By now, many of you who have followed my writing know that I am the dog man of Hot Springs (I love cats too), but I tend to adopt strays. I would adopt the cats, but most of them are wild and untouchable, so I leave food for them.

You may (or may not) have heard of my twenty-year-old dog “Thor” and how he came to stay so healthy for so long. If not, I won’t go into detail here because I don’t want to be repetitive, I’ll just say that he nearly died several times along the way, I now know after talking to numerous holistic vets, due to processed dog food. This was many years before “the scare.”

For the last eight years he has been on the barf (bones and raw foods) diet and again, I won’t go into the details of that diet (except that it is all human grade raw meat, bones, fruits and vegetables (and herbal tinctures) To find out more about it just google the barf diet it works great for dogs and cats too thor is finally reaching the age where he experiences some health problems (at an age where most dogs do what they eat processed food between the ages of six and ten.

I am angry that more nutrition is not being taught in veterinary schools. But I have read several veterinary journals and was not surprised to see, for example, that there are no minimum nutritional requirements for grains of any kind for dogs or cats. But look at processed foods. It is loaded with them; even “expensive foods of socially acceptable quality”, even if meat or meat by-products are the main staple.

A vet told me, “But dogs choke on bones…some dogs have died.”

That’s true.

But millions upon thousands of fewer dogs (even given the percentages of which dog eats what) have choked to death on kibble than on raw bones. Thor has been eating raw chicken bones (wings are his favorite for 7 years). Never a problem. But never give a dog a cooked bone, chicken, beef, or ribs. Cooking changes the molecular structure and makes the bones brittle. Thor has eaten raw bones of everything from chicken to rabbit for ten years without a single incident (let alone A VET BILL!)

Let’s be honest. Seventy years ago, there was no such thing as “dog food.” People fed their pets with table scraps, raw food from gardens, etc. The catastrophic illnesses we see today began around the same time that processed dog food was introduced to the market.

A few months ago I was flying to Charlotte, NC for business and to see some friends. He was talking to a young woman before takeoff, sitting next to me who had two yellow labs. They were both constantly sick. I talked to him about the vomiting diet and how most vets don’t know about it, because they’re educated by marketers in the dog food industry.

A woman in front of us abruptly turned around and said, “Sorry to interrupt. I’m a veterinarian in Sterling, Virginia, an allopath. But I know as much as anyone about the barf diet and I would never recommend feeding a dog or cat processed food.” .

I was shocked. I asked him: “How do you make a living, then, with so few sick animals?” She said that she works on word of mouth, volume patients. They usually only come every few years and that’s mostly from accidents. I smiled and instantly educated myself. There are some very good, honest vets out there who really care about their patients, I thought to myself.

(Update) Since I wrote this article, my best friend “Thor” has died at the age of 22. I still visit your
serious site. She had such a magnificent presence that I can still feel the spirit of him alive from him. I miss
him to a great extent.