fruit. Dogs don't really want too much sugar. They don't want the fruit. If you keep giving them lots of fruit, you're going to start getting yeast issues and all sorts of stuff. So ease off the fruit. I think things like dark berries are probably the best, things like blueberries I adore, you know, blackberries, any of those little dark berries are fantastic. But they like all those things. You'll see dogs eating bananas and melon and stuff, and that's all okay in small very small amounts. But, and as for seeds and stuff, yeah, like I would give some crushed seeds. Pumpkin seeds are probably the best thing you can give them because seeds, small tiny amount of seeds, because dogs would eat birds, they eat the stomach contents of birds. They wouldn't eat the stomach contents of bigger prey. With all the videos we need to see now, the dogs and wolves and dingoes, they don't eat the stomach contents of the prey. They don't, as people say, this is why we feed 60% cereal because dogs love the stomach contents. No, they don't. They don't eat the, you know, half-digested grass. Who's going to eat that? So, but they do eat the stomach contents of birds. So that's where the seeds and nuts and berries bit comes from in raw feeding. So we give a little ground pumpkin seeds. But the reason I love pumpkin seeds over any other seed is because it contains an acid called cayenne acid. And cayenne acid is one of the most potent anti-helminthics, anti-wormers out there. So if you're feeding very small amounts of ground pumpkin seed, your dog's not going to get gut worms. So there's absolutely no need to give worming tablets I mean, the most you need to do with worming tablets is that once or twice a year you send off the poo sample to somebody that does— we've got WormCount here in the UK, it's probably in New Zealand, it's in Australia, it's just a veterinary nurse that you post her a poo sample and this poor devil has to go through 100 poo samples in a day and then you get a text to your phone 24 hours later, your dog doesn't have these 14 species of worm and it's digesting its food properly. So like, and that's usually about £20 Wow. So why would you give the chemical, you know?

Conor, what a great place to end.

There you go. Yeah, I love talking this stuff, Dan. I could go on.

Hey, I'm just— yeah, I could chat to you all day. Absolutely fascinating. Can you just run through again, just very briefly, the website, the name of your book, where they can find it?

Yeah. So my website is dogsfirst.ie. You can catch me there. You can contact me at info@dogsfirst.ie. So I respond to a good few of my emails. I've got a Facebook page that's pretty busy. There's a good few people on that, Dogs First Ireland, if you type that in. And if you just type in Dogs First on Facebook, it should come up. And the name of my book, you'll find it on Amazon, is Feeding Dogs by Dr. Conor Brady.

And it's the one with loads of 5-star reviews.

Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. Yeah. Thank God. Thank God. Yeah.

So look, I'll put all of those links, including I'll find— I'll get that TED Talk video of you. I'll put the link to the Amazon where you can buy the book Feeding Dogs. Transcribe all of this podcast so you can read through it, all that sort of stuff, and lots of other bits and bobs. So if you want to find all that information, you can go to my website, theonlinedogtrainer.com/feedingdogs. And yeah, Dr. Connor, it has been fantastic.

I love the time. I love it. Let's do it again at some stage. I just love it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Great work because we need good men and good women like you helping to educate us into the dark underbelly of dog food, which indeed I could tell you a lot of stories myself about stuff I've experienced. It's dark. Yeah, it's dark. I mean, the margins alone, I just, I never forget. Yeah, price of some of the dog food in the, in the vets. And then I had a mate who used to offload it from containers at the port, and he told me he once had a look at one of the prices of what it actually cost import, and it blew his mind because it was nuts.

Oh my God, it was basically—

you don't want to say it was rubbish, but it was, it was the price of rubbish.

It is, it is, it is very close to rubbish, but it's the dregs of the food sector. As I go through, every single ingredient is the very lowest, cheapest thing they can put in there. It's not, you know, uh, just, and just to reiterate down to people, you know, they don't have to leap into feeding raw dog food. It's a bit freaky for people sometimes, but adding in little bits on top of their grain-free dry food at a grain-free dry food, add in a few bits and pieces on top. And don't forget a meaty bone now and again to clean the teeth outside of the dry food meal. Give it to them at lunchtime, a nice meaty bone, really good for the teeth, very safe. You can learn how to feed dog bones on my website. That's really important for them. Good nutrition cleans the teeth. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it's important as well, just to finish off this, when we talk about, you know, dry dog food or kibble, it's not that all of it is the same.

No, it's not. No, no, you can find some good stuff and you can avoid the bad stuff. That's all it's about.

And there's also a lot of very, very good, loving, caring, fantastic vets out there.

Yeah, absolutely. That's important.

And yeah, it's important to remember that.

So yes, absolutely. Tread carefully, tread softly.

Hey, thank you, Dr. Conor Brady. It has been—

Yes, Dan, loved it.

It's been brilliant. And thank you guys for listening in to another edition of the Doggy Dan podcast show. Thanks for tuning in and have a good day. And as always, love your dogs.

You've been listening to another episode of the Doggy Dan Podcast Show, bringing you one step closer to creating harmony with your dog.