Pet Topics

There are many good reasons why pet owners should question the wholesomeness and goodness of commercial pet foods. Just a few years ago, there was a huge recall of pet foods involving a vast number of pet food brands due to the detection of poisons in the food. Because the problem was so widespread, it’s been suggested that over 10,000 dogs died as a result of the tainted food while others became seriously ill.

Even so-called “high quality” dog foods were recently discovered to have high levels of aflatoxin and had to be removed from store shelves. Liver cancer is known to be a possibility after consumption of fungi like aflatoxin.

These problems have caused concern in many pet owners. Many have searched for food sources that they can trust with some suggesting araw meat diet for dogs.

A raw meat diet? Commercial pet food producers don’t want you to do that! At the risk of having profits reduced, pet food companies certainly don’t want you to consider deserting their offerings. In an attempt to persuade pet owners not to switch their pets’ diets, the giant pet food companies are trying to warn of the “risks” of a raw food diet.

But many dog owners are talking excitedly about the health advantages they are seeing after switching their dog to a raw diet of meat and bones. These benefits for their pets include:

• Vast improvement in the stool (fecal matter)
• Fewer visits to the Veterinarian due to decreased health concerns
• Fewer allergic reactions

These are but a few of the benefits. The pet food industry retorts that this is just anecdotal evidence and don’t want you to think that there is any real benefit to a raw meat diet. They claim that feeding a raw diet has greater risks including that of bacterial infection.

Perhaps most of the evidence is anecdotal, but for those who are nervous about quality control in commercial feeds, there’s not much else to go by. Do you think the big pet food producers will be funding studies anytime soon on the quality of raw vs. their products?

It’s not hard to feed your dog a raw meat and bones diet. There is some hesitation on the part of pet lovers, but the risks in feeding raw are quite low when you consider the risks of contaminated dog food.

Another issue is the manner in which commercial foods are labelled, wanting us to believe that the primary ingredient in their food is meat. This is not true – it may be the first ingredient listed, but most of the time, the weight of total grains is far higher than the weight of the meat in kibble.

A raw meat diet should also include bones. While some
might balk at the idea of feeding their dogs bones (not heavy bones that they cannot crush with their teeth), canines in the wild do consume bone material. We’ve been told many times that bones are a choking and splintering hazard – but this is only true when the bones are cooked. The cooking process makes the bones harder and more prone to splintering. Digestibility of uncooked bones by dogs is very good. Dogs that chew on and eat raw bones generally have little to no tartar buildup and their teeth are pearly white.

Despite what the commercial dog food companies say (and the veterninarians that are sponsored by these corporations), while the evidence is anecdotal, there’s a lot of it that indicates a raw meat diet is a healthy diet for dogs.

Click to learn more about meat and bones diet for dogs.

Immiticide is the only drug which has authorization from the Food and Drug Administration with regard to the treatment of heartworm in your dog. A different name for this drug would be Melarsomine. This kind of drug shouldn’t be wrongly identified as the heartworm preventive medicines given to dogs. It is only reliable to fight adult worms, it won’t have an affect on the immature larvae which are killed by preventive treatments and it is required to be administered by a veterinary.

While this medicine is a prescription drug based on a toxin, arsenic, it is actually much, much less dangerous than the former treatment options using arsenic and unlike earlier treatment options, will not lead to toxicosis (which is merely another way of stating that it won’t lead to health problems caused by poisoning). Nevertheless, this specific drug is not approved for any other creature than canines and is not approved with regards to human use.

Even though, as stated earlier on, this drug is a great deal less dangerous in comparison with its predecessors, it may have a number of unwanted side effects, the most frequent of which could be the obstruction of blood vessels because of dead worms getting transported along while in the dog’s bloodstream. An obstruction of that kind is named a thromboembolus and any time more than one is produced, these are referred to as thromboemboli. Due to the location where the adult heartworms lodge, within the heart and also the arterial blood vessels around it, these thromboemboli will probably form inside lungs (pulmonary thromboemboli) seeing that dead worms become transported away from the heart – and might be deadly.

Some other side effects tend to be not so serious and can include discomfort and swelling where the injection of this drug was administered, general malaise which includes fever and listlessness, decrease of desire for food and a cough. For more information regarding side effects of immiticide, have a look at this article.

The common technique for administering the treatment for canines which don’t have a really large burden of worms is simply by way of only one injection then the second injection after twenty-four hours. In pet dogs in which a substantial worm problem has been clinically diagnosed, only one injection will be used and then after four weeks another single injection followed in twenty-four hours by another, as above.

Due to chance of dead worms being carried into the lungs and causing an embolus, the dog is required to be kept really quiet and caged. After the first couple of days the dog will possibly be permitted out of a crate and will definitely not be permitted to run or even play for several weeks. As soon as your pet dog is checked out following therapy using Immiticide, Ivermectin (a heartworm preventive drug) is going to be supplied to kill juvenile larvae and your dog must keep on a heartworm prevention plan for the rest of its life.

Lately, Immiticide shortages have had a lot of publicity, with pet dogs going on a waiting list for treatment. To find out more regarding the shortage and heartworm treatment, go to http://heartwormtreatment-fordogs.com right now.