Your Pet’s Flea & Tick Meds Are Making Your Family Sick | Dr. Judy Morgan, DVM

are spewing bloody vomit and diarrhea, seasuring and dying. I went public with it, got death threats. Puring was the number one.

We never were able to find the contaminant.

We had some insiders who were giving us information. One of them mysteriously died. - Oh! - I mean, what with pet food? - With pet food.

- Does Hillary Clinton have a stay comparing it? Okay, if. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - The pet industry has convinced millions of owners

that their animals will die without constant medication. And most vets are too afraid, pressured, or trained inside the system to challenge it. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Judy Morgan, holistic veterinarian, best-selling author,

and named holistic veterinarian of the decade, to expose why heartworm, flee, and tick preventives are not the universal, non-negotiable necessity pet parents or told they are.

“And why you should never let a vet bully you”

into lifelong drugs that may shorten your pet's life.

We talk about how the pet food industry actually operates, including car, tell, level, control, intimidation, tactics, and even death threats, and why most commercial pet food is designed for profit, not longevity. Dr. Judy breaks down what dog should really be eating,

how food alone can heal chronic issues like allergies, paulicking, shedding, anxiety, and gut disease, and why genetics is often blamed to cover up lifestyle damage. This conversation connects the dots between environmental toxins, lawn chemicals, tap water, vaccines,

over medication in the silent ways modern living is accelerating aging in our pets. Most importantly, Dr. Judy lays out the simple rules that can literally double your pet's life expectancy. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel

or Culture of Pothakary on Spotify. Make sure to leave us a five star review until everyone, why?

This is your favorite podcast in the health and wellness space.

I mean, duh, who else is talking about holistic pet care. Please welcome holistic veterinarian, Dr. Judy Morgan, to Culture of Pothakary.

“- Some people believe that shedding is just normal for dogs.”

Other people think that shedding is completely dependent on the type of diet your dog has and that it's actually preventable. Where do you land in that debate? - A little bit in the middle.

- Okay, interesting. We have long hair dogs now and they shed a little bit but not much. Short hair dogs, we had dobermans before we had the Cavaliers. They shed it incredibly just all the time.

It never seemed to stop. I will say that once I got them off-kibble and dry-based diets and put them on high moisture more species appropriate diets, the shedding decreased dramatically.

But all dogs and cats are going to turn over their coat a couple of times a year. That's just a normal process. But that shedding period should be shortened. It should be within a couple of weeks

we turn over the whole coat. We see the same thing in our farm animals. Our horses, particularly the minutures, they grow all about five inches of hair for the winter and then it all has to come out in the spring.

But we try to make that happen over a period of one to two weeks, not all year round hair everywhere. - I've got friends with golden retrievers and some of them are feeding them raw real food diets. They hardly shed it all.

- Exactly. - I have friends that are on the traditional ultra-processed food kibble diet with their golden retriever and it is so gross how much they shed.

“And that's why I feel so passionate about real food for pets.”

- Absolutely. - I think it just contributes to so much. I mean with my dog, everybody assumes the shedding must be insane because he's a long-haired pecanese

and he doesn't shed it all. - Exactly. - So I don't know. I think that's fascinating. I think a lot of people don't realize

how food is medicine for humans, but food is also medicine for dogs. - Absolutely. And that's really my main platform that food is medicine. It's also the foundation of life.

You cannot out supplement a bad diet. So if your pet is suffering with chronic issues, chronic inflammatory problems, you can give them all the supplements in the world. But if you don't fix that foundation,

you're not going to solve the problem. - When you see excessive shedding in a pet, what does that tell you about a dog's or cats internal health? - A lot of times it tells me there's not enough moisture

in the diet for one thing. Two, their body is undergoing some chronic inflammation. Some chronic disease. Just things are not as optimized as they could be. And so we see people say so often.

Oh, my pet's been eating that low-quality high-processed food for years, they're fine, they live to be 15. They lived, but did they thrive?

- And I say that about humans too.

They're like, so we're living longer. I'm like, and we're also on seven medication plus starting in our 50s. - Exactly. - That is normal. So yeah, you're not even thriving.

You're supposed to be able to enjoy running around with your grandkids and your family and retirement age and doing all these fun activities. You're not supposed to be bed-ridden for 25, 30 years.

“I mean, and that's how a lot of Americans are living.”

So we're really seeing right, a mimic of the chronic disease epidemic that we're seeing in humans, especially in America, we're also seeing that in our pets year too. - 100%.

So if we look back at the 1970s, the average life expectancy for a middle-sized dog was about 17 years. Now it's about 10 years. What have we done wrong in the past 55 years

that has decreased their lifespan almost by half.

Wow. And it's really interesting, people will say, "Oh, he had a good long life, he lived to 10 or 11 or 12." To me, that's half of life. Our dogs are living to 18, 19.

My cats are living into their early 20s. I would love to see that be even longer. We all love our pets, they're like our children. When something happens to them, we're devastated. So why wouldn't we want to have them be with us longer?

And while they're here with us for that longer period of time, have them be active at energetic and not on seven different medications and suffering with chronic disease and not being able to walk or exercise. So if we can kind of shift the paradigm

of what we're doing with our pets, we think that by having all these new medications and being able to do more diagnostics, that we are making things better. But a lot of those medications that are being given to our pets,

the pesticides that are being given to our pets, they're shortening their lifespan by a lot, and they're causing more trouble than what they're fixing. Why do you so many pets need regular dental cleanings when wild animals rarely have rotted teeth?

It's due to the carbohydrates in the diets. That's a big part of it. So we say to people, oh, this dry kibble is going to keep their teeth clean. That is such a fallacy.

It's a total myth. Dry kibble doesn't keep your teeth clean. That would be like you're dentists saying to you, here, eat these crackers every single day.

“That's the only thing you're ever going to eat.”

Don't bother brushing your teeth. Your teeth are going to be just fine. You won't have any teeth by the time you're 35. If that's what you survived on. So we need people to understand how important dental care is

as far as that either daily brushing or a daily supplement, or chewing raw meaty bones. If you're somebody who can do that with your pets, I have a couple of dogs who don't have very many teeth. So raw meaty bones are not really in their future.

My small dog, far as to as hydrocephalus. When they have hydrocephalus, it's very painful for them to chew on something hard. It causes reverberations through their water in their brain. So we have a lot of breeds that are naturally hydrosophallic.

And so they are not able to chew on hard things to keep their teeth clean. So there's a lot of things that go into it. But one of the big myths is that chewing on dry kibble is going to sob dental problems.

It actually causes them. Do you think it's fair to say that we as pet owners are unintentionally accelerating aging in our pets? Absolutely. Wow.

Just for so many reasons, over vaccination is just huge. When we first started vaccinating for things like December and Parbo and Rabies, this is what I was taught in that school when I am a dinosaur. So it was a little long time ago.

But what we were arbitrarily taught was you have them come in every year for shots.

“And so we took a key from the dental practices”

and said, oh, we'll send a reminder that they're due for shots every year. Well, that's a bunch of malarkey. The vaccines last five to seven years are maybe a lifetime.

So we don't need to give them every year. And what we need to be doing is saying to people, hey, you need to come in every year or maybe every six months, get that physical exam. A veterinarian can see and feel things in your animal

that you can't as the average pet owner.

So having that complete physical exam is so critical

for prevention. And I'm a huge fan of lab work. So my had my practices. I would do complete lab work on all of my patients at least twice a year.

If they were on any chronic medications, they were getting lab work four times a year. So that's every three months. At first, people bolt and then they started to see the benefits of it.

Particularly if you have a pet who's on chronic medications, those medications can damage the liver. They can damage the kidneys. I want to see that and follow trends and be able to jump on that as soon as we start seeing changes.

Rather than waiting a year or two years and then saying, oh my gosh, now he's in complete liver failure or that drug caused kidney disease.

But I'm not saying to people, hey, come in every year for shots because I know that they don't need them every year. So we need to change our thinking, the chronic use of flea and tick pesticides on our pets.

One of the most horrible things we've ever done,

we would never feed pesticides to our children

and say, here it'll keep them from being bitten by a mosquito. What a crazy idea. - Yeah, I have a lot of questions about that actually. That's something that I really want to get into. So when you are feeling an animal in that yearly exam,

are there things that you're feeling for

“as a holistic veterinarian that a conventional vet may not?”

- Yes. So I practice traditional Chinese veterinary medicine as part of my overall. And so we look at things a little bit differently with that. So we look at the tongue color and we feel the pulses.

So there are different qualities in the pulses, different qualities in the tongue color. But because I also do modalities like chiropractic and acupuncture, I'm feeling for tightness in muscles, problems with joint mobility.

So extension and flexion of every joint. And a lot of that should be done by a traditional veterinarian as well. And I used to do really work. So I'd go in a lot of other practices,

kind of like the substitute teacher. And I would see a lot of other veterinarians practice. And the complete physical exam ran the gamut from, you know, putting them on the table listening to the heart and saying good to go

to something that would take 20 minutes to look at every single piece and part of the animal.

“- My yearly exam with Mochi lasts about an hour,”

maybe a little longer. - That is amazing. - She does want me to come in yearly for teeth cleaning because he's got, you know, short, head, wide mouth. It's just hard to get back there and do all kinds of stuff.

She says teeth are basically perfect,

but she's like just for, to be precautionary. She thinks that he needs to come in for a deep cleaning go under once a year. I don't know, how do you feel about that? - It depends on the pet.

So with our animals, I have like forest. My hydrocephalic guy, he has to go in every year to have a complete dental cleaning. And he probably could use it even more often because he does build up a lot of plaque and tartar

from a Chinese medicine perspective. He has something called a jing deficiency. And a jing deficiency affects the nervous system. So the brain and spinal cord, which we know he's got issues there.

It affects the joints. Some of his joints spend the wrong way. So that's a problem as well. And it affects the teeth. So he's got very poor enamel.

Small breed dogs tend to have a lot more dental problems. They don't have enamel that says strong. And a lot of them, it was interesting before I got into holistic stuff. And I was in traditional practice.

We used to say that a Yorkie that still had any teeth left in his head at seven years old was doing amazingly well because they're just a breed that's known to have a lot of dental issues. So for instance, those golden retrievers,

they may never have a dental cleaning.

They just, especially if they're on the right diet. And if they're chewing on something and getting any kind of home dental care, a lot of those large breeds will never have an issue. So when we compare it to animals in the wild,

Yorkies don't live in the wild. Peekinies don't live in the wild. So we have, unfortunately, genetically bread these animals to have a lot of these issues. So it really is an individualized thing.

Like it really wouldn't matter if I brushed forest teeth twice a day, gave him dental supplements, gave him whatever he could to chew on, which is not much. He was still need to go in and have to have dental cleanings. Which I'm not thrilled about putting him under anesthesia

to have that done. But the non-anositic dental cleanings are a waste of money. 75% of dental diseases below the gum line. So they're going to have to be sedated and get radiographs of their two-throughs, their jaw structure.

“That's the only way you know what is going on in that mouth.”

So we used to have a lot of clients who would get that non-anositic dental cleaning. And think that everything was great. We'd bring the animal in, take extra rays, and find that there were roots that were being reabsorbed,

they were broken teeth, all kinds of things going on that you're not going to find just by scraping the tartar off. - That's super important to know. And I know none of us want to be wasting money on pets for sure, so that's really good info.

From your perspective, what are we doing that's shortening a dog's life the most? - Three together. - Okay. - Wrong diet, over vaccination and over use of chemicals.

So whether that's antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, flintic pesticides, so it's kind of a three-pillar thing. We need to kind of back off and really look at everything with a critical eye. And one of the things that I think is hugely important

is when you go to your veterinarian and whether you're there for a problem or something routine,

ask them what the potential side effects are.

It's really interesting in human medicine when you go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, you get pages of information on these of the potential side effects, interactions with other drugs, what to watch for, when to take it.

In veterinary medicine, your hand that a bottle of pills and just told the give it twice a day, and nobody ever talks about the side effects. So what I tell people before you accept any medication for your pet, take your phone out of your pocket, look up the side effects.

It's very easy to just put that in your search engine, side effects of XYZ, look at what those are, and then ask questions about that. Because all too often, we just look at the person in the white coat and say, well, they said it was safe, so it must be.

I've even gone through this with my mother. She was in the hospital, and a nurse came in to hang three bags on her IV pole. And I said, what are those? We hadn't even seen a doctor yet.

And I said what are those? She's a doctor prescribed these three antibiotics, and I said, for what the doctor hasn't seen her yet. So I said no, when the doctor came in, I said, she was a young resident, and I said,

“do you know the side effects of those three antibiotics?”

You want to hang on my mom's pole? And she said, no, I'll tell my head. I said, funny thing I do. Yeah. So I'm not going to let you do any of that

until you look it up on your phone right now and front of me and read me the side effects. And then after she did, I said, would you do that to your 84-year-old mother and she went, well, maybe not. And I said, okay, well, we're not going to do that.

And so I chose one out of the three, the one that I thought was going to be the most helpful, and it did solve the problem. But we have to be the advocates for our pets and our family members, and that's very difficult for the life person who doesn't know anything about the medications.

But the great news is we can all look those things up. Are candles in air fresheners harming our pets? Oh, yes, absolutely. So I actually did a presentation for us some at on air quality.

And VOCs are a huge problem for our pets. Cats and birds are super, super sensitive. So for instance, if you cook with Teflon Cookware, don't have birds anywhere in your kitchen because the fumes are going to kill them,

which should tell you something about what that's doing to you.

“That's why they had the canaries in the coal mines”

because the canaries knew when the air quality was not good. They dropped dead and that was a little warning, get out of the mine. So we have that with birds and with cats. So a lot of people will have Popeye or a central oil candles in sense and things that they burn.

And particularly if their cat is in a small room and there's not good ventilation, they can go into liver failure.

So essential oils are amazing.

If they're good essential oils and they are pets safe and they've been tested to know that they are pets safe. VOCs, our cats have something like 5 million olfactory receptors to our one and dogs have like 60 million to our one.

- Wow. - And those olfactory receptors are not just to say that's the smell receptors. They're not just in the nasal passages, they're in every organ in the body. So when we're using all of these artificial fragrances

and artificial air fresheners, it's really toxic for them and buying new toxic furniture in our winter clothes or doors are closed. And so all of this stuff is off gassing in your living room, your pet is just breathing it in

and it's affecting them more than you. - Absolutely and so like cigarette smoke is a huge issue for pets because it settles down and our pets spend most of their time on the floor. Studies have shown that cats actually concentrate

those toxins much more than dogs and that's because cats are kind of on everything and then they're grooming themselves so much. So when we test the blood of cats and dogs and people, we find that the toxins are highest in cats

and then dogs and then people. - So if you're somebody who is just hanging on to claw rocks and conventional cleaners with a death grip and you're like, I have to use conventional cleaners

“because I feel like that's how I know my house is clean”

if it smells clean with the chemical smells. How is that affecting our pets?

- The bottom line is eventually it's causing cancers.

And it can cause neurologic problems, so many things. And there are great studies. I look at my kids who were raised with horses and you know, always had dirty hands, eating a sandwich in the barn after cleaning the stalls.

I mean, I look at that and go great probiotics. This is awesome. My kids are really healthy. But we have so many studies that show that children who were brought up in those sterile environments

where the moms are like everything is white and everything is claw rocks to death. Those children have a lot more asthma, a lot more allergies. Their immune system never got off to a good start. You literally are much better to send your kids outside

and let them eat dirt.

- My granddaughter runs barefoot through the chicken coop. I go kind of go, ah, but you know, her immune system pretty amazing. - You think about the most perfect suburban neighborhood in America and the lawns are manicured

and they've got the lawn guy that comes once a month to spray the lawn.

“How is that affecting children and pets especially?”

- So there was an interesting case somewhere out here in the West a couple years ago where something was put down. I can't remember what it was anymore.

But it was something that basically when it got wet

made a gas that killed moles and things in the yard and children went out and played on it right after it rained and it was off-gassing and the kids died. We have great studies that show that those lawn chemicals contribute to bladder cancer in dogs.

And interesting, we just had a 17 year old dog die of bladder cancer and actually he didn't die of his cancer. He lived with the cancer for two years and it actually was shrinking just a died of old age. But bladder cancer is something that we absolutely have proof

that that is being caused by these lawn chemicals that we're using. So our dogs tend to go out roll around in the grass nibble on the grass, they're ingesting so much more of that than we are.

But if our children are going out there and rolling in the grass and running barefoot through it,

they're getting those chemicals as well.

And interestingly, I can't get away from this back to our fleeing tick chemicals. When you give the oral or topical fleeing tick chemicals to your pet, those are also being transmitted to your children.

- Oh, so in Europe, Fippernil, which is one of the very commonly used topicals has been used for over 20 years in fleeing tick chemicals, it is found in all the waterways in Europe and in the hair of French children, they tested.

So is that what you're veterinarian is going to say, well, apply this once it's dry, it's fine. Your kids can hug them, sleep with them, kiss them, it's no problem. It's a problem, it is being spread environmentally.

And when we look at these chemicals that are toxic, deflees and ticks, then they're in their waterways

“and in our environment, what else is it killing off?”

There was talk years ago when they came out with Bervector, which is an isoxazeline, flora lantern for fleeing tick prevention on our pets. They discussed and it actually is being used as a product called exult being fed to poultry,

now to kill poultry mites, because poultry mites decrease egg production and decrease the growth rate of the chickens. So they actually discussed giving Bervector to 25% of the human population in places like Africa and India,

where malaria is a huge problem. And they said, well, if we give this computer models, if we give this to 25% of the human population, and they're getting bitten by mosquitoes, it'll kill the mosquitoes who take that blood meal.

And that will kill off enough of the mosquito population that then malaria won't be such a problem.

Well, first of all, I don't want to be the person

who has to take the drug because the side effects from it are horrible. But what happens if we kill off the mosquito population? What about all the birds and frogs and nudes and salamanders and beings that survive

with that as their food source? Why are we so egotistical that we think we can just wipe out a species on this planet and it will have no effect on the other species and the environment?

So we need to go back and really examine what are we doing to our world? What are we doing to our environment?

“Is Fippernil in all the waterways in Europe a good thing?”

I don't think so. And they're saying it's coming from all the pets who were being treated with it and then swimming in the water. You know, that scene in Cinderella

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that's Go Jevity, G-E-V-I-T-I.com, use code Alex for 20% off your first purchase. (upbeat music) Every time I go for this yearly appointment for Mochi, she's hammering me about two things, heartworm and flan tick.

With flan tick, I am always asking a hundred questions

'cause I don't understand why she's adamant he take it. I live in the desert, my dog is 99% of the time indoors. A peak in his dog wants to be an extra human sitting near you on the floor in the house. He goes for a short walk morning and evening

and that's basically it. He is not this athletic outdoor dog. I travel with him twice a year, maybe to go home to Indiana Warren from. And even there, it's a short going outside

to be really quick coming back in. He's not hanging around and rolling around in the yard. When I ask her this, she's like, "Well, it only takes one second." And your dog has all this hair,

you're never gonna find that tick. I've had him now for a little over a year. And so my question to you is, "Am I doing the right thing by not giving him flan tick or is she also right that it just takes one second

and then really horrible things can happen?" She's absolutely wrong. - Okay. - And you're absolutely right. - Okay. - Here's why. My mother taught me this.

My mother, before I was holding this two years ago, she said, "Hey, when you go to the clinic today, bring home my sixth month pack of heart one prevention, my fourth month pack of flea and tick prevention." And I just looked at her and I said,

"Mom, have you ever found a flea or a tick on your dog?" And she said, "No, and I don't want to." And I had a light bulb moment. My light bulb moment was she thinks that by putting this on, it is repelling fleas and ticks.

They don't repel. The flea or the tick still has to bite your dog and have a blood meal in order to die. So you're not preventing the spread of tick-borne diseases. You're not preventing the spread of things that fleas carry

because your animal still has to get bitten. So it's not a preventative. It's killing them after the fact. So to me, that was my light bulb moment of I need to explain to people that these are not repelling.

“Now, what will repel is essential oil sprays.”

This is the other problem, especially for fleas. The life cycle of fleas, five percent of the life cycle, is spent on the pet. We get so crazy attacking our animals with sprays and powders and collars.

We're working on five percent of the life cycle. What about the other 95? It's in the environment. So we live in North Carolina. It gets really hot in the summer.

Heartworms are a huge problem. fleas are a huge problem. We have all these outdoor cats that live in the barn. We don't use chemicals on anybody. I don't use heartworm prevention for our dogs.

I kind of quit. My practices were New Jersey before we moved south. And I kind of quit about five years before we left New Jersey. And even when I was there, we were giving it seasonally in the summer. We had a lot of mosquitoes.

Heartworms were sort of a problem. My dogs are like yours. They spend, you know, they go outside. They run around the yard in the middle of the day. Mosquitoes aren't out there in the middle of the day.

It's ridiculously hot. So at night, at dusk when the mosquitoes come out, we go inside. I don't want to be bitten neither today. Yeah.

If I need to stay out there, I'm going to hit me.

“And then we then essential oil spray that is safe for them.”

That is made for that. What do you like? We have quite a few companies that we work with. There's Wolf Creek, Projects, Kids, and Kind. So there's a whole bunch of them on Dr. Judy Morgan.com.

So but these are ones that have been tested. They're organic. They're certified for use on the animals. And we know that they work. And so we read an event.

And we had a tent set up at a county fair. And just for talking about holistic battery medicine. And the little tiny, no-seem, nap things were just biting us like crazy. And I had a couple of dogs in the tent with me.

And we were going nuts. And I said, do you know what? I'm going to stop this problem right now.

So I took one of the essential oil sprays off the shelf

that we had in the tent. Gave my dog one spritz down or back the entire tent cleared out of mosquitoes and nuts. And nobody was like, can we come in your tent? Because it's only place where we're not getting bitten.

And that was from one spritz on my dog. So we know that these things will repel for our yard in North Carolina.

So basically little tiny bugs. And they eat the immature stages of the fleas and ticks. So that's getting rid of that other 95% of the life cycle. So what about people that do have primarily outdoor dogs

“that are living in wooded areas of the United States?”

What would you do for flea and tick for them? So for our cats that live in the barn, we actually, their spraying cats is almost impossible. They don't want to be sprayed with anything. They're also really sensitive to the smells.

So we actually have a powder that has name, yarrow and diatomaceous earth. And so this is one of the projects for my 88 year old mom. She'll sprinkle powder into her palm and then she'll walk up to the kiddies and go,

good kitty, good kitty and pet them and just put the powder on them. And that works to keep our cats in the barn from being infested with fleas and ticks. And I will say the better the immune system is for your pet, the less parasites they will have.

So for instance, we never have intestinal parasites.

We haven't had any heartworm issues. And our cats, if they go down in the woods to hunt, I may be pull off one or two ticks a year off of nine cats. They're just not bringing them home. They don't taste good.

They're on a species appropriate diet. They're not over vaccinated. They've got some powder on them and it's just not an issue. We also have scalar wave tags and ultrasonic tags that you can put on your pet's collar or harness

that work really, really well. Again, they're sending out ultrasonic or scalar waves that the parasites don't like. What is the lifespan on the powders of the spray?

“It's like, do you have to do it every single day”

or every three days or once a week? It really depends on your pet's exposure. So if I had, for instance, a hunting dog or a dog that I was hiking in the woods all the time, I might hit them with something every morning

before we headed out. I was asked to speak at the Pointer National Specialty in Ohio 15 years ago by one of my clients. And so part of the Pointer National Specialty they have to go out and hunt in the fields.

So in the morning, 100 dogs went out on the hunt.

My client's dog had an essential oil spray on her and her dog.

She was the only one who came back without ticks. That's insane. And everybody else came in with ticks. Wow. And so you better believe the next day I sold out

of all my spray and the next day everybody went out in the field with essential oil spray on because they all came back with so many ticks today before. Talk to me about heartworm because I still have input motion on heartworm.

Do we need to be so scared of this? How do you prevent them from getting it naturally? So Dr. Will Faulkner, who is in Texas, he's a holistic veterinarian. He wrote a, it's an ebook.

It's naturally healthy dogs don't get heartworms, something like that. And again, it goes back to the immune system. And there is a great video on YouTube where it's a time lapse thing where there's a blood sample

with an immature heartworm swimming around in the bloodstream. And it's from a healthy animal and over time, what we see is the white blood cells and all the parts of the immune system come in. They surround that little baby heartworm and digest it

over a period of 24 hours. So a good healthy functioning immune system is not going to allow your pet to become overwhelmed with any kind of parasitic infection. We don't use heartworm preventative where we are now.

It's a high heartworm state if you look at the heartworm maps. And that's one thing that people can do. They can go online to the American Heartworm Society and look at the maps. And it will show you because a heartworm positive dog

in order to get the medication to treat the adult heartworms, you have to report it. And so we have pretty good numbers as to how many cases are reported in all areas of the United States.

And there are some areas that can Colorado where there just isn't any. The American Parasite Foundation, whoever they are, they recommend, and most traditional veterinarians, recommend heartworm and flee prevention every month,

every pet all year round. Well, if I'm in upstate Michigan in December, January, February, March, under two feet of ice, I don't have mosquitoes that are going to bite my dog. I don't have fleas.

Maybe I'll find a tick that might still be crawling. But we just don't have that parasite issue. So that is, that's great for the drug companies to sell to every single pet.

There's 160 million pets in this country.

Sure, that's great marketing.

“How do you know if your dog has a strong immune system?”

Do they have any chronic disease? Are they shutting excessively? Are they itching all the time? Do they have ear infections? Do they have skin infections?

Do they have arthritis? Do they have chronic bowel issues?

Get your lab work done.

And is it all perfect? Is it right down the middle?

Where you want it to be? Or are there things in there that are pointing to? We've got some issues. So for instance, if you get blood work done and the platelets are really high, platelets go up

with inflammation. Are the globules high? That's going to go up with inflammation. Is the white blood cell count elevated or skewed in the proportion of different cells?

“So that's why that lab work is so important”

because we can use that as an indicator of, oh, Jesus, only five years old. But look, we've, we have platelets. We're 300,000 last year and now they're 500,000. What happened?

Yeah, something's going on. This is Mochi's blood work. So one of the things that I actually love

is interpreting lab work.

To me, it's like a logic puzzle and you put the pieces together and it gives you information that then you can fix things or be proactive about things. So I actually have a course

that is interpreting and understanding lab values and I have it in two levels. So there's a lower level that just kind of tells you what all these abbreviations are for the average pet parent who's just kind of like, what does this mean?

And then you can add on to that in interpretation where you can send me your lab work and I will record me going through your lab work and saying, oh, okay, and I'm gonna do that with yours now. Where I record, okay, I'm seeing this.

“This is a signal that we need to be looking for XYZ.”

These are some of the things that you could consider doing to, you know, with diagnostics and with natural therapies or food to help the situation. We also have a more in-depth like six hour course which would be really good for anybody

who's like a holistic health pet coach or a vet tech or even veterinarian who wants refresher. Of course, most veterinarians absolutely don't like interpreting that work.

To me, I just, I love it and so it was a huge part of my practice. All right, so we'll start at the top. Red Blood Cell Count looks great. Heemoglobin is really good.

So we're here at high elevation here, right? So that makes perfect sense. White Blood Cell Count is good and we look at the distribution of neutrophils to lymphocytes since about two to one, which is right where we want it to be.

So that's great. However, we get down to platelets, platelets should be on this lab. They say their upper end of normal is 412 and he's at 527.

“So that means we've got an inflammatory process”

that's starting to kick in somewhere. And so, you know, we'll see if it tells us somewhere further down here where that might be. - Okay. - But there's some inflammation.

So glucose is 86, that's his blood sugar. That looks great and you said he was a raw fed guy. So that's, was he fasted for this? - No, was he supposed to be? - They didn't tell me that.

- They don't tell you that, but they should be fasted for 8 to 12 hours.

So a lot of times we'll get like the first morning.

- Yeah, he had his morning breakfast. - Yeah, so we'll get first morning bloods and just tell people don't give them their breakfast before you come in or you can do it at the end of the day when they had breakfast like eight hours earlier.

- Okay. - So a blood sugar of 86, after having just eaten is great. So in kibble fed dogs, it'll be 110 to 120 whereas especially after eating whereas raw fed dogs, it's gonna be in the 80s

and if they're fasted, it might be in the 70s. So we know from human medicine studies that the higher your blood sugar stays chronically, the more inflammation you have in the body. So this is good.

So as DMA, which is kidney function, creatinine and B1, are all load and normal and so that's great. Means as kidneys are working really well. We're happy with that. Then we look at electrolytes, phosphorus calcium,

sodium potassium, his potassium's a little bit high. Interesting, one of my dogs just came back with the same level, more than likely it's dietary related. - So he has pumpkin puree every day, is that it? - Pumpkin's a little high in potassium, so it could be.

- Yeah, he's pumpkin puree every day. - It's not every day high, it's not something to worry about, but it is showing up as a little bit high. - Okay. - What's also interesting, when we look at the lab normals,

those are based on kibble fed dogs, not on raw fed dogs. So sometimes we see some differences just based on diet. Liver function, ALT, out fast, GGT, Billy Rubin, cholesterol, all perfect.

Amalase is low, which is a pancreatic enzyme, and that's fine, because he's a raw fed guy, so that looks good, heartworm and tick-borne diseases all negative, which is great. - So he's got some inflammation for him.

- He's got some inflammation going on somewhere we don't know where. - Liver and kidney function is great, but there's something that's not perfectly happy. - One thing that I've noticed in him

that's driving me nuts, I wanted to ask you about is excessive paulicking,

He does not smell like corn chips,

“but he is obsessively looking as possible.”

So I was wondering if that is a sign of something medically, or if he's bored, or what that means. - Could be either, but it could be a lot of times when they're trying to detox a little bit, or when we're starting with allergies,

it starts with the paulicking. So we might want to look at what can we do to try to make that go away and bring the inflammation down. So the root cause of allergies and most inflammatory problems for our pets is abnormal microbiome in the gut.

So we also can get abnormal microbiome in the respiratory system on the skin, in the ears, and this goes back to all the chloroxin. We spend so much time trying to kill off bacteria that we kill off all the good things too.

And so we need that healthy microbiome. So because all of his lab work looks great, except that there's some inflammation brewing somewhere, I might look at doing a microbiome test on him really easy to do. You just get a little kit, send in the poop sample,

and it comes back with here's where we've got an imbalance.

“And now we can do, or we have a couple of choices,”

we can add a probiotic, or we can do what's called FMT, which is a fecal micro biota transplant, which they've made it really simple. Now you can do calf cells. You don't have to take a minute and get poop shoved up

one under the other. And so interestingly, I did that one, what I consider my healthiest of our four,

like never has any issues.

And so I did the test first. And it came back everything looked really good. Her fungal organisms in her microbiome were a little low, but not bad. But she also had bacteria in her bowel

that were antibiotic resistant bacteria. This is a dog who doesn't take antibiotics, hasn't taken antibiotics. So I'm like, oh, I wonder where that's coming from. So even though she was very healthy,

her stool was very normal, she's on a great diet. I said, all right, well, we got this back, and it's really good, but it's not perfect. 99% of the people would be thrilled if they're doggoed that great on it, the test.

And we were doing this because we were trying to prove a point. So I did the FMT capsules for 30 days,

and then we retested all the antibiotic resistant bacteria

were gone. And the fungal organisms were a much broader diversity. That's interesting. It was really interesting, it was like this, and it's funny because I keep seeing on social media

my interview with that company when we talked about that study that we did, it's showing up as their advertisement now. Because we all think that we have this perfectly normal healthy animal, but you don't know

until you look inside. And so that's one of the greatest ways, easiest ways to look inside. We also have tests where you can do heroin analysis, and you can get so much information from heroin analysis.

So for instance, that potassium that's a little bit high, if we were to take and it's easy to get hair on this guy. If we were to send in a hair sample on him, we might find that we have mineral imbalances going on that we could do something to shift that

and make things a little more balanced for him.

“- So where do you buy a gut microbiome test for a pet?”

- Your website. - Your website. - Your website. - Your website. - Okay, cool, because I'd be interested in doing that. And then I could just do it, I could get by that, and then I could send it to you, and you could tell us what's on it.

- Well, yeah, so you send it to the company, and they send you back all the results. - Oh, and then I asked you about them. - If you need help with that, after you do it, you can send it to us,

and we'll be happy to help with that. But the companies are very good. They send you back these really detailed graphics. - How can you tell that your dog has a cold, or how do you know if your dog has allergies?

- We do see a lot of upper respiratory issues, particularly with dogs that go to boarding, grooming, daycare, that group setting, just like sending your kids to school. My granddaughter going to daycare in school,

brings home everything, we all get exposed. Allergies with chronic watery eyes, runny nose are not very common in pets. That's kind of the symptoms that we get. Maybe you'll see it if you have really, really high pollen count,

because the watery eyes, the watery nose, that's the body washing the pollen out of the system. So if it's a clear discharge, or they're sneezing a little bit, nothing to worry about, if that discharge becomes thick, yellow, or green,

we've got red eyes to go along with it. That's a symptom that we've got something more infectious going on that might need to be dealt with. For allergies, for our pets, it's usually scratching. So they can have an inhaled allergen,

like pollen, grassweeds, molds, that sort of thing.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] What dog behaviors are often cries for help that owners miss? Oh, there are so many. And really interestingly, based

on the Chinese personality of your pet, we can change their diet to change their behavior. So that's something that's been really cool to see over the years. But first of all, we have dogs that have dog behaviors. Same with cats, cats have cat behaviors, like chewing furniture.

Yeah, we want them to live in our world and follow our rules. And a lot of times, our rules are in total contradiction to what the dog rules would be. So they all have a social order.

And there are some dogs, some breeds, some personalities, who want to be in charge. They want to be in charge of you. And that doesn't really work so well in our world. So for instance, all the dogs that are used for shuts and work

and for police work, those are dogs who are large and in charge, the rot-wilers, the mound was, the doberman's, the shepherds. They want to be in charge.

“And that's why we need the right owner with the right dog.”

Because if you're this kind of wimpy little person, you're probably not going to want one of those breeds anyway. But if you're a wimpy little person, and you allow that dog to run your world, it's going to get ugly sooner or later.

So a lot of times when we're seeing what we consider undesirable behaviors, it's the dog saying, no, I really need to do this. Our dogs don't get enough exercise. They don't get enough mental stimulation.

They don't get enough playtime.

And I know most people, and I used to be one of them,

“are really against dog parks and group play settings.”

Now, my dogs would be horrible in group play. I would never take them. I would think your pecanese might not be great in group play either. He does not like to play with other dogs. He loves being around people.

And he does not care about barking at other dogs, or anything he completely ignores them. But if somebody has a toy, then he's very excited, and he's very focused on, I want that toy, I want that toy.

If a kid is playing with a ball or something like that, that's what he sees and he freaks out. But another dog could be barking at him, and he just walks right past, he's just unfazed. But is it a concern?

Like, should I be worried that I have a loan or school shooter dog that just has no friends? (laughing) - I got his toy, sure, but no, I mean, that's absolutely fine.

So we have four dogs, and two forest, the crazy one.

And Gilly, there are two days apart. One's an English toy, Spaniel, and the other one's a Cavalier, King Charles. And we got forest when he was a little guy,

“and we got Gilly when he was two years old.”

They are like brothers from another mother. They absolutely love to play together. They sleep together in the crate, they do everything together. And then they also do that brother thing

where they hate each other, and they want to kill each other. And who knows what sparks them, but every once in a while, it's like, I'm gonna, you know, and they totally ignore the other two dogs. So yes, dogs have buddies and friends,

and I used to think that, you know, forest wasn't really playful and didn't really care that much 'cause his buddy before Gilly was an old Cavalier that had heart disease. So very mellow didn't do a whole lot, but they hung out together all the time.

When that went past and we got Gilly, all of a sudden we saw a totally different personality with forest. But we had two other dogs. Forest doesn't do anything with those other dogs.

Doesn't, doesn't care. Our female English toy, she would love to be an only child. She's not mean to everybody else, but she just doesn't care about all those boys.

They could just go away. So every dog has a different personality. And we need to know what our dog needs. So for instance, if you have a working breed, a herding breed, you better give them a job

and find something for them to do because if you don't, they are going to develop all kinds of bad behaviors that you are not going to like. So, you know, I used to have clients with these dogs that needed a job and I'm like,

buy them some ducks to her, go to a sheep, I don't know, bring your grandkids over and let them herd them, but find a job. I had one client that I was working with in her dog. So go and retrieve her.

And it was during COVID. And this woman was really a workout fanatic. And since she couldn't go to the gym, she built a gym in her garage. And she would go spend hours in her gym

and her dog would just lay in the corner, totally depressed and developed all of these gastrointestinal issues. And I said, this is, this is not a medical issue. This is a mental issue.

Your dog lost his ability to go for walks, to play with the sprains, he's hanging out in your gym all day depressed because you're doing your thing and he doesn't have a thing.

“And I said, you need to find a job for that dog.”

Even if you sit down and have a conversation with a dog and say, your job is to protect me and make sure I don't get hurt that you know, you follow me from, you know, equipment to equipment. You, your job is to be here with me

and babysit me doing my thing. And within a month, she's like, oh, he's back to normal all the GI problems one away, because he didn't think he had a job. And so I said, whatever, whatever you do,

and I don't remember what else she did with him, but it was just, he needs a job. He totally lost, he's, he's a depressed kid sitting in the corner watching you do your thing. And so, you know, maybe you have a dog

who would be great in a, in a good dog park not a, if you, maybe you have a dog who needs that social interaction, maybe you don't, you're dog would do terrible to dog park, you know, don't take him to doggy daycare, he's gonna hate it.

- I know, that's how I have it.

Yeah, people always ask me that,

'cause I travel a lot for like what happens to Mochi. He has, you know, like two babysitters that are regular that I paid and he'll go to their house and he like knows them and he feels more comfortable. I just know he would be miserable in a kennel situation.

And he also is so weird, you know, I put a bib on him to eat dinner and all this. I'm like, I just don't see people in a dog, doggy daycare being willing to do his weird little meal that I do and do a bib and put his hair up in a scrunchie

'cause he has all this hair and I'm trying to keep him from getting messy. - Same problem. - Yeah. - And most boarding situations will not feed raw food.

- Okay, that's good to know. - They will not. - Our most dogs under stimulated in modern life. - Absolutely, absolutely. And our cats horribly under stimulated.

So is it safer for a cat to live inside technically yes,

Like, we look at their cortisol levels.

They're through the roof because they're not getting to do cat things. So we have two indoor cats, highly stressed. We have seven outdoor cats who hunt and chase and climb and do cat things all day, they're all raw fed. They're all fed the same diet.

Interesting that I tested the microbiome on all seven nine cats. We did this for a company that wanted to see the difference between indoor and outdoor cats all fed the same thing. So it was a pretty good controlled study. And all the outdoor cats had beautiful microbiomes.

Our indoor cats horrible microbiomes all fed these same thing. But it's a stress level of not being able to hunt and pounce and climb cats need vertical climbing space.

“That's why they sit on top of your refrigerator.”

So we are not giving them what they need and the same for our dogs. I had clients who lived in small apartments and wanted to get a herding breed. And I'm like, unless you are planning on doing a lot with that dog, that dog's going to be miserable.

Yeah. My daughter, when she first graduated from college,

moved to the Raleigh area, she lived in a small one bedroom apartment. And she adopted an 80 pound dog. I said, what are you going to do with this 80 pound dog? And she said, well, I walk her in the morning and then I walk her after work. And I'm like, that's not enough for this dog.

Luckily, they had not a good dog park, but they had a Fensteria, where she could let the dog off leash and actually entertain the dog and give her some exercise and give her a chance to get out or y'all use. Because without that, that dog was going to be destructive. That dog was going to be howling and barking in an apartment setting.

Not good when dogs all the sudden pick up barking in an apartment setting and they're not barkers. Is that because they're understimulated? Probably.

Mochi has started barking.

It drives me nuts. Like in the mill and I, he hears the littlest noise at 2 a.m. And all of a sudden, he's barking and it's starting to really piss me off. I'm like, what is going on? You never barked before.

Well, he's got something inflammatory going on. So we need to look at his gut. Yeah. In Chinese medicine, we call that a Shen disturbance, which is disturbance of the mind.

And so it can be diet related. It can be exercise and stimulation. Related. It could be maybe he needs a little melatonin before bed. Okay.

Good. That sounds good to me. Do dogs need sunlight in a similar way to humans? So they really don't do a good job of converting vitamin D from sunlight like we do. There's too much hair in the way and it's just not something that they're even if they were

bald their skin doesn't do it as well. So no from that perspective, but yes, from the perspective that circadian rhythm and sunlight

“is so important for health in general, it's important for for I health.”

Really interesting. My daughter was looking at studies on wearing sunglasses and how bad that is for your health. Yeah, we've talked to that on the show. Yeah, so our dogs need that sunlight as well. They need that outdoor time.

They need that fresh air. When we look at studies of people who work in offices under artificial lighting all day. So unhealthy for your mental health as well as your physical health and we see the same with our pets. What is the biggest lie being sold to pet parents about dog food? So there's so much influence on the veterinary profession by big pharma and big food.

Just no different than in the human world. So I was recently at the largest veterinary conference in the country and the millions of dollars spent on advertising and promotion for big pet food and big pharma is just over the top. We put on big events. I know how much it costs to wrap a post with an advertisement.

And when I see 50 posts wrapped by one company, that influence is crazy. So the biggest fallacy is that extruded dry kibble made by the big three pet food companies is the healthiest for our pets. It is absolutely the bottom of the barrel for our pets, but unfortunately they have convinced

“the veterinarians of the world that that's the only way that we should feed our pets.”

If you took your child to the pediatrician and he handed you a box and it said complete and balanced nutrition, don't ever add anything to this. Don't put any fresh food in your child's bowl because that will unbalance the balance diet, which is false because most of them aren't balanced anyway according to studies. Here's your dry brown balls.

Your child should eat those twice a day and don't add anything to it. You would think they were absolutely out of their mind. But yet we go to the veterinary office and that's what we're told to do and we think that is fine. So in 2024, we had this one social media group that is talks about pet food and

but I have over a thousand complaints in one month against one pet food company where the

“dogs and cats are spewing bloody vomit and diarrhea, seasuring and dying."”

Like, and it was having to do with if they opened a new bag or a new can that this is what was happening within 24 hours of eating the food. Well, there was a major contamination or something. Exactly. So I went public with it and got death threats from consumers, not even from the companies. I got death threats from consumers saying they were coming to my farm, killing my family,

killing our animals because you called out a pet food company. One of my vet school classmates sent me an email

and said, "I should lose my license and not be allowed to be called a veterinarian because I was

speaking out against this pet food company." And I said, "You are so brainwashed." That's the brainwashing that goes on. And so we spent $20,000 sending food out for testing to multiple labs. Part of the things, Karen Becker also contributed to that, Susan Thickston from Truth about pet food, contributed to that recent testing to so many labs. And then we found out that a lot of the labs had a conflict of interest. So that created a problem for us. And it's funny those are some

“of my YouTube videos that have the most views. Wait, so are you allowed to say what the pet food is?”

Well, it ended up there were a lot that were incriminated, but Purina was the number one. The worst. Absolutely at the top of the list. And so that's the one that everyone was sending death threats about. Yes. What the heck is the Purina mafia? This sounds like the big

ag big chemical people that are trying to intimidate me. Yeah, exactly. So uh, but we never were

able to find the contaminant. We had some insiders who were giving us information. One of them mysteriously died. I mean, what with pet food? What pet food? Like you wouldn't think. Does Hillary Clinton have a stake in Purina? I'm kidding. I'm not sure who does, but this was a huge deal for about eight or nine months. And I mean, I was away trying to write one of my books when all this hit the fan. This is creepy. It was creepy crazy. And so, you know, we were on

signal chats going back and forth, trying to hide from everybody. It got nuts. And so uh, 10 or 15 years ago. So I've been, you know, kind of Susan Thixon got me into it from Truth About Pet Food. She's a pet food consumer advocate. She has been for years because her dog died of bone cancer and her veterinarian said, "Well, it's probably from the Ethoxic Win Preservative that's in the pet food." And that actually was appearing in a product too. And this was 20 years ago. And when she called the company,

they proudly said, "Oh, that pet food will be shelf stable for 25 years." Well, that's a huge red flat. That's a huge red flag right there. 25 years. 25 years. Justin Susan has made her life's mission to, you know, get truth in advertising and labeling in pet food. So she invited me to go to the Afko meetings with Harvard, which is the American Association of Animal Feed Control Officials. Anyway, um, so there was one meeting that we were supposed to go to in San Diego.

And a pet food company had a canned product that was tainted with youth and Asia solution. What? Youth and Asia solution is rampant in pet food. Why would that be in there? Because rendered meals, they can use any animal. So if a cow dies and this is where we get gross, I hope nobody's eating. If a cow dies out in the field, just drops dead from whatever, it can lay in the field for a couple of days. The meat guys come pick it up. They take these trucks that are not refrigerated

full of these dead carcasses and deliver them to the rendering plant. Put them in big piles out in the sun and the parking lot. Eventually, they're bulldozed into a big bat and cook down. And that's

“where we get all these animal digest and meat and bone meal and meat meals. And that's what goes in.”

So the, the extruded pet foods, a lot of them are made with the waste products from the human food industry. So in Wisconsin years ago, there was a truck that flipped over on the highway. It was full of skittles that were misbranded. And everybody was like, where's that open truck full of skittles? It was huge truck going to. It was going to be cattle feed. So waste products for the human food industry go into feeding our animals. And it's technically illegal to have these, you know,

animals that died otherwise them by slaughter. So they weren't slaughtered for meat, but they just died and they got made into meat. Technically, that's illegal. But when we question FDA about it,

for the past 20 years. And they say, well, we, we choose to overlook this because if, if it didn't

“go to that, it would have to go into our landfills. You don't want to see our landfills filled”

with all this waste, do you? I, well, I'd rather see it in a landfill or fertilizer or something, anything other than what is going into my pet's bowl. Yeah. So back to the youth and Asia thing. So this lady fed her five pugs brand new cans of this food. All five dogs fell over. One lived. Oh my gosh. And so, no, sorry, four lived one died. But they all ended up at the emergency room. The lady had to be a lawyer. So she was smart enough to say, okay, we got to test the stomach contents. We

got to do autopsies on the dog and found that it was youth and Asia solution in the food. Now this was labeled as a human grade USDA approved meat source. It wasn't. It was from the, you know, the guys picked up the dead animals down the road. And so there was youth inized animal meat that got in there and it was in a high enough quantity to cause the death and illness of all her dogs. It was a good lawsuit about it. But that company had this crazy, crazy guy who had been featured

“on their calendars and, you know, yeah, I remember what kind of dog he had. But he was so mad that”

we were speaking out of against this company that he said he was coming to the Afko meeting armed to come after us. I'm sorry. What? And so Afko officials invited him in told him he was welcome at the meeting. So we're in San Diego already and couldn't go to the meeting because they invited this armed crazy person who wanted to kill us. You wouldn't think that pet food is this crazy. It is. I don't even know what to say. I've rarely rendered speechless on this show

and of all things, it's the pet food mafia running rampant. They literally are buying veterinary loyalty. Our pet food companies giving bonus checks and things like that to veterinarians to show their products like what is going on here? They give them free food. They pay for a lot of the continuing education. Which means like special vacations and cruises and stuff.

They just they sponsor all this stuff. So when I first started in practice, well, the second job

out of school, the guy that I worked for sold a lot of prescription diets. Small animal high end practice in a high end community. Literally every patient who walked in the door walked out with one of these prescription diets and he got trips all over the world. Like he was just rewarded. He was the largest seller. It was very small practice, but he was the largest seller of those prescription diets of anybody in the country. Okay, you've blown my mind successfully. Sorry.

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15% off air tube headphones. Are there raw food pet food brands that you do like that are complete meals? Absolutely. Okay. So what we look for when anything that's on my website or anything that I recommend has to be human grade. So whether it's a supplement or a food, any kind of product, it has to be something that I would be willing to use on myself in order for me to use it on my pets. Okay. So we jokingly said, you know, if the poop hits the fan and we eat our pet food and we have

to, you know, we can't go to the grocery store. And if we have to guard something, well, I'm placing one person at the end of our driveway for our farm because we make all of our own food there. But I'm also placing some security at our warehouse because everything in there is human grade, and I won't starve to death for probably 10 years. Oh my gosh, my animals will be fine, and I'll be fine because I am perfectly willing to eat any of the food or any of the products

that are in my warehouse for pets. So mochi eats a raw small batch of sliders. Do you what do you think about small batch brands? We actually like small batch and our pets are about to start eating raw small batch for the next month or so. But we have probably four or five brands that we rotate our own pets through. Okay. I actually have a list and Susan Thixon on truth about pet food has something called the list. The probably has about 40 brands on it, and it says on

there how much it'll cost per day, whether they're human grade, and in order for a company to get on her list, they can't buy their way on. They have to send her the bills of lighting for every single ingredient where it comes from, how it was raised, how it was processed. It's probably the most complete list. I have my own list and it's just companies that I know that I trust so I would can you name it for you? Sure. So I actually formulate a lot of food for all provide out of Georgia.

And so they have actually made my trademarked Pupploaf and Catloaf as well as traditional Chinese veterinary medicine based diets for the personalities. So that's kind of an interesting fun thing. We like small batch. We like steves. We like green juju. Those are we we can't ship frozen food out of our website. So we do the freeze dried. Freeze dried is very similar to the frozen

“raw. It's just more expensive because it went through a freeze drying process and you have to add”

moisture back to it. So whether that's water, bone broth, goat milk, whatever. But the great thing with freeze dried is great for traveling. If if you have a bowl. That's what I do. So my mom has a bag of freeze dried small batch at her house when I just come for like the holidays that is what I make mochi whenever I'm there. But at home what I do is anytime he runs out of a bag of the small batch raw sliders and it's like beef, chicken, duck, rabbit, pork. I get a different type of meat.

Right. So he's going through all these different types of meat so that I keep that different.

Yes. And then I always give him like a couple scoops of pumpkin puree. I do like a little gut

supplement. Sometimes like a turmeric, anti-inflammatory mix or something I put in there. Maybe I put on top like some toppers like some muscles or beef hard or chicken liver, duck liver. I just put a couple of that salmon bites. I just do like random things.

“Perfect. So is that enough or like do I need to do different or more?”

That is really great. So one of the things that I do recommend is so I like rotating proteins. But I also like rotating brands. Okay. And there's a reason for that. If you look at the recipes, all provide isn't like this, but a lot of companies are. The main protein might change, but then when you get three or four ingredients down, everything is the same after that. Makes sense. Like the vegetables or whatever is it right?

we're talking about. They're formulated to be complete in balance. But let's just say,

“for whatever reason there's a micro deficiency in there. You know, maybe that's a little bit”

low in zinc with their formulation for your particular pet. Or maybe it's a little low in vitamin D,

because your pet isn't absorbing it as well. If we have a second or third brand that has a

different formulation, then by switching that in sometimes, maybe we make up for a micro deficiency that there might be there that we don't know about. This is so smart and so helpful. The other thing is let's just say, because we just went through this with all provided, a grinder broke. And so they didn't have any beef product for a couple of months. These couldn't make it. And so they were running short on some things while they were waiting for new equipment to

come in. And people are freaking out. They're like, what do I feed my dog? I'm like, well, if you had two or three brands that you were rotating between, you'd have two more to fall back on. So let's just say small batch had some big problem in their plant. And they couldn't make

their food. What are you going to do? You're going to have to do a quick change and hope that

your dog's gut can handle that change. And usually if you're feeding multiple proteins, they're going to handle a change with no problems. Particularly if you're switching to another high-end frozen raw. So I like to have a couple that I'm switching around between. And everyone's while I'll also just make my own food because I have balanced recipes and I know what I can do. Like I like to just for fun. Sometimes I will buy whole ground rabbit so it's got the entire

rabbit or whole ground quail. I know those aren't balanced completely. So and I know what they're missing. So I can make them pretty close to balance without having to run it through a calculator. So it's like, all right, well, we have raw eggs on our farm and we have raw milk and we have the yogurt that we made from our, you got raw milk and we have sardines. So I know if I throw some of that

stuff in there. Yeah. We're pretty darn close. So I always want to have a backup plan. Like I ran

out of food a couple weeks ago. It's like, I got nothing. Well, you know what, sardines, eggs and yogurt are going to come pretty close. Here you go. So if somebody wants to learn like how to make

“the perfect plate for their exact type of dog, what's the protocol? Like you need to get their blood”

tested. You need to get their gut tested. Not necessarily. So we do have a pet personality profile quiz. So you can download that from the website and figure out, you know, it walks you through. Well, he's got these symptoms of whatever. And then at the end, you can say, oh, look at that. He's a wood personality dog. So wood personalities are prone to these things and it lists them. And then it tells you what to feed to help counteract that, whether they're deficient in something or they

have an excess in something. And we have recipes. We have a lot of free recipes that you can download on our website. We also have a homemade food for dogs 101 course that you can learn starting from using a base mix. So Dr. Harvey's is a company that has really nice base mixes. They have all the vitamins and minerals. And they have the vegetables. They have some that are complete too. But you can add your own meat. So, you know, if you're like, oh,

yes, sounds really expensive and really time-consuming. Well, if you use a base mix,

“and all you have to do is add some meat to it, whether it's raw or cooked and a little bit of oil,”

it's poof, it's pretty easy. Yeah, I like that brand Dr. Harvey's. So, you know, we can do the gamut from it. It's completely done for you, which yes, it's going to be more expensive. It's like eating at a restaurant. It's going to be more expensive. Somebody else made it for you. Then you can go to base mixes. So, you don't have to think a whole lot. And then we have complete recipes with different proteins or for different issues. So, my in and young 2.0

nutrition for dogs, maximizing health with whole foods, not drugs, has over 60 recipes. And so, those recipes are based on Chinese medicine principles, but they're broken down into, no, we have liver problems. We have kidney problems. We have heart problems. We have obesity, cushions, disease, diabetes, whatever. So, that even if you don't, and the book walks you through the Chinese medicine, but for some people, it literally is like learning another language.

So, we make it pretty simple. It's like, well, you know, he's got some heart disease. He's got these symptoms. I'll, I'll try this. Is it acceptable to give dogs tap water? It really depends on your tap water. So, we have a reverse osmosis system on our well, because our well was contaminated. We didn't really have a choice. So, it's a little low in minerals. So, a couple of options that we could try. We could give them one water bowl with just that. We could give them a bowl with spring

water, and we can give them a bowl with a little bit of salt in it and see what they gravitate toward. What we found in our house is they each have their preferred, but there's three bowls. So, each have a preferred bowl. It doesn't matter what's in the bowl. It's like, I'm going to that bowl. I don't care what you put in it. So, it depends on your animal. We do know that a lot of

Yeah. So, it is a good idea. So, when we lived in town before we bought the farm,

I went to the town well website to see when they had last tested the water and what it had in it, and it hadn't been tested for two years. So, we have no idea what's in here. So, if you're not sure, maybe putting some sort of a filter on, there are great test water tests where you can send out and have your water tested. Even though we have reverse osmosis, I still think that we've got an issue. So, I have a kit to send out to see what's in our water. I still want to know.

So, it really depends. Like, some water is so contaminated and some is not so contaminated.

“Is the pet vaccine schedule similar to the childhood vaccine schedule that we just kind of revamped?”

Where there's like a lot of stuff on there that's completely unnecessary. And would you say that

all of it is unnecessary or are there certain vaccines? You're like, okay, every dog should get these two.

It's really interesting because the older I get and the more stuff that happens in the world, the more I'm thinking this whole vaccine thing is just not what it's proposed to be for pets. So, we know, like, when I graduated from school, it was every vaccine every year. Rabies went to every three years. We absolutely know that they're not needed every year. Okay, so they were telling me that they were like, you know, Mochi's going to need his rabies

in, like, another year or something like that. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. Do I have to, or am I going to, is it going to be like dog CPS coming for him? Like, what happened? Sort of. So, where we had our clinics in New Jersey, we were a mile from the local shelter and the animal control officers. And so the county, every summer, would hire high school and college kids to go knock on doors and ask people to show proof of licensing or their animals.

And if you had an animal who wasn't licensed, it's really hard because somebody knocks on the door and all the dogs come running, run, run, run, run, run, run, run and the cats are sitting in the front window. And you can't say, I don't have any pets. Yeah, I don't know, that's somebody else he's just visiting. And so then that would get, if you didn't have them licensed, you would get a fine and you would be given 10 days to get them vaccinated and get them licensed. And most communities

and states will not accept a tighter. So a tighter is a blood test that shows that they have a immunity, which once they have a rabies vaccine, they're probably protected for anywhere from five to seven years, maybe longer just depends. So I was vaccinated with a Reese's monkey experimental rabies vaccine, my senior year of at school in 1984. Yeah, that's, we had to do it. Yeah, there was no choice. We had a couple people who almost died and get really, really sick. Oh my word,

luckily I did find with it, but I got bitten by a rabid kitten probably 25 years later. And my titers were still good. So yeah, he Reese's monkeys, I guess. I don't know. I still had to do the whole seven vaccine post exposure series. So it's going to be different for every pat again. A pebble, the strong immune system that made a good immunity to that vaccine, they're probably going to have a great tighter. But even if you have a tighter that shows that

they're protected, most governmental agencies will not accept that. They will only accept a vaccine. So we want to take one of our dogs to Japan for open heart surgery. And in order to do that,

she had to get a rabies vaccine, a tighter and even if it was good, she had to get a second vaccine

and another tighter. And I said, I'm not willing, you know, I'm willing to spend $45,000 to get my dog's heart surgery. I'm not willing to get my dog to rabies vaccines.

“Side note, why will go to Japan for that? Couldn't you do the surgery?”

Oh, no. This is very specialized. And at that time, it was only being done in Japan. Oh, okay. Now there's some other places doing it. So rabies is the only one that really is governmentally regulated. The rest of them, you may need proof for boarding grooming daycare. The other problem that we have is some veterinary offices insist that your pet be up to date on vaccines in order for them to see them as a patient. Yeah. Well, if that happens,

we will be finding someone else. I can tell you that. But hopefully they're going to accept the tiders because I have a feeling he's going to be fine. So we'll see them are. But that's good to know. I feel like the vaccine thing with pets is as much of a racket as the child of vaccines scheduled personally. Yeah. Okay. People here are chiropractic for pets or acupuncture for pets and they're rolling their eyes and they're like, "Okay, what are we perisilting? Do dogs really

“need all this? This is insane. What's your response?" Again, do we want our pets to thrive or survive?”

And chiropractic, I was not a believer until I learned chiropractic, which was accidental. I didn't know that it was called something else, the course, and I didn't know I was taking a chiropractic course.

I believe in this." And so I stayed throughout the entire course and when I went back to work the next week, the first case in the door was a dog that couldn't walk. I did my new thing and the dog got up and ran out of the door. So I went, "All right, apparently this works." So I used it from that point on in my practice. So for 30 years, I did chiropractic and the results were amazing. I started doing it on horses. We had a huge equine chiropractic practice. My horse had arthritis problems and

needed injections into his joints in order to keep him mobile. Until I started doing chiropractic on

and that solved the issue and he never had another injection. After I started doing chiropractic

and then I added acupuncture to it. So the whole thing with chiropractic is keeping nerve flow, blood flow, and energy flow circulating throughout the body. So anybody who's ever had a muscle spasm or your back locks up and you know that it hurts to move it, you know, maybe I had one arm that was numb for a year because I had a problem in my neck that I couldn't solve. So when we don't have perfect nerve blood and energy flow coming from the spine,

nothing else works. For instance, if you watch your dog trot away from you, are there legs moving

“in a nice fluid motion? Is there tail head going back and forth? Are they loose in their spine?”

Or is there tail rigid and are the legs moving like pistons? If they're moving like pistons and everything is rigid, they need some help. And what I found, I did the chiropractic first and then I learned acupuncture. And what I found is that the two agreed 100%. But how do you put acupuncture needles on a pet? Aren't they like rolling around? So we usually do a permission point on their forehead and that kind of chills them out and they usually fall asleep. So we would get our needles in the

fall asleep and then after 15 to 20 minutes and I saw this on my horses as well. After about they fall asleep like they're literally their noses are touching the ground and after about 20 minutes their head pops up and their eyeballs blink and then they give a big ole shake, needles fly everywhere and that's like I'm done. Well if I find out what is causing inflammation emoji,

“acupuncture I know might be good because that can help the body heal that area, right?”

Yes. So that's I'm a curious about the balancing, the whole body. I'm into it because I I talk about acupuncture. I've had an acupuncture on the show for humans and so I understand the benefits for the human body and I'm all in for pets too. Is it ever too late to turn your pets

out around? It is never too late. So one of the things that my husband and I have been really, really

into for ever since we've been together is pet rescue and so we have done some really crazy things in the pet rescue world. We want to drove from New Jersey to Missouri to go to a dog auction to rescue a bunch of Cavalier King's Charles Spannels that were being sold at auction which a lot of these are puppy mill dogs that have been used for breeding and these animals have been living their lives in little cages to feed by two feet. Been used for breeding had no veterinary care,

eating very poor quality food. They come to us with ear infections, eye infections, skin infections, arthritis, chronic disease. I mean you name it there a mess and one of our best ones was Charlie. He was turned in by a puppy mill breeder at the age of eight. He only had four rotten teeth left and his X-rays for arthritis were the worst I had ever seen. Charlie was put on his raw food diet. We solved all of his issues and he lived to 19. Oh my word and was happy, healthy. He had a

four-wheeled cart because his arthritis was so bad but he was just the happiest guy and we've done

that with so many of these rescues. So it is never too late. I'm chief veterinary officer for a group

called Monkeys House senior dog hospice in sanctuary in New Jersey. All of the dogs that go to Monkeys House come from high kill shelters and they all have a terminal diagnosis. So they get dropped off at the shelter and the shelter vet will say, "Oh he's got cancer, he's got kidney disease, liver failure, heart disease, what most of them have a combination of all of those and Michelle puts those dogs on a whole food diet tailored to their issues and then whatever

diagnostics and surgical procedures, dental cleanings that need to get them sort of put back together and a lot of them are coming with a prognosis of a couple of days to a couple of weeks to live.

“And I think her longest one has been there like eight years. That's incredible because it's only”

dogs in the New Jersey area. They're coming from all over. She mostly does Philadelphia, okay, high kill shelters there and New Jersey, but I over the past 12 years,

They cannot, I am retired. Oh Dr. J. So how do you find? Is there a database or a website to find

“a holistic veterinarian who has the same mindset as you in their individual states? It's very”

difficult. So a couple of things that can be done. HVMA.org, the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association.org, has a veterinary finder and so that would be people who are members of the AHVMA and the databases in huge because there aren't that many of us to put in your state and it'll it'll say, it'll list all the veterinarians and it'll say what they do, whether they do acupuncture nutrition, homeopathy, whatever their specialty is. So that is a starting point.

I take very, very few phone consultations these days just because I'm a little busy, but we do have a list of about a dozen veterinarians that will do telemedicine conversations. You do have to have a local veterinarian that you are working with that can you know, supply the lab work and the diagnostic information that that veterinarian will need to work with, but we have some who specialize in working with people who have pets with cancer and others who specialize in nutritional

needs. So you can reach out to us through our website and we can supply that list, but also HVMA.org to find that in person. Do you have a podcast? I do. Tell everyone about that.

“So it's the Dr. Judy Morgan is naturally healthy pets podcast and we've, I think we're in our third”

year. I had one years back for a couple of years and I quit due to lack of time, but now I have this whole team that helps me. So it's much easier now. It's really nice having a team. So we interview holistic veterinarians and people who are making products or have companies that are

doing amazing things. We look at latest research that's coming out and we also do an in-person

event every other year because it takes a lot to put them on, but our next one will be in Dallas in April of 27 and we have six top speakers from around the world that will be coming in. And do people bring their pets? No. Oh, service animals are allowed, but it is a time when about 700 like-minded individuals who like raw feeding and like everything natural and then we will have close to 100 vendors and these are all hand-picked by us. Oh, I love it. So that everything

is human grade, really above board and one of the things with us, it's not even just about the products. It's about the people behind the companies. So if you have a company that doesn't work with good integrity and good morals and you're not friends with other people in the space, that's going to be a problem for us. And then tells about your book. So I actually have nine books that I've written. I've got all the way from raising naturally healthy pets, which is sort of

the intro into the holistic pet. How to find the right veterinarian, how to talk to them about not doing all the vaccines and all the different things that we've talked about. After that is keeping your pets naturally healthy, which goes through all the different organ systems and different diseases and talks about how we would treat them from a traditional standpoint versus a more natural standpoint, how to combine the two. We have a couple of cookbooks. The Yen and Yang 2.0 is the

most recent. I have K9 kitchen capers, which is just a fun read. Those were actually stories submitted by pet parents who were just going over the top making meals for their pets. Meanwhile, their families getting served hot dogs and cold cereal. So we can't have that. So that's really fun. We have a book called Protecting Your Pets Against Paracites. So you were asking all the questions about flees and ticks and Lyme disease and heartworms. That's all in that book.

“And then we have one about dog parks called Unleashed. What is your Instagram? I think everything's”

under Dr. Judy Morgan. Okay, perfect. If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, it could be physically emotionally or spiritually what would it be? Food. We have to start with food. It's the foundation. Again, I mean, that spiritual mental physical getting them out there, getting them moving, interacting. That is so, so important. But again, if we're just feeding them

toxins, we're never going to get good health. So we have to start there. Dr. Judy,

thanks for coming on Culture of Pothi Carey. Thank you so much. It's been so much fun. Are you going to be doing vaccines for your pets? Have you tried a raw food diet? Will you? Would you ever have your dog? See a chiropractor or acupunctureist? I'm curious. Let me know in the KeepServative Facebook group. New episodes of Culture of Pothi Carey come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific 9 p.m. Eastern with new expert guests anywhere you get your podcast.

You can find the show on Instagram at Culture of Pothi Carey who post tons of cool stuff there guides

This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. A Malks Clark and this is Culture of Pothi Carey.