Care of the Older Dog
(Part 2)
Robert McDowell
Herbalist
Feeding Your Dog:
It is never too late to give your dog a bone. Raw bones preferably with some meat on them is the best single food for a dog and there is no reason why a meaty bone cannot form a very large part of the, nutrition, minerals, dietary bulk, exercise and recreation for your dog.
Dogs were designed to be able to gulp their food. This was a survival skill in a world where scavenging and pack hunting were the only means of getting fed. In the scavenging business you have to be able to get a belly full as quickly as possible in case some bigger scavenger came along and chased you off your find. In the hunting business when you were younger or smaller you had to be able to get a belly full quickly while the bigger stronger pack members were otherwise distracted. However, sitting under a bush with a big bone salivating and tearing bits of meat off it for hours, sucking out the marrow and chewing up the bone itself are what the doggy good life is all really about. Burying a bone to let it ripen; exercising the neck and forequarters by tearing skin and meat off bones; cleaning teeth and strengthening the neck and jaw by crunching bones is all the best fun and the best nutrition in the world for a dog. There is nothing we have come up with in our modern world of pet food, plastic pretend bones, vitamin and mineral supplements and scientific nutrition and medicine which comes anywhere near it.
Lessons Nos 1 and 2:
This is the single best thing you can do for your older dog and you must make arrangements somehow, even if you live with your dog in an apartment high above the street in downtown Tokyo or New York, to let your dog have regular raw meaty bones.
Bones provide the best combination of minerals to grow bones (which is not all that surprising really). Bones slow down the ingestion of food so that digestive processes can be properly stimulated and operate at peak efficiency. Bones bulk up the stools so that the dog can produce proper firm and quickly drying (and easier to clean up and less smelly droppings). Bones exercise the teeth, jaw, neck, and forequarters of the dog, which is the whole front half of the dog without even going for a walk.
We are told that bones splinter and can get stuck in the dogs throat and this is true of cooked chicken bones especially but who said anything about cooking the bones. Bones were not cooked, except by accident in the dogs world they were raw and this leads us to lesson number three.
My range of standard herbal treatments includes a standard mixture supporting Bone Maturity and Bone Repair for those dogs whose feeding history has not been ideal.
Lesson No 3:
Minimise cooked food and remember that all commercial dog food is a cooked product. Cooked to kill the natural bugs and the odour; cooked to preserve; cooked to enable the dried or tinned dog feeds to hang together in a suitable form; cooked to enable nutrient and appetite stimulating materials to soak into non nutritious fibers and bulking agents which no self respecting dog would eat if it was presented on its own. A dogs metabolism was not designed for cooked food and if we condemn them to life on commercial dog feed, we are asking for trouble and inviting an early 'old age'.
There is a place for scraps, after all a dog is a scavenger and can survive and thrive on a very wide range of foods, but let us not abuse this. Let us be selective. In the wild as a hunter or scavenger a dog would go first for the stomach contents of its prey. We are talking partly digested grains and grasses here very much like a mushed up version of our own cooked vegetables and porridge.
I suspect that instinct has given the dogs a special liking for stomach contents for two reasons. Firstly they are a source of carbohydrates and vitamins, which are lacking in meat and secondly they are easily accessible through the softest part of the body and a large meal can be gulped down quickly if you are first in at the kill.
Give your dog the vegetable portion of the table scraps. Boil up combinations of Oats, Millet and Linseed to which you add a little spinach or parsley and give this as the principal cereal meal in preference to any commercial dried or tinned food whatsoever
Lesson No 4:
Fast your dog. Again, in nature, a wild dog would not have been able to feed every day. Domesticated dogs should eat only once per day and then on average of two days per week they shouldn't be fed at all. If you have a yard they will probably manage to find a bone they have put away for a rainy day and if not going hungry for a day does not matter at all, quite the contrary.
Almost all of us feed our dogs too much and too frequently. Do your dog a favour. Don't feed it two days per week at all. On other days either give it either a meat and bone meal or a cereal meal.
Lesson No 5:
Don't give treats. We also often give them treats and there is an emerging industry encouraging us to do just this. Every time we give a dog too much or an extra treat we should realise that we are doing it for our own and not for their benefit. If the treat is a little bit of raw offal it is probably OK. If it is a commercial item a little bit of human food or worse still a human sweet treat we are doing our pets a grave disservice.
