The First Step Toward Making Your Own Petfood

Please Don’t Just Skip To the End

This is a Call to Arms and Plea For You to Make a Commitment

The easiest way to feed your pet from ingredients that you provide yourself, is to start with a nutrient-rich powder, developed by Dr. Richard Pitcairn, and available in the book that I recommended you buy. His book not only talks about specific ailments, it also has recipes, and goes into great detail about the nutrient content of different ingredients, the cost comparison between different types of meat, grains, and so forth.

Basically, however, although I do think the book is the best one you could buy on the subject, and certainly goes into great detail if you want it, the gist of what he is saying is that if you stick to certain proportions of whole healthy grains and vegetables, and healthy meats, depending on whether you are feeding a cat or a dog, the result is that you will avoid the illnesses caused by commercial pet foods.

There are a number of commercial petfoods available today, through specialty stores and online, that come pretty close, and may enable you to have a pretty healthy pet, but they are very expensive and not readily available. The average pet owner, shopping in the grocery store–which most do–or even in their local pet shop, will not have access to these, or even know about them.

Even more sadly, the average pet owner doesn’t even know that the petfood they are feeding their animals is making them ill, and thereby costing them a fortune at the vet. If you look in animal magazines or on line, you will see the proliferation of animal heath insurance plans, a very new concept, as insurance companies cash in on this new phenomenon of a huge increase in the number of sick pets and the equally enormous rise in the cost of vet care. It is very similar to the phenomenon going on in the human health care industry.

Because they have to be careful not to disturb their advertisers: the pet insurance companies, and the pet med companies, these magazines, and many online sites as well, when they write articles, watch their p’s and q’s, and don’t step on any toes or make any waves. Their pet health articles and petfood recipes are wishy-washy at best, and full of misinformation.

Like the author of the book Mad Cowboy,  which I read long ago and which is now in it’s levendy-seventh printing, and his famous epic battle along with Oprah, against the cattle industry, I’m not afraid of offending anybody. I’m trying to spread the word. I’m trying to counteract the deliberate misinformation that this petfood–veterinary–pet-insurance–pet-medication Industrial Complex is spreading. It is very much like the medical-insurance-pharmaceutical Industrial Complex that is feeding on the easily preventible explosion of bad health in the human population, and which it is modeled on. They want it. They profit from it. They promote it. I don’t know if I’m coining a phrase here. If I am it won’t be the first time, but I’m going to call it the Pet Health Industrial Complex.

I would like you, (this is the call-to-arms part) because, by the very fact that you are reading this, you do know more than the average pet owner, to make a commitment to help educate your friends. Unfortunately, a lot of them are simply not going to want to hear it. I’ve learned that the hard way.

But it’s worth trying, because in our economy, this phenomenon is causing many people to simply not be able to afford pets or to be able to afford to have them neutered, which in turn leads to a huge increase in the number of pet animals destroyed in shelters each year. And now, without further ado, the recipe for Healthy Powder:

Dr. Richard Pitcairn’s Healthy Powder

1. 2 cups brewer’s yeast (the less “refined” the better)
2. 1 cup lecithin powder
3. ¼ cup kelp powder
4. 4 tablespoons bonemeal powder (it varies in quality and nutrient  content, Kal Brand is the highest quality)
5. 1000 milligrams Vitamin C Powder (unless you are going to be using quite a lot of this, buying a bottle of this, grind up a 1000 mg. tablet and take the rest yourself. One a day.

My product, when it is finished will have many more powdered nutrients in it, but this, mixed with the right proportions of raw meat, and pure healthy vegetable ingredients in the right proportions, will keep your pet infinitely healthier than a diet of commercial pet food, no matter how expensive.

Should you feed your pet any cooked meat, you will need to add digestive enzymes to counteract the stress of producing the enzymes, one of the plethora of problems with commercial pet food: It’s cooked.

But, I can’ write it all in one article. It’s not readable that way. It needs to be like the chapters of a book. Divided up. But I will make a separate and easy to reach page with the Healthy Powder Recipe on it.

Down & Dirty

Okay, Let’s De-Mythtify Some Myths and Call Some Ugly Names

Commercial animal food was first introduced around the turn of the century, by William H. Danforth, who began producing a line of animal feeds, called chows under the name Purina Mills. There was horse chow and pig chow, dog chow and so forth. Although I could find absolutely no mention of it, I remember from my own early human nutritional studies that the original purpose of the chows, was for feeding laboratory animals used for the purpose of  medical experimentation.

I even went to the Purina website thinking they might have a “history” section, and they did, but it began with their production of petfood.  And consisted of one illustration. I don’t doubt that they want to distance themselves from the image of animal experimentation, but the truth is, as they were, even then, very much aware of the effects of nutritional deficiencies on animals, and could not have them interfering with the results of the medical experiments, Purina Chows were in fact probably as nutritionally complete as it was possible to make them.

But we’ve come a long way baby. We no longer have a bunch of scientists scrutinizing the process to make sure that their rats and monkeys, cats and dogs were as nutritionally perfect as possible so that didn’t throw a variable into their experiments.

What we have now is stockholders looking for the highest percentage of profit. Not scientists making sure their lab animals got all the nutrients they needed to be healthy, And boy have things changed. I mentioned in an earlier article, or maybe in the “about” section, that it was in the early 90s that I first killed one of my dogs by feeding it a “prescription” pet food, prescribed by a vet who was blown totally away by what an exceptional example he was of his breed and really did have his best interest at heart. We were cautioned to never let him have even a scrap of human food, much less anything raw. And we never did. If people tried to give him something, poor dying thing, we said “oh no, really, he can’t have it, he’s on a special diet.”

And so, our beautiful, loving, brilliant show-quality, show-quality obedience-trained Doberman slowly died of multiple–probably dozens–of nutritional deficiencies. I didn’t know it then, but the reason that he was put on the canned prescription diet to begin with, because of a “delicate” stomach, was doubtless due to the pet food we had been giving him.

I have since learned that Dobermans are very sensitive, and for that reason, in my own “dog” nutrition studies I have always used them for my test animals. Before you misunderstand, let me make it clear that I was not taking dogs and depriving them of nutrients to see the results, I was taking sick dogs and making them well. Sometimes terminally ill animals. Cats as well. I just got through, by diet alone, curing a cat with terminal cancer. By that I mean that the “cat specialist” vet had said that it had metastasized to the degree, into the lymph nodes, that surgery would just prolong his suffering, and as he still felt well at that point, she saw no point in doing it.

The good thing about animals, is that, although they may be very sick, they also recover quickly. I think it took about six months for the cat to be completely tumor-free. The truth, the same thing is possible with people, and I have seen it over and over.

But people are not who I’m talking about. I digress. Here’s the point. And listen very carefully. Vets are just as brainwashed by the pet food companies, and the pet drug salesmen as human doctors are by the pharmaceutical salesmen. I know, because I used to work in that industry. I sold medical equipment, not pharmaceuticals, but I sat in the waiting rooms with the pharmaceutical salesmen, patiently waiting to try to sell the doctor on our products.  Vets are also pretty totally ignorant of nutrition, as are most human doctors.

Think about it! Who was making commercial pet food that was “the only thing your pet should have. No table scraps” before 1900? In fact most people didn’t use commercial pet food at all until about the 50s, and it was better quality then, and animals got other things to supplement their diets. There weren’t any cats that were kept imprisoned indoors because it was “better for them.” For the last 2,000 years, when cats and dogs were domesticated because they served a useful purpose, what do you think they were eating? It sure wasn’t dry kibble. It was the raw scraps, internal organs, bones and other left-over from their human owners, some carbohydrates and greens in the case of dogs, and what they could catch and eat on their own, and the green growing things that they instinctively knew they needed. In fact, think about it even more, and this is really important. Who was cooking it for them when they lived in the wild? “Oh no raw meat. How horrible and dangerous” says your poor ignorant, brainwashed vet.

Now, if poor Rover starts to nibble at some grass or weed, as he’s being walked on a leash, he’s yanked away. Bad dog. And keeping cats imprisoned indoors, feeding them only commercial food, is really an act of cruelty, and will cost you hundreds, maybe thousands at the vet as they develop one illness after another.

Skin conditions are one of the very first signs, or hip dysplasia that your puppy starts to show signs of because he’s not getting what he needs to support his rapidly-growing muscular and skeletal systems. Diabetes. Animals didn’t used to get diabetes. It was unheard of. In fact people didn’t used to either, but once again, I won’t digress.

And now the ugly names: Purina, Eukanuba, Iams, etc. etc. All of that horribly expensive stuff that you pay for, thinking you’re doing the right thing for your animal, especially the “more I spend, the better it must be” theory. Wrong. None of it is good for you animal. Some may be less harmful than others. And those twenty pound bags that now weigh 16 pounds but cost the same? And the absolutely most dangerous thing you can feed your animal is the soft, moist stuff that usually comes in pouches. The snacks. The things that are usually the most expensive of all!

As I said, I’m not going to go into the ugly details on this website, just tell you how to keep your pet healthy. For those who really want to know, “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly,” will have the really repulsive details of what’s in petfood and what’s not. As I can get around to writing it. So much to do, so little time. And I know I keep saying I’m going to give you the “way to do it,” and that was what I had planned for this article, but then I realized that there was no point until I had explained why. And that’s all I can write for now. I’m not trying to tantalize you, I just out of time, and if you’re bought Dr. Pitcairn’s book you already know.

What Iams Doesn’t Want You to Know

“Pet food is one of the world’s most synthetic edible products, containing virtually no whole ingredients.” (emphasis mine). The quote is from an article by animal activist Tina Perry.

My original version of this particular post was so repulsive that I realized that I wouldn’t be able to justify my PG13 rating. It made me realize that I probably need to write, and in fact have already started an “R-rated” version, for those with strong stomachs and the desire or need for more detailed information. The truth of many aspects of the pet food industry are literally horrific. Even the “top,” and generally assumed trustworthy brands of pet food are now composed primarily of materials that barely support life, much less health in our pet animals.

I first began, sadly,  to notice that this must be the case by observation of my own pets and their problems. After a career as a human nutritionist, the truth was slowly and painfully brought home to me and I began to study animal nutrition about fifteen years ago. Unfortunately I had lost more than one beloved pet by then.

There had been pet food scandals before then, most notable in my memory was the case in which numerous cat foods were found to cause blindness because they didn’t have the high levels of taurine that cats need. I think most people, at that time thought it was an honest mistake. We were more naive then; surely no one who made food for animals would deliberately not make it sufficiently nutritious!

I think not.

In a way it reminded me of the ensuing uproar when a Florida Congressman suggested that ketchup be considered a vegetable to lower the costs of the legally mandated “nutritious” diet that Florida public school elementary students ate at lunch time. It probably is considered a vegetable by now. Our own diets are deteriorating at an alarming rate.

As I began to read, book after book–there wasn’t much to the Internet at the time–I became more and more horrified. The corporations that were providing food for our animals were behaving as soullessly and without conscience as we have discovered over the years that all large corporations eventually do. Pretty much by definition a corporation is an entity with all the rights of a human but without soul, conscience, or any ethic except to provide the best bottom line to the stockholders.

It was after all my reading that I narrowed my choice of the “one best book” for pet owners to Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats. It has an amazing amount of extremely useful information in it. Dr. Pitcairn remarked at one point that if you could find a vet old enough, he would tell you that he had never seen most of the “illnesses” that animals suffer from today. I thought it about his book then, and I think it now, although, as with many nutrition books I prefer the earliest edition. It is surprising the pressures that can be brought to bear on authors of subjects of this type, in later editions.

But most of what I read was beyond horrifying, for many reasons in addition to what was or wasn’t in pet food.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you stick with me, I will teach you how to feed your pets for less than the cheapest commercial pet food if you are a smart shopper, keep them healthy so that not only are you, and they are happy, but you can avoid the really expensive part of this scam, the trips to vet for all these new “diseases.”

A Pretty Revolting Idea

But Better Than Nothing

I have to say that I take a great exception to the idea of feeding your animals anything that has been cooked so long that the bones “turn to mush.” Easy, and I guess it satisfies the people who still can’t bring themselves to feed Fluffy icky raw meat.

The truth is, cooking meat, destroys many of the nutrients that your animal needs. But the truth also is that anything is better than feeding your pet commercial petfood, so I have included it here. She also fails to mention any of the other ingredients that should be added to the meat to create dog food. And dogs, as they are not carnivores, as cats are, eat a diet more like what humans eat; in other word they need carbohydrates and vegetables in greater proportions than cats do. Although even cats need some carbohydrates and greens, which they would normally get from the stomachs, already partially digested, of the animals they have eaten.

However, as I have said, almost anything you feed your animal is going to be better than the commercial petfood you buy off the shelf, but just, at least, scrape some of those mashed potatoes, bread, salad (yes, dogs love raw vegetables) and cooked vegetable to the mix in roughly the proportions that you would eat them yourselves. And don’t sweat it. Dogs have been eating human table scraps and the raw meat and bones leftover as people prepared their meals for millenia and did just fine.

And, one again, anything is better than commercial pet food. Well, fast food probably comes in a close second. It’s killing us, and it will kill your pet as well. So, listen to this lady, but take what she says with a grain of salt.

Next time: “Down and Dirty” how to feed you dog for maximum health with almost no prepaartation, little cost, and far greater health. That is, if you’re eating a reasonably healthy diet yourself. Fast food won’t cut it.

Changes We Must Make

The state of commercial pet products: their rapid deterioration and inadequate state has caused me to see this as a even more urgent matter than I had realized. In the time I had taken off from my studies of pet nutrition, pet health, the pet food industry, and pet food, that not only had there been a number of scandals involving the recall of hundreds of brands of pet food and the deaths of thousands of animals, these exposes were apparently seen as merely the cost of doing business.

Even the immense amount of money that the recall and the ensuing lawsuit were such a drop in the bucket compared to the money that they were making, that they not only didn’t stop; they assumed that the American Public had been deadened to the issue to the point that they forged ever more boldly ahead. Cat food is now at a point that I predict that by the next generation of cats, the food will simply be incapable of sustaining life, and in fact may be at that point already.

Just in the last year, the amount of time since I last read the ingredients on the petfood bags in Walmart, the situation has deteriorated, despite the bad PR the manufacturers are getting in the conventional press.

Richard Pitcairn, DVM

Something has to be done, and many people are working on this problem. We feel we’re very close to having the best product on the market. Every bit of time you spend making your own pet food will save you hundreds at the vet’s, and I promise you details, but I’m just getting this blog up and running after migrating it, and it’s taking me a little time just to get the posts back on with the right tags and categories and what not.

I promise you recipes, and other things you can do for your pet, that will be keep them out of the vet, but for now, I will  say, t hat after reading virtually every book on the subject, I settled on one that I would recommend as “the” book that a pet owner should have, in the way that if you could have only one cookbook, It would be the Joy of Cooking. This book is called  Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide To Natural Health For Dogs and Cats. The link leads to a site that shows an interview with Dr. Pitcairn.

This book is chock full of recipes and sections on illnesses of every type. It even contains a guide to the relative prices of various types of meats. No pet owner should be without it!

Happy /St. Patrick’s Day, Everybody

Contamination May Spread to Human Food

We  repeatedly told that we don’t have Mad Cow Disease in this country. In 2003 my husband and I were in the township office of a small town in a part of North Carolina where many Hog Factory Farms are located. Posted on the wall was a small sign that read something like this:

Hunters

Beware of any deer that may show the following symptoms: staggering, emaciation, wandering in circles (there was more, but I have forgotten it) because they may be suffering from spongiform encephalopathy!

Warning: Don’t click in the Mad Cow link below if you have a weak stomach, and it’s not for children. It’s on my related website for people who want to know the real low-down nitty-gritty, and it’s x-rated.

How does this relate to petfood? Obviously, the conclusion to be drawn here, is that the only way for animals to get Mad Cow Disease, was to have eaten contaminated Hog Feed, or something contaminated by that Hog Feed. The unfortunate fact is that, in their greed, the Hog Farmers (and other factory farmers) don’t burn and bury the carcasses of animals with Mad Cows Disease. They send them, as a classification known as 4D meats, to meat by-products plants. These meats, along with gathered road kill (including, if you work out the logic,  a lot of deer with Mad Cow) are one of the main ingredients in petfood. There is no way to get rid of Mad Cow Disease, because it is caused by an organism known as a prion, that cannot even be destroyed by heat sterilization. It’s not just scary for pet owners. It’s scary for us too, because we are talking about some seriously greedy unscrupulous corporations. Are they already sneaking these contaminated animals into processing plants for meat meant for human consumption?

This One’s Just For Fun

And Funny!

In the End, We’ll Have Healthy Pets

There are a lot of Petfoods in Walmart. And the large bag of their best quality food fit the container that was designed to hold it several years ago. But now, I’m getting ready to get rid of the container because the level of the pet food when I pour in the bag has gotten lower and lower each time. It’s stupid looking. And I have to admit that I’m ashamed that I kept the bag there at all. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have, but I have been busy, and lazy, and sometimes I just don’t have the energy, or sometimes the time, or both to stop to mix their food. But unfortunately, there is nothing in Walmart that it’s safe to feed your pets, although Paul Newman’s Organic is probably the best, although the cat food very definitely does not have enough protein for cats, as cats are true carnivores, where as dogs are “opportunistic omnivores.” It is, however, unfortunately, impossible for any heat-treated food, no matter how well-intentioned the producer, to provide the nutrients a pet needs.

I tell you this so that you won’t guilt-trip yourself too badly when you’re late for a party and Bertie is hungry and you throw some crunchies in a bowl. And the animals love them. They almost always develop what is known as an allergic addition to the ingredients in the food. This blog will probably not go too deeply into areas that would be difficult for the sensitive to handle. I write a pretty much simultaneous blog on the same subject matter that will go into more depth: for those not of the faint of heart. But at the end of it all, what we’ll have will be healthy pets that we can afford to keep, and keep out of the vet’s office.