Dear Friends,
Well, it has been a challenging year for many of us already, hasn't it? My Mom's column has told you about the things we are trying to do here at the hospital to keep it afloat and to keep you healthy, even when the bad economy is making it hard for many of your owners. And I am going to tell you what to do about some of the health challenges that you want to avoid and how to do that without spending a whole bunch of money.
My fuzzy friends, here is what I think: It makes more sense and is cheaper to PREVENT health problems then to treat them after they have made you sick. That makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, if you don't want to have a bad fire destroying your house, is it better to take the time to look around and make your house safe by removing anything that could start a fire, or to wait till the fire starts and then try to call the fire department real quick and hope that the firemen get there before too much damage is done? (HINT: This was a DUH question for everyone but Canuke, and even he got it right after he thought about it a little bit!).
Do you remember Canuke? He is the Bullmastiff that Mom adopted when he was going on 7 years old. He was owned by a breeder who didn't have any more use for him or room for him to live in a big kennel, so he had been living in a very small crate for a very long time. He had a lot of pressure sores all over him from being confined so much and he didn't look so good when we got him. (We all thought that he smelled really bad, too, and he got lots of baths and herbs to fix this and to help his skin get healed up.) But he was a strong and healthy dog because his breeder had always fed him a really good raw diet - so it didn't take a very long time to get him back in shape. I will show you a picture of Canuke at the end of this column and then you will have pictures of all of us - I showed you pictures of Hebert and Emmett last year in my columns, you might remember.
So my point is - you have to EAT right to BE right inside and outside. My Mom always says that good health starts with your diet. So you have to make sure that what your people are feeding you is safe and good for you and that is sometimes hard to tell. I think that people forget sometimes that no one checks up on the people who make pet food very often, even since that big problem that killed so many of my friends in 2007 that I told you about in my April 2007 column. I have to tell you that those scum-sucking expletive deleted (Mom took some of my words out and put this last thing in) people who pretended that nothing was wrong while so many pets were dying from bad food are still out there selling pet food and it makes me MAD! You have to check for yourself, I am telling you! And you have to remember that the people who are supposed to make sure that pet food is safe - the "American Association of Feed Control Officials", or AAFCO for short, are people FROM the pet food industry working FOR the pet food industry and paid BY the pet food industry, and that is sort of like having a fox guard a chicken coop, don't you think?
So please, keep checking our website for the latest up to date information on what is being recalled so your owners don't buy it for you and even worse, feed it to you! Don't forget that even a lot of treats that might taste good to you are just not safe. You can look at my September column from last year to see some safe, healthy, natural treats that might taste good to you and are easy for your owners to fix for you. And please look at some of those cookbooks and websites that I told you about in my November column last year, so you can eat some FRESH food that is good for you. Maybe you can even get your owners to cook dinner for you sometimes! My Mom always says that the pets who have owners who cook meals for them or who fix them raw meals at least some of the time have a lot fewer health problems then the pets who eat dry pet food, which is not very good for you.
Do you know why eating just dry food is not good for you, my dears? Here's what I want you to do: go to a mirror, right now, and look at your teeth. Do you see how pointy and sharp they are? Do they look like they were made to eat pasta? Well, dry food is processed just like pasta, with a lot of heat and pressure that kills the good stuff in your food. And to keep it good in the bag for a long time, it has to have a lot of stuff that is not meat in it - things like rice and potatoes and wheat and corn and soy. None of those things are very good for carnivores like dogs and cats! People and cows and horses and elephants have big long intestines to deal with stuff like that, but carnivores don't, so it is hard for us to use those kinds of foods. We are designed to eat MEAT, us dogs and cats!
Here is another reason why eating only dry food is bad for you: Dry food (here is another DUH, my friends) is dry. Dry means it has a lot less moisture in it than fresh food. Did you know that fresh food is about 70-80% moisture that our bodies need and dry food is in the low teens, maybe 12-14% moisture? That means that you have to drink an unnatural amount of water when your people feed you a dry food. And while you might think that you will drink enough when you get thirsty, scientists know that cats and dogs are no better at doing this than people are - but we are a lot smaller so we get a lot more dehydrated and that is really bad for our insides. Most people know that coffee and soda drinkers are usually dehydrated, and all athletes know the importance of staying hydrated, and everyone knows that babies can get dehydrated really easy because they are little and are dependent upon someone to give them liquids, but they sometimes forget that many of us are the same size as a baby and all of us are dependent upon someone else to give us something to drink. (Unless you are Canuke, who can flip open the toilet lid and get a drink for himself. I wish that I could do that!) But you see what I mean. You have to eat right, and you need to drink enough water and that is the most important thing you can do to stay healthy.
The next most important thing you need to know my Mom already told you about in her column - the thing about not letting your people get you too many vaccinations. But since I get to say the things that she can't say, I will tell you to think about whether it is harder for a veterinarian to take the time to tell you how to stay healthy and to go to a lot of seminars to learn this stuff (because they don't teach vets very much about to how to help your patients stay healthy in vet school, as odd as that might seem) or to just make small talk with your owners and stick another vaccine in your butt?
Do you know that there are a lot of vet clinics and even some big chains of vet clinics - there is one that starts with a B - but Mom says I can't tell you that so I won't - where the vets have a computer that tells them to give you a whole lot of vaccines even though every big important veterinary group with a lot of initials in their name, like the AVMA and the AAHA and the AAFP and the AHVMA and lots more, says to NOT give so many vaccines? Mom tells more about this in her column, but I will just add that most of the vaccines that those dumb vets try to give are completely unnecessary for many of the pets that get them and boy, that makes me MAD. And I think that their mothers should be ashamed of them for their money-grubbing ways that just go against everything that their own profession is telling them, too! I guess they must not even read any of their own professional magazines or attend any seminars like we all do at Knollwood....because if they did, they would sure know better that to do things that are bad for their patients.
So, buckaroos, please be careful about vaccines and listen to our Nurses and Dr. Papacek and my Mom when they tell you about the vaccines that last for three years and the titers to use instead of some vaccines and if your owner takes you to one of those vets who loves to give a lot of shots, you just remind your owner that you only need the "core" vaccines and are SO not a pincushion! I will tell you more things that you can do to keep yourself healthy next month. Until then, be well and healthy.
Your friend,
LIZZIE
P.S. Canuke isn't really as dumb as he looks!
