Sorry yet again for my on-going silence - we had a hitch with Billy losing lots of weight and needing a few days in hospital being fattened up. So all a bit scary but ok again now. So I have lots of articles to post and catch up with.
In the meantime.....
... I'm a novice yet highly opinionated (me?!) dog-owner-to-be and I was wondering if there are any magazines I should be reading and that aren't too annoying. Or web-sites? The equivalent of Natural Horsemanship magazine would be fab but if that's over-optimistic then one of the normal glossy types.
Are people here fans of the BARF diet or any others? I've been intrigued by BARF ever since I didn't get any of my minor/intermittent allergy symptoms with the first BARF dogs I met. But I've become more sceptical since learning more about dog evolution and the BARF theories seem to depend on the crappy wolf/dog theories. Not that I've read it properly - should I? If the diet is good then does it matter about the theories that underpin it?
In doggy circles, is the vaccination debate as contentious? Or does everyone just do the jabs as prescribed? Likewise worming, flea treatments etc. Where can I go to get a balanced opinion? haha - how's that for wishful thinking?!
Think that's it for now but I'm sure there will be lots more....
- something I've been meaning to get into, but in the meantime, the law says we must vaccinate, so vaccinate we do. Similar doubts with worming and those horrible pipettes to squeeze on the back of their necks against ticks etc.
Looking forward to a flood of information!
Rita
Not sure if that link is good.......let me know if not and I'll try again
R
OK, looked up BARF - I should have been able to guess it.
As a vegan, I find the whole idea of finding ever more ways of maintaining the meat market horrific: it makes no economic sense,either, but of course the producers are desperate to keep selling - have a look at this article, for example: (there are no horrors in it)
Of course it's true that dogs and cats should eat something more resembling the diet they evolved to consume, (although dogs do not actually need taurine and can be vegetarian - and I see that the formulae for the BARF feeds contain a lot of veggies -) but surely that should mean we have to think long and hard about the way we keep animals, and the way we privilege some over others. We should be looking to minimize even human consumption of meat, out of solidarity with the world and other humans and out of care for our own health, not bumping up our "pets" consumption of the same.
It should be possible to minimise the destruction we wreak by keeping carnivorous animals as pets - by own preparation of ethically sourced foostuffs, perhaps - instead of trusting to the ready-made BARF foods, which I notice are trademarked and are, therefore, making money for someone in packeting, marketing, publicity, transport etc. At any rate, that would seem to be the direction in which to look! After all, hounds were traditionally fed left over hunters (the horses, not the people!), which I'm sure was great for them, but no-one thinks that's such a good idea for their old family pony, these days. To bump up the meat trade with expensive dog-food preparations is akin to keeping fox-hunting going to feed the hounds with the casualties!
As always, it comes down to a radical re-think of our attitudes to other species, and the dog-and-cat-diet part is not easy, at least not for me.
Magazines - wishful thinking! I find the doggy magazines excruciating - hardly anything on behaviour or ethical dog keeping and with an added hideous 'cute' feel that the horse ones don't even do. I will watch this thread with interest incase anyone has found a good dog magazine.
My dog is a veterinary nightmare wrt food and has to have a very specific prescription diet so not really read up on it as I would if I had a normal dog. I think that the most important thing with feeding is that you feed something that takes a long time to eat - bones/chews and the like. Dogs need to spend time chewing etc so providing dry or wet feed in a bowl that they can just inhale in two minutes wouldn't meet their needs for behavioural eating and is the equivalent of feeding horses hard feed with no grazing.
Vaccinations are contentious but if you ever need to put him/her in boarding kennels then you need to keep them up to date...
Hope Billy is tickety boo, now. Sorry to hear he was unwell.
Re: Dogs. As Suz says, the magazines are excruciating. They're aimed more at show types and 'fashionable' dog owners. From my meals at The Punchbowl, I've learnt that you get better info in the Shooting Gazette and similar!
I used to feed Jasper (springer) on BARF and when I eventually get another dog I won't hesitate to do the same. I did buy a couple of BARF books, but to be honest they made things far too complicated, adding special ingredients that I didn't think were part of a dog's natural diet and the recipes were like 100 carrot cakes rolled into one.
So, I simply went off what a dog would eat naturally. As a natural scavenger and poor hunter (I thought Cape Hunting Dog rather than wolf or fox), I used poultry as the bulk part of his diet. For this I collected bags of chicken/turkey carcasses from the butcher. At first it was free, then the buggers cottoned on and started charging me £2.50 a bag. Still cheap, though!
I also added in the odd turkey leg as a treat, offal in the form of hearts, liver and ox-tail (I warn you, it's hard to find this stuff organic). I also had the odd pheasant (two road kill but undamaged bodies, one that Jasper caught himself - good boy!).
A typical meal would involve half a chicken carcass or 4 chicken wings, alternatively 2 chicken legs. Another meal might be offal - half a heart, some liver ... to that I added any veg that wasn't toxic to him. So, broccoli, carrots, peas, parsnip/swede. A lot of this was off-cuttings from our own meal. I also saved egg shells and ground them with a pestle and mortar, sprinkling a teaspoon over a meal if it contained mostly offal. Jasper had the loveliest dog poos in Britain! Solid and non-smelly!
You'll get a better idea as you go on, but the meal size doesn't need to be big at all. Jasper was a skin-sensitive ddog before BARF, and farted like a trooper. He was absolutely transformed by the diet and needed no supplementation in the 2 years I fed it to him. The vet was very impressed with his condition (the diet didn't help his coordination and he ran into the fork of a tractor, durr!).
As far as vaccinations go, it's up to you. To use kennels, most insist on the yearly boosters, but our dog went to Mark's Mum's. With the cats I do every two years after the initial course. If you look at the individual vaccine data (search by brand and type of vaccine), most last for at least three years and some last for life. Most of it's a complete con!
Hope that helps. There are specialist BARF forums, but I haven't looked at them for years. They seemed to be mostly Americans who 'cooked' better for their dogs than they did for themeselves!
Oh, if you do get an entire pheasant, make sure the gall bladder isn't damaged. Believe me you'll know about it!
p.s. I wouldn't recommend the pre-fab BARF foods, such as Nature's Diet. It's the equivalent of giving a kid savoury smoothies day in, day out. Very little fibre in them and already masticated. Not to mention the sourcing of ingredients, as Rita points out.
Also, bear in mind that cheaper chicken may have more brittle bones. I went to a butcher who sold free-range and organic.
Thanks for all of that. Shame about the magazines, I should have guessed!
As for BARF, yes it was definitely the DIY version I was interested in. I think the pre-fab stuff has come about since I heard of the diet and had forgotten it existed.
Rita, I've always been intrigued about the idea of veggie dogs/cats. So do you support that because you believe they are healthier on a veggie diet or because it goes against your ethics? How far should we go in "imposing" our ethics on our animals? eg I prefer +R for training but I don't expect Jak to renounce punishment as a way of interacting with other horses (or even me for that matter!). And playing devil's advocate - how about zoo animals? (given that they do exist and leaving aside the question of whether they should exist!) Should we try to make them veggie too? Or is it different if they are not domesticated? Or is it down to omnivore vs carnivore? (Genuinely interested in your thoughts and hope this doesn't sound confrontational because not intended...)
As for vaccinations - having fun regarding Billy in that respect, sigh.. Sod's law that the paediatrician whose care we were under in hospital organises the vaccination programme and gave me a right b*llocking for having an opinion on the subject. I thought it was a balanced and open-minded opinion.....! Hmmmm, I guess I'll have to get reading up on the doggy ones - maybe next year and just have done with them to start with....
Catherine
This message has been edited by Brocksopp on Jun 5, 2008 5:51 PM
It's a vital question, I think, this one of how we line up other species to suit our perceived needs and/or interests (the Biobigotry thread has some relevant observations here). For me, it's not so much a question of whether our personal ethical stance should affect our treatment of "our" animals - making dogs or cats go vegetarian, for example - as seeing such practices as feeding "pets" on other animals,(these being rendered helpless and unable to escape, unlike "natural" prey), as straws in the ethical wind.
Seeing that it is mostly necessary to feed dogs and cats meat,for instance, could make us ask: "Is the practice of keeping/privileging carnivore ethically legitimate at all?". The zoo example, again, could give us pause to question the whole practice - as Catherine says, it's a given at the moment that zoos exist, just as do millions of "pet" dogs and cats, but the mere fact that these institutions oblige us to behave towards some species in ways which we ourselves would consider cruel and reprehensible if we behaved thus towards others should make us reflect on whether there is something amiss at the very heart of our attitude to non-human species. The results of human treatment of the naural world in general shows us that we are capable of destroying the whole thing to serve our own ends, whilst feeling few pricks from our consciences. Unfortunately, the simple fact of enjoying something does not guarantee its ethical status, as countless unequal power relations throughout human history shows.
We tend to resist really deep questioning of our attitudes to animals, because of an immediate feeling of alarm that the right to enjoy animals' company - even to save them from awful fates - is going to be taken away if we admit that radical change is due. This, I think, is unnecessary - in our lifetime, there will still be horse, cats, dogs and a long etc. needing care and guardianship and we can share our lives with them, but I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that we should be shaping a different future for animal-human relations and teaching future generations to share the world with other species on a different basis - preserving wild habitats instead of zoos, not breeding animls who will never enjoy the life they evolved for and generally trying to see our place on the planet as part of a sustainable pattern, instead of insisting on our role as problem makers and problem solvers in chief.
We have to solve day to day problems of how we treat other species on an ad hoc basis, but I for one am convinced that there are lessons in these very problems which could be very productive of good for both humans and non-humans, if we have the courage to see which way the evidence is really pointing.
Rita
Bloomin' 'eck guys - this is all a bit heavy. However, it's certainly a topic very close to my heart and one which makes my head explode if I think about it all too much.
Can I widen this discussion a bit please? - Just the other day I was talking to someone who keeps two horses on her own land. She is looking to send one horse away on permenant loan because she no longer has the time required for her. I asked about how the remaining horse would do if left on his own. Her view was that he'd been kept on his own in the past and showed no signs of stress. I wanted to ask how she assessed stress but didn't want to open a can of worms. On the other end of the spectrum, I know of someone who won't keep horses at all because she hasn't got 25 sq mile of land for them to roam over and she won't keep them 'less than ideal'.
It occurred to me that for some people (me included) keeping a horse on its own is absolutely out of the question. However, I'm also aware that my horses do not a have an ideal life. In fact, I don't know of anyone whose horses do by 'natural' standards. On the other hand, if our horses could choose, would they opt to sacrifice some of their freedoms for some of the advanatges of being domesticated?? Of course we don't know, so the questions is, how far are people prepared to compromise and how to you assess whether its working for your horses? Can there even be an objective measure of what's working for them since peoples perceptions of what they are seeing are all so totaly different. One persons 'not stressed' might be another persons 'shut down'. How do you draw the lines beyond which you're not prepared to go with your horses.
OK - now me head really is going to explode cos I've thought about this too much today!!!
cheers,
cath
Happy to talk to you about this when you come up. Feed mine on a variety of raw meats and add a herbal supplement (Hilton's "Vital Health") daily and fish oils three or four times a week. Plus cooked veggies left over from human meals. Burdy is also partial to raw carrots, apples, fibre nuts and horse poo.
Nope, no decent doggie mags that I've come across.
Thanks Rita, and sorry for delayed response. Great posts that really get me thinking. And will continue to do so, I don't really have any response for you as I need to get my thoughts in order!
I was on holiday a week ago and a similar subject arose. The gite owners had chickens and encouraged us to throw scraps to the chickens - including bacon scraps because chickens are not veggie and so can eat meat. To me that seemed really odd, there seems a world of difference between chickens pecking at grubs etc and eating cured pork. So I guess I would think similarly with a dog, along the lines Diane mentions.
But I also like Rita's argument - more thinking required......
We passed our "test" with the rescue people. Just need to install garden gate and wait for our lab to turn up. no idea of timescale though!
Cath - ooooh, good questions! On my same holiday I got chatting to the gite owner's son, trying to help find solutions to his future loan pony's set-up, mainly trying to provide him with some equine company. I encouraged him to look at the needs of a wild horse and always strive to replicate them as best you can. So free movement, company, foraging etc. A big step up from what he has in current stable yard, even if it still won't be perfect. Jak's doing next to nothing at the moment and momentarily decided not be caught the minute he saw the headcollar on saturday (was badly in need of hoof trim!). But soon reconsidered when he smelled herbal treats - so yes, he does choose to sacrifice the odd freedom for a benefit of domestication.
As for "not stressed" vs "shut down". maybe I'm just way too arrogant but I firmly believe this is down to education less than difference of opinion. If more people spent moretime studying motivation, +R etc rather than different ways of applying pressure then this would be much less of an issue.