Going off track again. Did you know that chemo excreted by a dog from any orifice has the potential to be carcinogenic? Poos have to be double bagged for a week. Wee washed away or done on a permeable surface away from regular dog traffic and no licking for 3 days. We have become a family well used to avoiding an over enthusiastic tongue!
Hmmm, I can't see why. Hard to meet calcium requirements in home cooked diets ( due to not feeding cooked bone) and some micronutrients are lost in cooking but that's a separate issue. Like I say, ketogenic diets for humans are cooked.
This is what it says on the KetoPet Sanctuary website. We do not recommend that you cook the food. Dogs have the proper gut bacteria and enzymes to naturally break down raw food. Cooking animal fats may also lead to pancreatitis.
Sounds like they are just super enthusiastic about the benefits of raw food and dogs' ability to handle it rather than saying that you can't have a cooked ketogenic diet. I've never heard that about cooked fat causing pancreatitis, wonder what the evidence is. I occasionally bake a bit of pig skin and use as treats, surprised my dog's not dead by now the number of things I do wrong!
When you cook fats, you denature them and they are not (chemically) the same as raw fats. Cooked fats - especially in the very high amount needed for a ketogenic diet - have the potential to cause pancreatitis. Raw fats, do not. BUT: You can feed Ziwipeak (as I said) and have a dog in ketosis. Ziwipeak has no pathogens but it is also not cooked - it is air-dried. If you want food you can handle like a kibble, which doesn't worry you in terms of bacteria, and which isn't going to cause pancreatitis, you can feed Ziwipeak and add fat to it.
As Toby’s upset bowels continues beyond his chemo we have had stool samples sent off. At a recent consultation with my local vet to drop them off she said the specialist had concluded he has suspected food responsive enteropathy. This was the conclusion having referred back to his scans from his cancer diagnosis. The foods mentioned in a previous post which were shot down by Jo as being high in carbs are hydrolysed so the protein is already broken down.I do understand where you are coming from though Jo. I’m kind of stuck at the moment. I did research the Keto diet and got in touch with the KetoPet Sanctuary who confirmed if I put him on the diet it would be for life(Hopefully 10+ years) The cancer diet is SO restrictive(with zero carbs) especially for labradors who are food obsessed. They also said it tends to be used as a diet of last resort. I don’t feel we are at that stage yet. Their results claim a 55% success rate in prolonging life but they run the diet along side conventional treatment that Toby is already having.Toby will be staged again in 4 weeks and again 3 and 6 months after that. If there is no sign of any spread at that stage he will be considered cured. In the meantime I am going to trial the hydrolysed food and see if it helps his bowels. If it doesn’t I will be back to the vets to think again.
" food responsive enteropathy" just means that he had a positive response to an elimination diet. Have you tried an elimination diet? That means feeding him nothing but one protein source. That's what they are saying you have done if they are telling you this. If he has 'food responsive enteropathy' and a positive response to an elimination diet, that means they have information for you on which foods he should avoid. You need to get that information and then avoid those foods. You can feed any diet you like as long as you avoid those foods which cause this. It doesn't sound to me like a proper elimination diet has been tried and it also doesn't sound like 'food responsive enteropathy' is useful for anything as a diagnosis - except to sound very impressive and make you want to continue feeding their expensive (and rubbish quality) prescription food...
Wow you sure no how to make someone feel like they are a crap dog owner!With this and other posts I’m surprised you’ve stopped short of saying it’s my fault he has cancer. My previous two dogs lived to 15 and 13 so I must do something right. I think it’s time I left this site and got my support from elsewhere. Getting a young dog through ear amputation and 8 rounds of chemo has not been easy or cheap but we are getting there and will carry on on our own.
"If you can't feed raw - feed Ziwi Peak." Pretty bold statement. That food is absurdly expensive. I probably couldn't afford to feed my dog that even if he only needed a teaspoon a day. Not everyone who owns dogs is rich. My last two dogs BOTH lived to be 15+ years old. Both fed regular dog food. The Labrador mix male was fed only Pedigree chicken canned food his entire life. Died at nearly 16 after a month of a big growth on his nose got huge quick and prevented him from breathing. The German Shepherd female was fed cheap Ol Roy dog food mostly. Died at age 15 in her sleep one night. Large breed dogs simply don't live longer than that so they did well. Most dogs do just fine on normal diets. Paying a billion dollars for a diet doesn't guarantee that your dog will be healthier. Her dog got a nasty cancer at a young age, highly unlikely that the diet had much (or anything) to do with it. It's okay that you support that KetoPet group or whatnot... But calling what others feed "rubbish" isn't really helpful or nice.
Please don't leave I have had similar problems where I felt personally attacked due to some throw away comment I had made as a joke & left for months, however I came back on and decided to take the pissy comments with a pinch of salt. You're far from a crap owner & like everyone else on here are doing what YOU feel is best for YOUR dog. You can listen to advice from many sources & make up your own mind, this doesn't make you a crap owner. At the end of the day we have to do the best we can do for our dogs & with the resources & money we have available, not everyone has an endless pot of money, doesn't make us any worse than the next person. Please reconsider you have much advice to pass on & the majority of people on here are lovely
I know exactly where you are coming from, we can only feed the best quality that we can also afford to feed. I don't get much over a thousand a month to live on and already spend upwards of £200 a month on my dog making sure he doesn't want for anything, it would be impossible for me to spend £5 or more a day to feed him
@J.D No one (anywhere) can definitively say why your dog has cancer. The only facts we have are: Your dog has an aggressive cancer, at a very young age. And there are some things you are doing (not just food, but in your other posts on the regular use of preventatives) which research does associate with an increased risk of cancer. Those are just the facts. A correlation and association is not the same thing as saying you have 'caused' it - as I'm sure you know, cancer is a complex disease with often many different contributing causes. You can get very outraged and angry at the bearer of bad news, on hearing that there are things you are doing which research finds have added to cancer risks - or you can take it as information and do further research and decide for yourself whether you would like to continue feeding a high carb diet and using regular flea/tick/worming meds on a young dog which has already experienced an aggressive cancer. I say this as someone who fed her dogs kibble until a couple of years ago - partly because, as a trainer, I wanted to be able to train with all meals. I have done many things with my previous dogs that I would never now do - including vaccinating a Weimaraner at 7 weeks and 10 weeks, including the lepto vaccination - then giving rabies vaccinations at 12 weeks and 14 weeks (this was when 2 shots of rabies was recommended for the Pet Passport to get an adequate titer). And spaying her at 3 years old. I wish I hadn't made these choices, but I didn't know better at the time and so I don't blame myself (much) for it - we can all only act on the information we have at the time, and at the time, I absolutely thought that if a vet told me something was ok, that it was ok. And if a vaccine said it could be given at a certain age, then it could be. And that was that. To my credit, when my Weim then got sick with first a mast cell tumour and then osteosarcoma, I did all I could to learn everything possible about cancer as a metabolic disease, how to prevent it, and what I could do to reduce the risk of it. And I dealt with the cognitive dissonance that existed between what I was learning and my previous actions not by getting angry and rejecting the new information, but by dealing with the fact that what I'd done previously had been less than ideal and may have contributed to her condition. And that was a pretty crap thing to learn. The other thing I learnt, in all this, is that vets are not neutral parties and have their own agendas. Research shows that even in human health, doctors' use of medications and prescriptions is influenced by marketing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071337/ I quote: "Drug companies provided more than $7 billion worth of pharmaceutical samples in 1999, most of these the newest, most expensive products. In the same year, the industry spent almost $14 billion promoting its products in the United States. Calcium channel blockers are heavily promoted to physicians as antihypertensive agents, and perhaps this promotion explains why they are so heavily prescribed. Many physicians will deny this, saying that pharmaceutical promotion, be it pen or penne, has no effect on their prescribing behavior. But the medical literature abounds with studies suggesting that promotion does affect behavior." The relationship between vet practices and prescription foods (such as Hills and Royal Canin) has been further explored in Marion Nestle's book 'Feed Your Pet Right' - in the chapter called 'Do Pet Food Companies Influence Veterinarians?'. Nestle is Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at NYU - and a 'human' nutritionist who turned her research to pet food - you can get the book on Amazon. I think anyone would find what she uncovered to be shocking, from pet food companies sponsoring events at vet schools, providing free food to vet students for their own animals, giving clip boards and pens and sponsoring regular lectures, chairs in departments, and awards and so on - they are intimately involved at every level of veterinary education to the point that frankly it amounts to a constant brainwashing of vet students, because the influence is cumulative and insidious, going unnoticed. Of course these own vets are going to prescribe these products to their own clients in turn... That is just business. Nestle also finds that almost all vet schools provide ZERO training in nutrition - she phoned around them all, for her book, and asked about their syllabi. I'm sorry that I got a bit frustrated, but sometimes people put such faith in their vets and their vet's opinions on all subjects - and I can understand why that is - but when you start to dig deeper and to learn what's behind things, you do come to realise that these opinions are not neutral or unbiassed.
I appreciate it is expensive - which is why I only feed it during puppyhood when I need to do lots of training, and feed a complete raw the rest of the time. Dogs need much less of Ziwipeak than you think, though. When my dogs were eating a whole cup of kibble per meal, they needed only a quarter cup of Ziwipeak. Kibble contains carbs and fillers which the dog just poops out without making any nutritional use of. Ziwipeak is pure meat and fat with no fillers at all, so the dog is able to nutritionally use all of it and you're not paying for stuff a dog poops out... I appreciate you owned two dogs that did ok on kibble but unfortunately that is a sample size of two dogs. It's not possible to have conversations where one person says 'my own dog lived to X age, eating X' - because that is just anecdotal and not science or research-based. Just as there are people in the world who eat a Big Mac every day and live to be 90, yet we know that eating in this way predisposes people to obesity, cancer and heart disease... Nothing guarantees your dog will be healthy - there are no guarantees in this world. You can do it all right and still have a dog (or person) get sick. But we do know about some risk factors and we do know that certain things stack the decks against us and increase the risk of illness. Science and research tells us what risk factors are. So whilst there are not guarantees, there are things that can be done to reduce risk. I should have unpacked what 'rubbish' meant and why - according to what we know about canine nutrition - I thought it was rubbish. I can rectify that: If anyone wants a deeper dive, there is an online interview discussion on many of these subjects here: I disagree that what I'm saying isn't helpful. If someone had told me this stuff, way back, it would have saved me a heck of a lot of time to be given some starting points.
You believe vaccines and spaying are bad things and lead to cancer? I believe that too many vaccines are problematic because vets often just want more money... And I believe EARLY spaying and neutering can be problematic... But vaccines do serve a purpose and I don't stand behind any anti vaxx stuff. And I think spaying serves a purpose as well. And any video with the statement "How to extend the life of your dog" on the front is automatic click bait because even if you follow all of what they say... Your dog of course may still die young. There is no guaranteed way to extend the life of your dog. The issue I have with some of your statements is that they are opinions. You may put your opinions beside facts, but they're still opinions. Those Royal Canin "rubbish" diets have helped plenty of sensitive dogs. Maybe the KetoPet or whatnot truly isn't best for all dogs. Where are all the science based direct studies that compare dogs on different diets side by side for their entire lifetimes? Where is the actual proof that as a whole, raw or (INSERT PREFERRED DIET HERE) helps dogs live longer, healthier lives. Where is the direct proof that these dogs are less prone to cancer etc? I sure cannot find it. These companies tried to say grain free was healthier than regular kibble. It isn't. It wasn't. Since when was WHITE POTATO healthier for you than BARLEY or BROWN RICE? Now they say that grain free can predispose some dogs to heart disease due to the legumes they often fill these foods with. Same as the people from Blue Buffalo who merely compared ingredients on TV but were never even able to make the claim that the food was healthier or worth the way higher price (because the food likely ISN'T better or worth the way higher price). Plausible words are just that... Plausible words.
@J.D you are not a crap pet parent. You clearly care to be researching and reaching out for advice. Take everything you read here and elsewhere with a grain of salt - there have been some strong opinions on here that contradict many other school of thoughts with regard to feeding. Trying to get through the mine field of feeding dogs these days is confusing and overwhelming without chemo and cancer! I personally would not feed ziwipeak until more information and research is done with regards to DCM. That’s my position and I don’t care to debate anyone about that. Continue to talk to you vet as you have been doing, as they know your dog and his medical history etc. people on the internet do not.
