Nutrition & Related Topics

One of the most important things you can do for your animal is to give it excellent food. Commercial foods, though chemically balanced, have the disadvantage of often using rejects from the human food industry. In addition, it is processed at a high temperature under steam pressure and this may damage some of the fragile nutrients and change proteins so they are more likely to stimulate allergies.

Fixing food at home can be easy and the least expensive way to keep your dog and cat healthy and resistant to disease.

Our book, Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide To Natural Health For Dogs And Cats, has many recipes that are balanced and sufficient to maintain a high level of health. We recommend that you give them a serious try.

On this page will be added some additional topics of interest and updates to the information in the book.

Using Calcium Supplements.

Raw Meat Diets.

Using Calcium in Home-Prepared Diets

Introduction

Dogs and cats, their kind in the wild, eat a large amount of calcium. This happens because they chew on, and swallow, bones which have large quantities of calcium in their makeup. It is assumed that with time they have adapted to having this kind of diet. It is not completely clear that they must have this much calcium to be healthy. In other words, perhaps they can adapt to lower levels. It certainly seems that way for many of the animals I have known that, for one reason or another, have had small amounts of calcium in their diets. They often seem just fine.

There is evidence that the growing animal is the one most sensitive to calcium deficiency. This makes sense if we remember that it is during this time that the bones of the body are rapidly enlarging. They are made up primarily of calcium and phosphorus.

In any case, it seems wise to supply the amounts of calcium that are typical of the natural diet and our recipes are formulated with that consideration. To give you some idea of how much more calcium is "required" by a dog compared to a human being, consider this comparison. The amount of calcium the average woman needs is the same as that required by a small 10 lb. dog. A larger dog, say a 100 lb. German Shepherd requires about 10 times as much as this average woman.

It is difficult to find sources of calcium that can add this much to the diet. The natural source is bones and we find that this is also the most ample source with which to formulate diets. It is also possible to concentrate calcium from vegetable sources by a special method of extraction. This is the way the supplement Animal Essentials (Aquamin) is made — from seaweed.

Advantages of vegetable sources of calcium

There are some advantages to a vegetable source. Bones contain both calcium and phosphorus, with more calcium in them than phosphorus. We also know that animals need to have a balance of calcium to phosphorus in the ratio of 2:1, e.g., twice as much calcium as phosphorus. What this means is that to come out with enough extra calcium from bones, you have to use a lot more total minerals to cancel out the extra phosphorus. It turns out that the phosphorus in the bone meal makes the requirement for calcium even higher. This would not be a problem in the natural state but when we are feeding grains and vegetables, the balance of these minerals has to be adjusted accordingly and we get into these issues. A vegetable source of calcium therefore has the advantage of providing just calcium without the unwanted phosphorus.

Another advantage of non-animal sources of calcium have to do with diseases like "Mad Cow" which can be transmitted through animal products. Granted the danger of this is extremely small but it does give another reason to prefer the vegetable sources.

Bones can also contain toxic elements like arsenic, lead, mercury, & radioactive strontium. This is because these elements have contaminated our world, coming from the use of gasoline, agricultural products, nuclear reactions and so on. The contaminants are picked up by grazing animals (e.g., sheep, cattle) and deposited in their bones. This is why it is important that the bone meal source has been checked for these substances. It is often bone meal from other countries, less industrial, that can be used while bones from cattle in the US are often quite contaminated. This is one reason that you will find warnings on bone meal in garden supply centers, that it is not to be used in food. It is a little known fact that commercial pet foods use bones from US cattle & are often unacceptably high in lead.

Very few veterinarians know this or consider this when treating ill animals yet excess lead can cause a myriad of serious problems including anemia, intestinal problems and disorders leading to death.

Dr. Pitcairn's Guide, Second Edition

If you are using Edition 2 of our book, there is further information that you can download to make use of calcium supplements easier. Please note this applies to the second edition (1995) only and that the most recent edition (2005) has tables in the book itself.

If you would like this further edition 2 (only) guidance on using calcium supplements for home-prepared diets, download the Acrobat Reader file on this topic. There I have listed the various companies and their products and what I have been able to learn about them. Additional pages show how much of each product to use in the recipes in our book. To view this file you will need Acrobat Reader, a free program from www.adobe.com.

View or download the paper on Calcium Supplementation.

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My Thoughts On Feeding Raw Meat Diets

by Dr. Pitcairn

About 20 years ago, when I began to think for myself about the significance of nutrition in animal health, I realized that animals like dogs and cats in the natural state subsist entirely on raw food. This was enlightening to me.

Shortly after that, I read of Dr. Pottenger’s work with cats on raw meat, bones and milk, in which he showed he could duplicate most of the common illness we see in cats clinically by feeding them cooked food. As I cast about for more information, I found much opinion but no veterinarians that had actually tried feeding raw meat to animals. As far as I could tell, they were saying the same thing that was told to me in school — that raw meat would cause disease, parasites and death. This apparently was not based on any scientific studies.

I do not remember when I began to suggest the feeding of raw meat myself but at some point I did. The result was unexpected. I found animals becoming more healthy even without other treatment. Indeed, I have frequently had the report that people find their animals become healthy when they make this change and diseases for which they were hoping to have treatment (on a waiting list) have disappeared. Since that time, other veterinarians have told me similar things about the use of raw meat. I do not have numbers but I think the veterinarians recommending raw meat in the US are in the hundreds.

My experience, albeit clinical and not based on studies, is that my patients have improved health on a raw diet. Furthermore, I have not seen significant parasite problems. It may be that the meat sources in this country are especially "clean" but I doubt it. I have read that the typical inspector spends 12 seconds examining a carcass. My thought at present is that dogs and cats, being carnivores by nature, are meant to eat raw meat and do not have a problem doing so. I readily admit the limitation of not doing statistical studies or careful evaluations, in terms of parasites, of these animals. However, I do feel the actual experience of recommending this feeding practice for 20 years does offer some evidence of the usefulness and safety of this practice.

Should the diet by entirely raw meat? No, wild carnivore diets include the bones and organs as well as other parts of the body. Meat is too limited as a food source. We can make up for some of this deficiency by drawing on grains and vegetables and other supplements to make a diet sufficiently balanced.

What about feeding just meat and bones? This is close to what is natural but not entirely. The wild animal also eats organs, skin, connective tissue and other parts. When we buy meat at a market and feed it raw, this is close but by no means is the meat fresh. It has been "aged" in a cooler for many days before shipping and then, of course, shipped to a market where it is sold. In addition it is not organic. Yes, organic meat (or "free-range, pesticide free") is available but unless the cattle, sheep or other animals are fed organic grains and hay then of course any contaminants in those food sources will end up in the tissues of the animals.

So we have to consider the "toxic load" of a high meat diet as meat animals (as a food source) concentrate the contaminants (even deliberately added chemicals like hormones and anti-parasite drugs). The more your dog or cat eats meat the higher the toxins absorbed.

A further complication is feeding raw bones (or cooked, makes no difference) because of the high lead and other heavy metal content. The chief concern is with lead, mercury, & cadmium—all poisonous metals. Lead is the chief problem as decades of driving automobiles using leaded gasoline spewed the element lead into our environment all over the country. It is in the soil and water and taken up by plants and eventually deposited in the bones of animals (cattle, sheep, etc.) that eat plants as their food. It will take centuries for the lead to work itself out of the soil and end up in the sea. Therefore, feeding large quantities of bones will expose your pet to high lead levels. This is the reason for using a calcium supplement as described in our discussion on calcium supplements. If the supplement is from bones, they are from animals that did not grow up in the US where lead is high.

For more discussion of this topic, see my book, edition 3, in which there are specific recipes you can use for prepare a natural diet using raw meat but supplemented with safe calcium sources.

In summary, raw meat is an excellent food for dogs and cats in my opinion. However, a complete and balanced diet is necessary. Just meat cannot be fed without eventual problems.

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