Herbal Wisdom for Dogs and Their People: With RIta Hogan PT 1

Okay. So, Rita, hi, how are you?

Good, how are you?

I am doing well. I'm really excited to get to speak to you. I was checking out your website again just a little while ago, and I had some questions for you straight away. So let's get into it right off the bat. Tell me what a canine herbalist is.

Well, it's, you know, depending on who you are. I definitely am a canine herbalist who specifically works with dogs. I do dabble in a little kitties and humans, but usually it's my. My already kind of. I've already worked with their dog. But I do consulting. I help people with herbal protocols to support their dog's health and I do some formulating for companies. I've been doing this a long time, like more than two decades, so in some capacity or another. And I do a lot of formulation. I'm an author. I do a lot of writing, consulting with like, different veterinarians and people in the field in like, in the veterinary field. I'm a member of the Botanical Medical. Veterinary Botanical Medical Association, a non veterinary member, which I'm super proud of. And it's a variety, but I certainly have a good time and help a lot of dogs and people, which is my main concern for all of it.

That's amazing. That's. That's like quite the resume right there. Definitely. A lot of. I was reading the different, you know, the different people that you've, you know, consulted with, and I was like, wow. You know, and just the time of doing it and. And I really. I kind of feel like things are kind of coming back around, more in the forefront with using more herbs and that type of thing and treatment in our animals. So. And I did want to talk to you also about. So you've been doing it for over 20 years. So. But like, how did you, like, get into it? Like, how are you like, oh, I think I'm going to become.

Well, my dad. My dad and my grandmother are definite. Definitely in my blood. My grandmother, you know, was a mother of 16 in the Great Depression. People used herbs. Poor people definitely used herbs then. And she used herbs for all of her kids. Never went to the doctor at all. Had a midwife to help her with birth, and that's it. So, you know, and then my dad. I didn't know my grandmother very well. My mom has, you know, just a lot of stories about her. And I met her a couple times, but she was very elderly at the time. And my dad and I would garden together and he would send me out to get Certain plants in the field. And he wouldn't serve himself an herbalist, but he definitely insists that plants are useful and the importance of homegrown vegetables. And he also grew a lot of herbs in his garden. And then, you know, I studied Ayurveda when I was in my middle 20s when I went to the University of Minnesota. And then I. It didn't resonate with me. And I ended up moving to Tennessee and I bought a 36 acre property there. And it just. I really started falling in love with the plants that I grew up with. And they were all over the property. And I started boarding dogs, doing kennel free boarding and training. And I just noticed how sick the dogs were. And I had started working with some of the plants there and kind of getting into herbalism. And then I decided that, hey, how would I use herbalism for plant for dogs while I'm learning here? And I started making salves and candles and different like external remedies for. For dogs. And I got a. I started a pug rescue there and I used. With another woman. I used herbs on them a lot along with. Under a veterinarian's doctor, Kevin Bryant helped me a lot with all the pugs. And it just kind of went from there. And then someone asked me a couple of years in, you know, what are you? And I thought, I'm a canine herbalist. So. And then now there's, you know, I knew there were animal herbalists out there. You know, the people that influenced my work early on, you know, when we did the Internet was not the Internet of today. You know, you couldn't buy anything on the Internet. You, they, like, people were just starting to make like websites for their businesses on the Internet.

Right, exactly. I remember making my website in the beginning, back in the stone age of making websites. Yeah, right.

You know, and so you're. It was, it was the stone age. It was like 2002 and. And it just kind of went from there. I was like, well, yeah, I'm an herb. Like, I think it was right around 2005 or 6 that I just said, you know, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this herb thing with. With dogs. And maybe 2004 and. And it just kind of went from there. And then, you know, for the last, I would say heavy duty. The last 10 years have been heavy duty, hardcore herbal, like practice herbalism formulation. And before that, I would say 2010 was the kind of lead up there. I had, we. I. I had a external product for dogs company called Farm Dog Naturals. With this other brilliant woman. And we had this company and I just, you know, I formulated everything for that company and so in one capacity or another, it's just been great. And I've been doing consulting since pretty much like the first week of my kennel free boarding facility.

Love it, Love it. So, so basically you're like handcrafting these the savs. Like when you first started and you were dabbling a little bit and having your pug rescue and, and I'm, I, I kind of feel like maybe you were treating skin issues with the wrinkles on them.

Yes, yes, yes. All the skin issues and stuff. And then I started, you know, giving the, the pugs. The rescue pugs. Herbs. You know, I'd give some herbs to the people that were fostering them or some already made formulas out there and then, and then it, you know, kind of went into tinctures and extracts and infusions and all that stuff and the rest is history. And now we, I use, you know, internal and external remedies for dogs and for all facets of things.

Nice. And are you still cultivating or has it gotten to a point where you're like, okay, and if that's true, are you still like low key cultivating and manufacturing like for your guys at home type of thing, like have a greenhouse?

Yes. So I have a business called Canine herbalist and it's canine herbalist.com and I sell a lot of my flower essences and tinctures and extracts there. I also sell some other companies products that I like. But I grow a lot of my own herbs right now and I make a lot of my own medicine. I do what's called wildcrafting too, which you go out in the wild and get a little bit of each, you know, of what you can. I. You don't need a ton of medicine unless you're doing dried plants, which I don't do unless you're, you know, selling dried powders. You don't need a lot of plant plants to make good plant medicine. Next year I am going to have some dried plants. But they. I'm working with a farm to, you know, a bigger farm to help me bring in some of those.

Nice, nice. And okay, let's see, let me see. You know, you talked, touched a little bit about how, you know, you're kind of. It's comp. Is it complementary to like the pharmaceuticals that say a client, you know, may have. The vet is prescribing, you know, a certain medication protocol for like, let's just say cancer or Something to that effect. Is that something that you can like, kind of work in conjunction with that?

Yes.

So.

And it depends on the plant, right? So it depends on the plant. So if, if, if, if someone was giving, like, was being give. Given an nsaid, you know, there's some, there's some plants out there, like willow, that don't work well with those. Or, or someone has a, like vet medin, which is for the heart. You know, if they're on a heart medicine, then I have to be careful of what I'm using. And that just comes with knowledge, which I happen to have, which is good, but takes practice. And then there's, you know, there's good references out there for like pharmaceutical interaction now. So that's good. But yeah, you have to be careful. But yes, most animals can be helped, but some pharmaceuticals you can't use anything with. But it's usually not the case. There are certain cases that I don't.

Oh, break it up just a little bit. It'll catch up.

Oh, okay. Hold on. Are you there?

Yeah, you're here back?

Yeah, yeah, I got five bars, so.

Yeah, we do too. This bad weather here. So you were saying that certain medications you can't do anything with, but that's rare.

Yeah, it is rare. And then there's certain ailments that I don't deal with. I don't deal with diabetes. I don't deal with congested heart failure. I don't know what specific diseases per se. Like if a dog has arthritis, I'm going to help balance. I'm going to try to get. Ear infection is happening in the first place.

Say that again about the ear infection.

Well, I'm going to try to get. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of what is happening. That's usually what herbalism does it. We're trying to figure out the root cause of what's going on.

And it sounds like just that holistic view where like you're looking at the whole animal, the whole dog, and then you're also looking at, you know, what they're taking pharmaceutically. I kind of suspect you'd probably would look at what their diet is like, maybe. And what they're like either living environment, their exercise, outside allergies, what have you type of thing.

Yeah, absolutely. You want to look at the whole entire dog as an ecosystem.

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes what an ecosystem it is, for sure. Yeah. Do you work with like behavior issues, like either separation anxiety or like some type of fear or aggression all the.

Time, all day long. Yes.

And all day long.

Yeah, yeah, all day long. It definitely, you know, I was just on a, another podcast talking right and how synthetic copper that's added is really causing a lot of problems with organ levels of copper and blood levels of copper. And you know, I was discussing like copper, excess copper can cause horrible fear, anxiety and panic disorders. It is definitely one of the things that I go to chlorine levels and. And copper levels are a huge contributor to fear based reactivity and panic and fright and so don't together with dogs who are afraid and reactive to kidney health. Usually they don't. They think their dog's kidneys are totally healthy as long as they're not showing up on blood work right as gone awry. But that's not necessarily true. Nine times out of ten when a dog comes to me, I really want to work on my dog's reactivity or he's afraid of everything. He's hiding during thunderstorms and he's afraid of people. He's submissively peeing. You know, things like that. I and look at the diet and usually I don't have to do anything about the behavior because it goes away, you know, or the microbiome, like a dog's large Intestine carries almost 80 to 80 over 80% of their immune system. It affects the gut brain axis is how the gut in the large intestine, all the bacteria, the trillions and trillions of bacteria in there really affect a dog's emotional center and how they're reacting and being in the world. So there's just so much and so much fun and so much kind of enlightening information both from me, learning things nonstop and, and kind of putting it through my filter and giving to people. I have a, I have a, I have been told that I have a good way of taking really difficult concepts, breaking them down and getting people to understand them pretty easily. So I, that's my goal really is to help people understand some of these bigger concepts and, and what they can do to help their dogs get better and be better and be more conducive for training. You know, when I had that kennel free boarding facility in Tennessee, I used to have a food requirement, right. And people said, you'll never get anyone to board with you. I was an hour outside of Nashville. They had to drive there. I required an interview. And when I would get them to my, my facility I would just sit them down and I would ask them, you know, what are you feeding? And for me, you know, there's a Kibble hierarchy. We got, you know, your bottom of the. The old Roy, you know, that a boy, your pedigree. And you got your science diet and everything. And I would explain to them, okay, so here's a list of 20 Kibbles. Here's a store. There was this lovely store in Nashville. There wasn't that many, but there was a lovely store. I said, this store is pretty central. And here's one in this area. Here's one in this area. But here's are some stores that you can purchase some of these kibbles at. Your dog has to be on this. Anything that's on this list. And this is the reason why. And then I would tell them, your dog is super hyperactive. He's very needy and he. It's not his fault, okay? I said, you know, it's kind of like shooting him in the foot and then asking him to climb this big mountain that was behind us. I said, he can't help it. Like, he's just overrun with sugar. Just overrun with carbohydrates and sugar, sugar, sugar and. And hyperactive and like food colorings and just all that stuff. They're neurotoxins and they just hyper excite the nervous system. And they would be like, they'd give me that look, but they really wanted to board their dog with me because I was the only game in town in kennel. Free boarding. And. And it was on. It was beautiful. It was beautiful farm. We had such a lovely, lovely piece of property. And the dogs got to be dogs and they were safe and it was just so much fun. And then they would come back. I'd be like, we're going to try it again in three months, sometimes a month, depending on how poor the behavior was and how poor the food was. And I just told them what to expect. There's going to be a little detoxing. It's going to take a little minute to get on this food. I said, come back in 90 days and we'll give it another try. And I would always see the people back. They would be like, oh, my God, I can't believe the difference in my dog's attitude. I can't believe the difference in their behavior. And this is still on kibble. And I can't believe the difference in their behavior. And their bodies look better. They were shedding less. Their poop didn't stink as much, the whole thing. Their eyes were brighter. It's just that they had. They didn't have as many toxins in their system.

Right? There's less discharge coming out of their eyes. There's less of that hyperactivity. Yeah, I know. Like from a training standpoint and a dog behavior standpoint, it's like when I would get especially aggression cases, just like, let's look at the food, let's look at the protein levels, go to the vet, get blood work, do dive deep, you know, looking at the entire thing and yeah, and I laughed about old Roy because I'm editing tomorrow's episode and it's a fear free groomer and we literally just took up talked about old Roy and so I was like, that's why I was laughing because that is the, the worst of the worst. Right. How I don't know how you feel about some of these, you know, supposedly higher end kibbles that you know, we were spending lots of money doing, buying and giving to the dogs and such and then I was like, you know what fillers are fillers. They're just using different kinds of fillers, you know, so I can't.

You can't make a kibble without a filler, so.

Right, right.

What makes a kibble? Exactly? Yeah, I mean I do think for people out there that, that don't have. But you know, in my opinion, I think some of the kibbles are super expensive and if you know what you're doing, you can do a fresh food diet. But if you want the convenience of the kibble like I have on my, my upcoming books website, I have a source, I have like sourcing and I do have some kibbles that I picked out that, that, that if you're going to feed kibble, pick one of these. Right. But you know, there is a kibble hierarchy. You know, there's a big difference between like limited ingredient, limited ingredient wellness to that a boy or attaboy or olroy. Right. Or pedigree or science.

Right.

All of them. Right. We don't want any wheat, we don't want any soy. We don't want any corn gluten meal. We don't want those, you know, rendered meal or just suspect animal fat. Hello. And so like there's so also, you know, there's euthanized cats and dogs in many kibble brands. So we want to make sure that there are kibbles that don't use rendered meal. Right. We don't want rendered meal. So, so those are the kibbles that I'm going to recommend for people that were having that kibble conversation. However, a lot of people don't realize they need to give digestive enzymes when they give kibble because the food is dead. You know just like cooked food needs digestive enzymes added to it and enzymes can really help vitality assimilation of nutrients. It can you know help the liver just there's so many enzymes that are needed to break down that kibble and so it does help But I do think that if they can get on a limited ingredient kibble and then or maybe like on the honest kitchen clusters right there's these clusters they're downgraded. They're a downgraded kib or an upgraded kibble right and then they do that. Well they might switch to their, their their their like freeze dried food or dehydrated food. I think it's dehydrated, dehydrated food and then well that you know it's the baby steps right and it just might to get their little paws wet in that they might be more conducive to switching over to a minimally processed diet. And that's where I want you know I want people to go.