Did you know cats share over 99% of their DNA with their larger counterparts like lions, panthers, and tigers? While their outward appearance varies greatly, anyone with a cat knows that sometimes they have the self-confidence of cougars! We know the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, beginning a cultural phenomenon that continues today, but how did that come to be?
DNA comparisons show that cats were domesticated about 10,000 years ago, from wildcats. Archeological evidence of the first civilizations does not go back much further. Coincidence? Absolutely not. The two phenomena are intertwined because of grain storage. Without an abundance of food, there is no time for scholars, and without scholars, science, technology, mathematics and the study of stars, forms of writing, etc. cannot be developed. 
Cats became beneficial to the human goal of food storage because they don't eat grain, but they do eat the rodents who eat the grain. So humans provided shelter to cats, who protected the food while not posing a threat to the grains themselves, and a mutually beneficial relationship began.
What does that mean for our Tabbies, our Ragdolls, and our pampered fur babies who no longer serve the purpose of rodent protection? Well, first off, it means feeding them dry kibble filled with corn, wheat, and soy makes no logical sense. Despite the marketing, most dry foods are low in meat and even lower in quality, and extremely dry for a species that evolved getting their moisture from their food. It also explains why it can be so hard to get cats to drink water – that’s not their natural source of hydration.
From this evolutionary perspective, the concept of dry food becomes illogical. It makes sense, then, that many common diseases can be better managed with a moisture-rich diet of meat, preferably high-quality raw:
- Obesity is a major problem in cats and can lead to diabetes, joint problems, thyroid concerns, etc. A high-carb diet is difficult to digest and creates insulin resistance, disrupts gut bacteria, and leads to weight gain. A low-carb diet of meat is easy to digest, promotes healthy weight, and avoids complications.
- Urinary, kidney, and bladder issues can often be traced back to a lack of moisture. Because of their desert evolution, cats don't have a well-developed sense of thirst and live in chronic dehydration. This puts stress on the kidneys and makes it difficult to move bacteria through the urinary tract. They need more moisture in their food!
-Cancer feeds on sugar, and refined carbohydrates are basically digested as sugars. Again, a low-carb diet rich in moisture will drastically reduce the likelihood of cancer appearing.
- Dental disease can also be better managed when you move away from dry food. Kibble does NOT clean teeth – if that were true, you wouldn't need nearly as many expensive dental cleanings for yourself! In fact, carbohydrates stick to the teeth, leading to inflammation and expensive surgeries. You have to get ahead of your cat's teeth before they become inflamed, and a raw diet of meat and bone do better at exfoliating the teeth and keeping them clean naturally. 
- The last common health issue I want to discuss is vomiting. It is very commonly a result of dry food. When cats are young their stomachs can stretch to accommodate the food they eat. But without moisture to soften the food, dry food irritates the stomach lining and over time it begins to harden so the cat begins to throw up excess food instead of being able to keep it down. Adding moisture (and a good probiotic) can go far in addressing this concern.
By looking back to what cats ate before pet food became an industry in the early 1900s, we can identify many of the ways modern feeding has strayed from the way cats were biologically programmed to eat. Let's use that information to make our cats healthier, happier, and quirkier than ever! 


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What Bones are OK to Feed My Dog?
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There are many health benefits to giving your dog a bone. They include:

• Building muscle in the neck and spine
• Providing mental stimulation
• Naturally cleaning teeth
• Freshens breath
• Keeping them entertained
• Healthy source of calcium and other nutrition

However, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with feeding bones. Feed the wrong kind, the wrong size, or a cooked bone and you could end up with broken teeth, blockages that require expensive surgeries, constipation or diarrhea, or an internal puncture. Here is what to know:

1. NEVER feed a cooked bone, rawhide, or bones with nylon. Cooked bones can splinter and cause puncture wounds internally, rawhide is full of nasty chemicals, and nylon is not a food!
2. Soft bones, like uncooked turkey necks, chicken backs, or chicken necks are safe to feed whole, as long as you are monitoring your dog or cut it up into small pieces to make sure they don’t choke. The cartilage is soft and easily digestible, so it is a great way to get some good nutrition into your pet.
3. Hard bones, or weight-bearing bones, are for recreational use only and should be monitored, especially for large, aggressive chewers. Uncooked hard bones are usually hard enough your dog will enjoy the marrow or cartilage without being able to break pieces off of the bone, but if they do it is usually ok, just watch for signs of distress through the night.

A relaxing afternoon in their favorite sun spot, chewing a bone, can keep a dog entertained, happy, and healthy with the right bone. So give your dog a bone!

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As you know, Healthy Hemp Pet is our #1 selling supplement here at Desert Raw. Here is a little bit of information from greencamp.com about why phytocannabinoids are so great for dogs!*
*Note at the bottom that the dosing information and where to by info is geared towards places where medical marijuana is legal and the product contains THC as well as CBD. Healthy Hemp Pet does not contain THC and is legal to purchase in Utah and at Desert Raw. :-)

I came across this infographic from petlifetoday.com. It is so sad to me that literally every single one of these conditions can be healed entirely or at least improved by feeding a raw, wholesome diet. There is no need for all this sickness! Take a look and share with your friends who may not be feeding raw yet. Then have them come talk to me!

I am naturally a very compassionate and empathetic person, sometimes to a fault. So I try to be very careful when talking to customers to not say anything that might make them feel badly about the nutritional choices they are making for their pets or have made in the past. 
After all, you only know what you know when you know it, and the mainstream methods of feeding pets is so incredibly messed up - but that is not exactly the consumer's fault, is it? So I am very careful about expressing a certain sentiment that I truly believe, because it could come across rather insensitively, especially for someone new to the holistic approach:

You can spend your money on the food now, or you can spend it at the vet later. 

I truly believe this. Of course, the expense can be prohibitive to many people, which is why I try to offer alternatives like Sojos and Honest Kitchen that can fall into the financial middle-ground of kibble prices, so that even if a pet family can't afford raw they can still likely avoid kibble. But today I was reminded of how the money is going to leave your pocket in an incredibly forceful way, and I really hope the individual facing this situation doesn't mind that she left an impression on me.

A woman came in with a 12 year old dog that she clearly loved very deeply. This dog has been through the ringer, and I feel so badly for what she and the dog have been through the past four months. The 55lb dog was diagnosed with cancer in the digestive tract back in February. It took multiple visits to the ER, multiple biopsies, and several tries to get the issue diagnosed. The results were some of the worst they could be, with two types of incredibly difficult cancer. The chemo protocol began, and this dog turned out to be part of the 5% or so of dogs who have poor reactions to the medication, so back to the vet they went. After two rounds of chemo, the results came back that it hadn't had an effect. Another round of different medications has now begun. She has struggled to get the dog to eat, and joked that her house looks like a pet store with how filled it is with different products - expensive kibbles and canned foods - trying to tempt the dog to eat. 

She was at our store because several people had recommended Healthy Hemp Pet, our #1 selling CBD oil from a local Park City company. When she came in I mentioned that we had other natural products that could help with appetite, inflammation, discomfort, and some that even had extensive research out of Japan indicating potential for the management of free radicals and tumor reductions (which CBD has also been extensively studied for). 

But the first thing I asked her when she told me her dog had cancer was if the dog was on a raw diet. While cancer is one of the few things that a raw diet may be contraindicated for (if the dog is undergoing chemotherapy and has a weakened immune system some fear the potential for bacteria to be a risk), removing the toxins, fillers, and simple carbs often found in kibble can be key to cancer management because the cancer cells feed off of those things, especially sugars. So while a raw diet definitely won't cure cancer, it may be able to help lower the risk of it spreading. 

Her response was indicative of the attitude of so many people: "Oh, but raw food is so expensive."

I am definitely not judging her for that statement. It is expensive. But as our conversation went on, I learned that she had spent literally $7,000 at the vet in the past four months. 

$7,000. At this point, there is no improvement and the dog still suffers and struggles daily. While I 100% honor her dedication to her pet and her willingness to dedicate her resources to the dog's well-being, I desperately wish that more people saw this mental block and were able to move past the financial fear of a raw diet - because the alternative is to spend the money treating a suffering dog, or cut the dog's life short unnecessarily. 

I did the math. For a 55lb dog, it would cost on average $45-$60 a week to feed a commercial raw diet. That isn't cheap, by any means, but for $7,000, you could feed a dog a raw diet for over 2.5 years. Even accounting for a holistic cancer management protocol of Turkey Tail Mushroom, Raw Goat's Milk, Turmeric, CBD, etc., you could still stretch your budget for almost two years and with potentially much better results than chemotherapy, which can be wildly ineffective - even in this case the diagnosis WITH the chemo was a life expectancy of 12-14 months IF remission happened. 

Six million dogs are diagnosed with cancer every year in the US. This number, as with the human population, is spiking dramatically. This is a CHRONIC disease, meaning it is the result of lifestyle factors. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the food we feed our pets is directly correlated to their chances of having cancer, their life expectancy, and their health. The money will be spent, whether spread across the dog's life, or in a desperate attempt to salvage it while it is suffering. The choice seems obvious to me, and the more people we can share our holistic message with, the more we can change the story for the next generation of beloved pets. 

I belong to several Facebook groups for pet parents, and this week the same question is being asked over and over again - "My dog has anxiety, what do I do?"

July always sees a spike in dogs turned into the shelter because fireworks and thunderstorms can trigger their fight or flight response in a big way.  Pet anxiety can be dangerous for everyone - dogs run away, they jump in front of cars, they get aggressive - so knowing how to deal with it is going to help make your summer celebrations run much more smoothly.

There are a lot of things you can do, but I want to talk specifically about hemp products.  Like many things mother nature has provided us, hemp is one of those blessings that used to be commonly used  but was replaced and forgotten by modern medicine's imperfect imitations.  

Industrial hemp  contains a component called CBD, or  Cannabidiol.  Both pet and human brains contain what are called Cannabanoid Receptors, and they received this name because of how perfectly several cannabanoid compounds bind to them.  These receptors are found throughout the body and promote homeostasis, or balance. Therefore, when they bind to cannabanoids, they are promoting balance throughout the body, and support health in a myriad of ways.  

Many people are beginning to use CBD products to regulate pain, anxiety, and  even seizures and cancer. It is a homeopathic alternative to literally hundreds of medications that can't do the job as well as nature can.  What is really great about using it for pets is that they actually have almost twice as many cannabanoid receptors as humans do, so if it works well for people, you know it is going to work wonders for pets. 

Want to know more?  If you read THIS article  you can get super sciency, but honestly it was a little over my head, not being a scientist.  If you want more information on hemp for pets, our favorite brand Healthy Hemp (local to SLC)  has some great LINKS on their website  you can use for further research.  There is a reason Healthy Hemp  is the number 1 seller at Desert Raw!

Steve's Real Food (also a locally-based company) has a hemp product we carry in the store that also has raw goat milk.  The article describing their success with pet anxiety can be found HERE.

We also have other great items, including our Farm Dog Natural's RELAX tincture.  

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I guess it says something about the type of person that I am when I take a break from prepping for the move-in tomorrow and decide to relax and write a blog. I believe the term is 'workaholic' but I prefer 'passionate and dedicated'.  

It's true. We are moving into our space in Foothill Village tomorrow.  I've been running around like crazy painting, preparing decorations, adding and pricing inventory, and doing things like creating an evacuation plan and scheduling building inspections.  All the while, my animals are dancing around me, distracting me with their cuteness or mischeviousness.  Case in point:

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In the meantime, the store is running our lives 12 hours a day. We just celebrated our first wedding anniversary - road tripping to Denver to pick up product.  We spent the 1 year anniversary of moving into our new home doing trainings, and the 1 year anniversary of our dog Asa entering our lives receiving inventory.  Luke turns 30 next week, and we celebrated early because we knew three days before the store opens we wouldn't have time to mark the occassion.  I guess that is the life of a business owner, but I think we have a lot to be grateful for.  After all, we aren't opening just any business. We are opening a store we can truly feel passionate about, with a mission that creates a drive that is keeping us going through the exhaustion of starting up. We want to help your pets. We want you to see the same changes we have seen, have the same joy, and be able to feel good about your pet's quality of life.  If that means a few sleepless nights and a lot of hard work, it is worth it!  See you all soon!