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Using Supplements
I'm often asked about dietary supplements for cats and dogs. My usual answer is that if you are able to provide your animal with a wide variety of meat, fruit, veg, nuts, seeds and herbs and your animal will eat it all, then you do not need to supplement. If you cannot for reasons of time, availability of variety on the non-meat side or because fido/tiddles looks at you with that "You have got to be joking" look if you try to increase the fruit and veg content then supplements should be considered.
I'll explain:
Animals in the wild are not supplemented. With bones and raw food type diet we can get as near as damn-it to the wild-type nutrition. In fact, as we are getting meats and non-meat foods from all over the world, the diet is probably superior to the wild-type. People often say that modern farming will cause leaching of certain minerals from the soil leading to lowish levels in crops. This is true, but I feel is got around because we are getting our fruit and veg from all over the world. So deficiencies in
Israeli avocados would be made up for by Kenyan mange tout and so on. It's a strange world we live in, but it does help us cope with other problems induced by modern farming.
If you're only buying organic food, then this is even better. More of it is home-grown, but frequently things come from far shores and so the above applies. The problems come if you can only regularly supply 1-2 veg varieties and 1-2 fruit varieties. Logically, there is more chance of deficiency problems the less components there are to the diet. Nuts and seeds are essential - grind them up and sprinkle on every meal for cats and dogs - they mimic what would be in your average rabbit/bird or small mammal. Herbs are great too - they're just like eating the weed species that the same animals would be eating.
In these situations where we cannot guarantee variety I would suggest looking at supplements to make sure that all the vital vitamins, and especially the minerals, are included in the diet. I personally advocate the use of Cat or Dog Pet Plus. It is a powder formulation containing beetroot fibre, flax seed, Lactobacillus acidophilus, garlic, protease, alphalpha juice concentrate and barley juice among other things. One tub costs £17.95 (+£2.00 for P&P) and can be ordered from my office on 08700 111 340. A tub would last about 2-3 months in a cat and about 1-2 months for a Springer sized dog. Another excellent product is called Missing Link and can be obtained from Savant Distribution on 08450 606 070.
