Raw food diet: How do I transition my animal?

If you haven't already, please read the "things to consider..."article before beginning to transition your companion.

For most cats and dogs transitioning to raw should be done gradually at first. You should take the time to figure out how your animal is going to respond. We don’t want you to potentially sabotage a successful transition to a raw food diet by suddenly putting down a plate of raw food for your pet without a gradual phase-in period.
Rather, we suggest that you eliminate any surprised reactions by your pet by “testing the waters” first. We recommend placing a teaspoon or tablespoon of raw meat or chicken on top of your animal’s dinner food that you have typically used in the past. See what she/he does with it. See if she/he eats the sample of meat along with the other food, and if so then proceed with the suggestions shown below. Note that if your animal is not attracted to the raw food sample, call us or e-mail us and we’ll share our experiences with you about how to convert reluctant animals.

If all goes well and you are ready to begin the transition process...Start out by substituting part of the typical size meal with raw meat or chicken. Remember, you are using their regular quantity of food as a guide or starting point.

(Diagram days 1-3)

On days 1 to 3, place a ½ teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of raw ground beef or raw ground chicken on top of your animal’s regular food serving and see what she does with the raw food.

With your cat or small dog the ground texture will be helpful. If your dog is medium size and up, chunks of chicken or beef will be just fine. The quantity of food will be governed by the size of your companion.

(Diagram days 3-6)

If all goes well—that is, if no detox signs are apparent—then on days 3-6, increase the amount of raw food to ¼ the total amount of food decreasing the total amount of commercial food by ¼.




(Diagram days 6-9) Again if no signs of detox on days 6-9, then increase the amount of raw meat to ½ the total amount of food decreasing the total amount of commercial food by ½.
Yet another change is coming. For days 9-12, add in some veggies now that we know your companion likes the raw meat. We suggest that you start with a small amount of grated or mashed veggies. No frozen vegetables because they have a high sodium content. Eeuw! You can start out by sharing some of your steamed veggies if you like. You will need such a small amount of veggies at first, a ½ teaspoon to 1 tablespoon depending on the size of the animal and the total amount of the meal.

(Diagram days 9-12)

On days 9-12, the increased amount of raw food will include a small portion of vegetables. At this point you are up to ¾ raw to ¼ commercial foods.

(Diagram days 12-15) So on days 12-15, with very little signs of detoxification, your companion should be having a complete meal of fresh foods, consisting of 75% to 92% meat with 25% to 8% veggies respectively.

Most books say 25% vegetables to 75% meat. Cats and small dogs are fine with the smaller percent of veggies and the larger percent of meat. Medium and large dogs are fine with larger amounts of veggies because the serving size of their meal is bigger so they automatically get more meat in their diet. Let your animal guide you. Play around with the ratios of protein to vegetable until you hit a level that works for both of you. Some animals need special ratios for their specific needs. But most are just fine on the prepared meals sold in stores, which are typically 25% vegetables to 75% meat. Now is a good time to acclimate them to a calcium supplement. By now, you know the drill. Start out with a small amount at first then increase from the introductory amount gradually. The instructions on the package will be helpful in determining the amount of calcium supplement to work towards.

Homeopathic Healing for Pets - Santa Monica, CA

Below is an article written by a girl who came to me with her cat in an extremely critical state. She interviewed me after the cat dramatically improved, but never told me this had been published. I came across it today by chance, via Google.

Link to original article.

Homeopathic Healing for Pets

Say Goodbye to Huge Veterinarian Bills

By: Aavi Haas

Edition: 9 December 2008

There’s nothing like the heartache you feel over a sick pet. Concerned pet owners end up spending tons of money, time, energy and emotions over the health of a beloved animal. We’ve got health insurance for ourselves but what about cute little Fido when he gets sick? What do we do? We spend every last cent we have at the vet on shots, x-rays, prescription foods and more, many times only to be left without a solution to what the actual problem with our pet really is. It seems like the pet care system is trying to strip us of our hard earned paychecks and yet we don’t know what more we can do as caring and responsible pet owners.

I recently had a scare with my beloved Siamese, Jack. I could not care more for him, as if he were my own child. I would truly do anything for this cat, including spending everything I have in order to keep him healthy and happy. I woke up one morning to a yowling cat and a pile of vomit on my freshly vacuumed carpet. Jack had thrown up before and I had thought nothing of it in the past but this time was different. His fluffy grey and white belly was protruding and swollen. His dewy eyes had a gooey substance within their corner pockets. His water bowl was full; he had not drunk anything in over 24 hours and his mangy coat had indicated a serious dehydration. My heart was quickly sinking with worry and compassion for the poor little fellow. He looked me in the eyes as if trying to communicate with me, “Mom, I don’t feel good. Please help me.” I immediately racked my brain for a solution and there didn’t seem to be one except for a trip to the vet.

I packed up kitty in his green faux snakeskin carry case and made sure he was cozily tucked inside a fluffy sheepskin blanket. Once in the car, I unzipped the case so that he could jump out and roam about free in the car. He sniffed around, explored the car a bit and settled into my lap as I drove. We got to the vet and both waited anxiously. After a quick yet seemingly thorough examination, I walked out loaded with expensive medications and specialized foods but down a few hundred dollars. A few days later, and an even sicker cat, I grew more and more upset. I didn’t know what to do but take him back to the vet. Walking out of the vet’s office once again, I was now down about six hundred dollars and still had no solution.

After a few more days of what seemed to be a dying cat and much grief, I decided to take matters into my own hands and take an alternative route. I am familiar with alternative medicine for people but I hadn’t really considered it for animals until now. I had spoken with a friend of mine who has a French poodle. My friend happens to be the poster child for alternative medicine. I told her about my poor little Jack and she recommended that I get in touch with a woman named Lita who is a pet medical intuitive. With my curiosity highly peaked and desperate enough to try anything, I gave her a call.

Lita Cesar is a trained and licensed Homeopath who’s been working as a medical intuitive since 2000. Trained at the American University of Complimentary Medicine, she originally got involved with alternative medicine after becoming frustrated with the mainstream animal care system. She had spent tons of money trying to save the life of her beloved dog that was dying of cancer. She ultimately found a homeopathic doctor who suggested an alternative solution. I asked Lita what she thought of the mainstream pet care system. “You can’t love animals and do what you do to them today,” says Lita. They are overly medicated, overly vaccinated and fed the wrong foods.” The biggest culprit in pet food, I asked? “Grains, no question about it: pets do not have enough of the digestive enzyme Amylase that breaks down carbohydrates, so when a pet consumes food with grains, it immediately creates an unfavorable situation. Anything that converts into sugar is absolutely disastrous for animals.”

Interesting – could food have been the culprit with Jack? I have to admit, Jack does enjoy fresh mangoes every once in a while or even a nice baked sweet potato. I felt guilty, as if I was a bad parent and it was solely my fault for his poor health. Lita reassured me that he would be well again yet warned me that he wasn’t doing so well. She asked me to touch him so that she could feel his energy through me, on the other end of the phone. A few minutes later, she had come up with a remedy for his ailments. Could it really be that simple? It was like magic and I couldn’t wait to get started. She gave me the name of a homeopathic remedy and told me that I could get it at the Santa Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy. But, how much was it? I had spent so much money already and was nervous to hear the cost. She told me and I was shocked: only nine dollars. Unbelievable, I thought. I had spent over six hundred dollars at the vet and now this pet intuitive was telling me that a nine-dollar natural remedy was the solution and that it would only take a day before he would get better.

I couldn’t help but wonder how she found the remedy. “A homeopath will typically do something that’s called taking a case. It’s about a three hour long process that involves a series of questions about the patients’ symptoms. The homeopath will then go through their database and match as best they can the symptoms with an ailment. Then, they go about finding a remedy. My work is strictly intuitive. It’s not recognized by the medical community but it’s a science that’s quite old.” How could intuitive work be a science, I wondered? “I use a pendulum,” Says Lita. “It helps the energy flow. A pendulum is a weighted object at the connected to the end of a short thin chain. It’s a sort of meter for reading energy. Everything has energy. Because we don’t see it, we don’t recognize it as existing in this society.” I would have to agree with her. In our culture, we need to see in order to believe. We have become disassociated with our intuition, with our true feelings.

All I knew was that Lita was my hero, and Jack’s for that matter. It didn’t matter if it was an Alien with magic green dust that cured Jack. All I was concerned with was helping my furry friend. Lita was right. A day after administering Jack his homeopathic little pellets, his health had improved. Within three days, Jack’s health was better than ever. With a deep sense of relief and only thirty dollars later, I was certainly impressed. In the future, I’ll think twice about taking my little guy back to the vet. I think I’ll go the alternative route from now on.

Lita Caesar CHM - The Dark Side of the Commercial Pet Food Industry:Rendering Plants

It is extremely important that cat and dog owners everywhere know about this recycling process that is at the center of the billion dollar pet food industry... Rendering Plants.
It is impossible to make an informed decision about what to feed your companions if you don’t know about rendering and the part it plays in the food chain.
It's interesting how rendering plants came into being.

Only a percentage of every food animal is used when making human foods, while the rest is considered unfit for human consumption. The 50% deemed unfit has to be disposed of. Slaughter houses and packing plants were sending out these portions with the trash and they ended up in landfills. How to properly handle the toxic waste created by the “disposed” animal carcasses became a big issue. Due to eminent government regulations the slaughter houses had to find a better way to dispose of the “unusable” portions. What do industries do when they can no longer dispose of their toxic waste in the trash? They either pay heavy fees for toxic disposal or they “RECYCLE”. Out of the desire to recycle this trash the rendering industry began.
Let’s define rendering. 1: to extract (as lard) by heating 2: DELIVER, GIVE; also: YIELD 5: to cause to be or become: MAKE. You get the idea. Creating a facility to expel ingredients out of leftover scraps, there by creating “usable” by-products was actually a financial stroke of genius. There are approximately 286 rendering plants in the U.S. today that recycle about 40 billion pounds of slaughter house waste such as blood, bone, viscera, noses, beaks, hooves, hair, feathers, cartilage, fats, diseased and decaying tissue, intestines, eyeballs, brains, spinal cords (BSE; Mad cow disease resides in central nervous system tissue). In recent times rendering plants have expanded their repertoire of resources to include restaurant grease, spoiled supermarket meats, road kill, euthanized zoo and domesticated animals.

Because of the rendering process some of these animal parts are used in the multi billion dollar make-up industry. In looking for other options it made sense to the food manufacturers to use some of the “unfit for human consumption” parts to feed animals, who don’t care what they eat as long as they get to eat. Hard to believe the 16 billion dollar pet food industry grew out of the need to recycle animal carcasses!
It is a process by which heat is used to extract or make something usable. Rendering is the opposite of “cold pressed” in terms of the process used to expel a by-product. The use of high temperatures of heat kills off bacteria, viruses, parasites, and other organisms. That sounds like a good thing, right? And it is if you want to sterilize something. This process of using high temperatures sterilizes, denatures, and destroys natural enzymes and proteins in the food making it unsuitable and empty of nutrients. It kills everything; good and bad. So the mandatory use of high temperatures to cure these dead carcasses allows the rendering plants to use human grade animal leftovers, as well as dead, dying, diseased, disabled animals and anything else unfit for human consumption. Once rendered this by product is considered safe to use for make-up, fertilizer, animal feed, industrial lubricants, soap, rubber, and other products.
Another important rendering description to know is “meal”, which is the name given to some of the animal by-products from rendering plants used in pet food. “Meal” consists mainly of leftover scraps: bones, beaks, heads, feet, blood, and much more!!! “Meal” is another name for materials that have been rendered or not used fresh. It can also be called beef-and-bone-meal or pork-and-bone-meal or chicken-and-bone-meal etc. These terms conjure up images of wholesome animal parts when a more appropriate term would be, cooked by products devoid of nutrients.
In the past there have been accusations that the pet food companies use rendered pets and road- kill in their pet foods. Claims the industry denies. Tests have been conducted looking for dog and cat DNA in pet food. No feline or canine DNA was found. There is still no regulation banning the use of these materials. What the FDA did find though, is pentobarbital, the most common euthanasia drug used to "put down" animals. The ingredients commonly associated with the presence of pentobarbital were meat-and-bone-meal and animal fat.

Tail of the Mill

Now that we’ve talked about the "animal" proteins used for pet foods it’s time to talk about gluten, which is another inadequate protein for dogs and cats. It is one of the main ingredients in kibble or dry food. Pet food companies want you to believe that they use nothing but the most wholesome ingredients. They conjure up images of high-quality whole grains in their foods, when in fact they use what is commonly called “tail of the mill”. This is really left behind residuals of the grains used in the production of human foods. A more accurate list of components would be hulls, chaff, straw, dust, dirt, and sand swept from the mill floor. Dogs and Cats will not thrive on whole or partial grains. Dry foods contain large amounts of grain parts as fillers. We all know that cereals, simple-carbohydrates, turn to sugar during digestion. Pet food manufactures boost protein levels in pet food by adding in extra gluten found in grain fragments, after the carbohydrates are removed. This is simply debris to fill up our companions and is impossible to assimilate as well as inappropriate for their species (see Kymythy Shultze). Cats and dogs do not manufacture amylase, the digestive enzyme needed to assimilate cereals or simple carbohydrates. This is not the diet for a carnivore. Our animals need animal protein in order to thrive and be healthy. Gluten (grain protein) is not a viable replacement.

In closing, the proteins in commercial pet food are not accessible because of the high temperatures required by the FDA in the rendering process. Much of the protein in kibble is unsuitable because it is the wrong kind of protein. Commercial pet foods can have denatured animal proteins and large amounts of cereal grains that turn to sugar. How healthy could that be? It sounds like “junk food”. Doesn’t it? What the pet food industry does have is great advertising, veterinary endorsements, “RECALLS”, and high profit margins. What is not revealed between the ingredients list is chemicals, harsh preservatives, fillers like melamine, poisons, etc.(see BARF WORLD) It makes sense to feed companions foods that help them thrive and maintain their health. We recommend feeding only human grade products because the regulations are stricter in this category than in the “animal feed” category.
We also recommend feeding a species appropriate diet (LINK). What do you recommend feeding your companions now that you know where the ingredients in pet foods come from?