Transcript of Episode #149 Featuring Dr. Judy Morgan! The Interview the pet industry does NOT want you to hear! Who REALLY controls pet food and pet care? The TRUTH about pet food, vaccination and more!

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And in my heart of hearts, this is one of the things that I am probably the most passionate about and have really started to, to come to that since we got our cat, especially, but as I've gotten closer to God and understood the need and necessity from the start of the creation to take care of all the creatures, especially the animals. And so my level of excitement and joy to do this is probably gonna shine more so than anything I've done to this date. So my guest has over 40 years of experience as an integrative veterinarian, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, a food therapist, and a bestselling author. She's a podcast host, and her goal is to change the lives of pets by educating and empowering pet parents worldwide in the use of natural healing therapies, which, you know, I talk about consistently in all aspects of life. We are gonna do our best today to bring to light as many things about animals and really all aspects of health for everybody as we can. It's an honor and a privilege and a joy to present to you Dr. Judy Morgan.

Thank you very much. I'm so thrilled to be here.

Well, thank you for finding me. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for coming to see me.

It is, it's not right around the corner, but I'm happy to be here.

I promise you that this is gonna be beyond well worth it.

I, truly believe that or I wouldn't be here.

All right. We started talking before. I said, you gotta save some of that for the interview. So we have a lot to cover today. I wanna start basic and then we're just gonna expound into all of the craziness that goes on out there.

There's so much.

And, and I talk about this a lot with humans, so it's gonna relate and it'll correlate a lot when we get into it with the animals. And it, it shows you how disturbing a lot of structurally how things operate in the world. Let's just start off with some basics here. What exactly is it that you do and what is your mission?

Well, I practiced medicine, clinical medicine for many years. I worked in emergency medicine for 10 years, and the last 20 years of practice, I was an integrative veterinarian, meaning I was leaning a lot heavier on my holistic or complementary or alternative modalities, whatever we term we want to use. Really, when we look at integrative medicine, it just means I have a lot more tools in my toolbox than somebody who says, I have this pill. So for me, once I changed over to doing more alternative therapies, I saw incredible changes in my patients. And after 36 years in clinical practice, my daughter moved from New Jersey to North Carolina. She got married. She called me and said, I'm pregnant. And I said, I'm moving to North Carolina. You're having my grandchild. Uh, okay. The clinics are being sold. And the timing was good. I was getting pretty burnt out with clinical practice. So while we were still in New Jersey and I was still running my clinic, we had started this little teeny tiny company in our garage called Naturally Healthy Pets. And I did that partially because my clients for my clinics were driving anywhere from 3 to 7 hours each way to get to the clinic because people were really looking for something different.

And they wanted to keep their pets healthier. But a lot of times it, when you're in holistic medicine, you're the last stop.

Yeah.

They've been to 17 other traditionalists, they're not getting different answers, and they're told there, there's nothing else left to do. So that's why we had people coming so far. And because I had clients coming so far, we said, well, we need a way for these people to get refills on their supplements and their food or whatever.. And so we started this little tiny company in our garage so that people could just order it online. Right. And my husband was retired, so he would fill orders during the day. You know, it might be 5 or 6 orders. He would walk them over to the post office. And in 2019, the end of '19, my daughter called me and said, I wanna quit my job. I don't know what to do next. And I said, would you like to run NHP and see if you can turn it into something? And she said, oh, that'd be cool. And she's an engineer by trade. She has grown the company every year and done an amazing job. And now we have about 15 employees. And the goal is to educate and empower pet owners. And the great thing about my platform now, we're on all social media and we have a big website, is that I can reach tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pet parents, not the 30 that I could see a day in the clinic.

And so it's been very empowering for me because I am changing the lives of millions of pets. And, you know, originally when I, you know, got to 10,000 followers, I was like, oh, this is really cool, you know? And then I'd set a new goal and then I'd set another goal and then I'd set another goal. And I remember one year right before the new year, I said, man, I just wanna reach a million pet owners. And literally 2 days later I had a post that hit a million and I went, Funny how that happens. Like you put it out there and it comes back. So I, I love what I do now because I get to speak all over the world. I get to change the lives of pets all over the world. And it's as much as I care about the animals, I also care about the humans that live with those animals. And those humans want their— these are our, these were our kids for a lot of us. And we know we're empty nesters. We have all these animals and We don't wanna see them dying in 10 years. We don't wanna see them having, um, 1.6 out of every 2 dogs over age 10 are gonna have a cancer diagnosis.

We don't want that.

No.

So how can we change that? And that is my goal, to educate people and get that changed.

I had a hard time for many years understanding when I would see people with their pets and I'd be like, man, they're kind of going overboard. Like, it seems too much to me. Like, I really had that in my heart and I, It took me having Gabriella, our, our, my own, and my world went completely upside down. And I also realized at the time, and I was just talking to this, to Queenie on the way here about how the way that I found her and I was gonna get a different cat and something told me to look for a different one and the, the way it all came together. And then I realized she was actually created for me and like what it's done for me internally and now externally, because internally she flipped a switch on of compassion I was lacking, and then externally now makes me want to go change whatever I can.

Yeah.

And we'll talk about this biblically a little bit. When God created all of us, he created the creatures, and we were told to love all of his creation. And I, I ask you this, one of the things that I always say about animals, unless they're just completely jaded and, you know, they have had been abused, they generally have this natural desire of love and care. And when you see a pet, all they want you to do is pay attention to 'em.

Oh, absolutely. My husband and I have been doing rescue work for 20 years and we've probably had 100 dogs go through our house, uh, probably close to that many cats as well. Now we have rescue farm animals and it doesn't matter how neglected or how abused they have been. All they want is love and to give love. And I don't care what kind of day you had out in the world. When you walk in the door, your animal is coming to you and wanting to just make it better and wanting to spend time with you. And animals are so empathetic. You know, if I'm crying, I've got so many dogs and cats, like, trying to lick my face, in my lap, like, what did we do wrong? What can— how can we help? Like, let's fix this. And it is really hard to be in a really crappy mood It's impossible when you've got this animal, you know, and for, for older people who are trying to stay in shape, get a dog, go for a walk. Yeah. They, they lower our blood pressure. That's why we use them for therapy. You know, you go to— I used to do about 40 visits a year to senior citizens' homes, assisted living, veterans' hospitals, and I had a van full of animals.

We had a miniature goat, a llama, a miniature horse, a chicken, a chinchilla. Cats and dogs, and we would load them all up in my van. My children were very little, so I had two little kids, all these animals, and we would walk into a hospital or walk into a nursing home. And particularly in the veterans hospitals, we would put a cat or a dog in bed with someone and the nurses, you know, they'd light up and they'd start petting them or they'd start talking to them. And the nurses so many times would say they haven't said a word or moved in weeks, months. And that animal, brings out that. And, and, you know, for older people who don't have a lot going on, and maybe their memory's not so good, all of a sudden they'll start telling you stories of their dog when they were growing up or their animals on the farm. Animals are just, they're just full of love. And that's, that's all they want to give. And all of our rescue animals that have come in, even our, our donkeys were so neglected and so abused. And They're, they're just love.

I mean, if I walk out in the field with a brush in my hand, I've got 10 of them that are standing there going, brush me next, brush me next. They, they just want that contact.

My cat will literally get in my suitcase when she sees it's time for me to leave and try to block me. And even today I was running late and I, I was getting ready and running around and she has this way where she'll throw herself down and go, and yell at me to come scratch her. And I'm like, Gabrielle, I'm late, but I'll do it anyway. Yeah. So therapeutically, just on that front, I believe, and I ask you this because you can't prove it scientifically per se, but I would argue that that's one of the most therapeutic ways to heal is through their love. And, you know, even when she purrs on my bed, I know it's healing me in some sort of way.

That vibration is absolutely— because they vibrate on different levels.

They do. It's amazing.

It's— and it's really interesting, like we've had two that one died with cancer, didn't die of his cancer, died of old age. And the other one did die of her cancer. But every day, once we got the diagnosis and it was bad, once we got the diagnosis, we would wake up every morning and say, what does Myra wanna do? And so I was still working, but it was still, what does Myra wanna do today? And so Myra would choose one of the buddies of our 10 dogs. We would go out for lunch with her. We would go to a pet store and pick out toys. We would go for a walk. We'd go to a new park. But not only was it doing something for Myra, it was doing something for us.

Yes.

And our animals don't live in the same realm we do. They don't have anticipatory grief. I get so many clients that get a bad diagnosis and they're just so stuck in, oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose 'em, I'm gonna lose 'em. And I'm like, how about we focus on today and live for today? What does your dog wanna do today? What does your cat wanna do today? How can you make today the best day it can be for them? Because that's all they care about. And when Myra only survived 8 weeks with her cancer and when we had to let her go, people were like, oh my gosh, that's so sad. You must be so sad. And I said, I'm sad that she's not here, but I am very happy because we had 8 weeks where every single day was focused on what does Myra wanna do? And I think that we can learn a lot from them. If I needed to cry because I was worried about losing Myra, it wasn't how it was gonna affect her. It was how it was gonna affect me. I did that outside, or I did that out in my car.

I never cried with Myra. It was like, Myra, we're having a good time today.

Yeah.

And so I think we can learn a lot about that for ourselves. You know, if you have a family member who has a terminal diagnosis or a bad diagnosis, how, how are you dealing with that? Are you spending every day crying over them, or are you spending every day talking to them, enjoying them, telling stories? And You know, having, creating good memories and not something bad. And I, I think they can teach us that.

Well, you know, they have such a sense of something's wrong and they're, they're sensing something's wrong with you. And then their last days here are spent in concern for you.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is kind of selfish.

Yeah.

Not intentionally, but it is.

No, not intentionally, but it is like, I would get clients that would come in again, you know, we're the kind of the last stop and it's like, oh, we've been to 5 different doctors this week and 4 different specialists. And you know, the dog has had this many tests done and I'm like, Wow. I am not gonna be the 15th person to poke a needle in your dog this week. There's a really nice, beautiful park along the river across the street. I suggest you go for a walk. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna be the 15th person to poke and prod at your poor animal. They just wanna spend time with you. Maybe I can offer you something different, but I'm, I'm not gonna be that 15th person to torture them right now. I want you to go do something fun. So I think, you know, a lot of times they can just help us change our mind. Yeah.

I swear to you, I just talk to her, I, or just bend down on the ground and immediately the purring starts. I don't even have to say anything. And it just, it starts my day right.

Yep.

And I say a little prayer on her and then you are part of her clowder. Yeah.

You know what a clowder is?

No.

It's a group of cats. We have herds, we have flocks, we have clowders.

She abuses me cuz she's so spoiled. Trust me.

So, okay.

So you said some things that are problematic words for me. And in humans a lot. And I want to relate it to animals now. So you, you brought up traditional, and I always say conventional. And I, my argument is, is what we are told is conventional is actually non-conventional, and what's traditional should be considered non-traditional.

You are absolutely right.

Yes, because it's ass backwards. Because you're saying something is conventional that you're altering and changing from what is truly pure and conventional.

Well, and when we look at Chinese medicine, it is called traditional Chinese medicine, right? So you're right, traditional medicine— I mean, we, we in the veterinary world, traditional medicine is conventional med, it's drugs and vaccines and prescription diets and bad food. And then when we talk about alternative, and, and I, again, I don't really like the word alternative.

That stuff should be the alternative. That's your la— your last resort should be the stuff that's altered. And, and when the the things that aren't harming you. Because what happens is, is, you know this, you start taking one thing, then you got to take something else to counter that side effects, and before you know it, you're on 10 different things.

My dad was on 30 medications a day for his Parkinson's. It was terrible.

And, and none of it was doing anything but harming him.

Yep, exactly.

So how bad is it with, with animals then? Is it the same kind of thing?

Same thing.

Well, let's talk about the vaccine schedule on animals because it's you kind of fall into this. Well, that's just kind of what you do. I mean, I did it at first too.

Yeah.

And then I started to, after I, and I, one of the things that helped me was talking to you about it. And then I started talking to my wife and I was like, what are we doing here? Like, exactly what I'm teaching everybody the right way to do things as humans. Why am I following a schedule for our baby that I shouldn't be following?

It's Unfortunately, it's, that's the way it is. So when I was in school, we were taught every animal gets all the vaccines every year, and nobody had looked at the science of how long a vaccine lasts, or, but it was, this is how you get your clients in the door every year. You send them a little card that says Fluffy's due for shots. That little card should say, hey, Fluffy is due for a complete physical examination and some diagnostic lab work. That would be a lot more appropriate than fluffies do for shots.

Yeah.

And so we all bought into that for so many years because that's just the way you did it. It's sort of like all animals get spayed and neutered at 6 months of age. That's another conversation. Because that's the way it's always been done. And suddenly somebody started looking at maybe those vaccines actually last longer. Maybe they don't need them every year. And so. Dr. Ron Schultz, who's an immunologist, started looking at it and started doing testing and said— and he started doing this way back in like the '90s, early '90s. And he said, oh, how about that? The core vaccines, distemper, parvo, hepatitis, they last 5 to 7 years and maybe a lifetime for a lot of animals. And yet we're giving them every single year. And so titers were developed, which is a blood test. And the blood tests tell— you can test for distemper, parvo, hepatitis, rabies, and panleukopenia in which is cat distemper. And so those are the core vaccines. And we can do a blood test that says, hey, look, he's got all these antibodies. He doesn't need another vaccine. He's already protected. It's sort of like you're either pregnant or not pregnant.

You can't get more pregnant.

Yeah.

You just are. So you're protect— they're protected or they're not.

Right.

Holistic veterinarians have been using titers for many years where we can, we can say, well, let's do the blood test and see if they need something. If they don't need it, I'm not gonna poke them again. Because when we keep poking their immune system with vaccines, the immune system after a while says, you know what, I give up. And then it starts attacking other things.

I was gonna say, yeah.

And we have so much autoimmune disease. It, the, the newest one that probably for the last decade I'm hearing so often, and prior to that never saw it, is meningitis of unknown origin. So we have brain swelling. My, my sister's dog developed it when he was about a year old.

Yeah.

She gave him a lot more vaccines than I ever did. Never would have done, but she does a lot of agility work and show. And so here's part of the problem: if your dog goes to boarding, grooming, daycare, goes to the show circuit, they require vaccines every year because they haven't been educated. So part of the goal, like, around my practice is we educated all the boarding centers, all the daycare centers, and we said, no, you can take a titer, it'll be fine. You don't need to say that they have to be vaccinated every year. We're stuck with the rabies problem because it's not as big a problem for cats because cats don't usually have to be registered with the township or the municipality, but you have to license a dog.

Yeah.

And in order to get a license, you have to show proof of rabies vaccine, and that's required every 3 years. And there's very, very few that will accept a titer. The other problem that we have is a lot of the traditional, conventional, whatever, veterinarians don't want to do titers.

Yeah.

And if they do them, they're charging $500 to do it, or you can pay $30 to get the vaccine. And, you know, everybody has a certain budget that they have to be within. And when you say, oh, it's going to be $500 to do the titer, it stops a lot of people in their tracks.

Sure.

And so one of the things that I discovered with that, one of my veterinary friends actually messaged me about 6 months ago because I had done something online talking about doing titers. And she said, where are you getting rabies titers for $100? Because the lab is charging me $450. I don't even mark it up for my clients because it's so ridiculously expensive. And the thing is, veterinarians don't realize they can send directly to Kansas State University Diagnostic Lab. That is where the labs send it. So the vet pays the lab, the lab pays Kansas, make their money, right? And then the client doubles that. So, you know, sometimes they're paying $900 for a titer and it's like, well, they could just send it directly to Kansas and it would be a lot cheaper. So my friend was like, oh, this is amazing. I can lower my price by, you know, two-thirds.

So some of them are 4 and 5x-ing it then, if not more, right?

Well, if they're being charged $450 by the lab, yeah, they're probably— usually it's double.

Yeah.

So, you know, then it becomes a $900 titer. So the thing is, you got to bypass the lab. And part of the problem is our biggest lab and our biggest imaging company was bought by Mars. You know, the candy company?

Yeah. Yeah.

They also make pet food. They make more money off of pet food than they do off their human food. And they are buying up the veterinary sector. So they own a very large percentage of the veterinary clinics, the veterinary lab, the veterinary imaging, and the veterinary specialty centers. Oh yeah.

I take a lot of comfort in someone making my animal food that makes candy Snickers.

Well, and ultra-processed food.

Yeah.

And where do the waste products from the ultra-processed food go? They go to the pet food. 'Cause you can't just throw it away. Why would you do that? So I just read something the other day. 44% of pet food ingredients are upcycled from the human food industry. Now, some of that is good upcycling, like, the liver and kidneys and heart, the organs. The super powerful food, and people don't like to eat that. So, okay, that's a good thing to go to pet food.

Great.

That's upcycling that I like. When you take brewer's waste products, like you, you know, you made beer and then you have the leftover spent grains.

Yeah.

Why is that going to pet food? When you have, you know, a cow that dies out in the field and it's decaying, that goes to pet food because that certainly can't be used for human food. Any animals that are sent to the slaughterhouse for human food, when and they cut out the good pieces of meat. And if they find a cancerous section or a section that doesn't look so good, maybe there's some scar tissue that goes in a big vat and that goes to pet food. I'm all for recycling, but I don't want my pets eating rotten meats. I don't want my pets eat, you know, and they cook it, they cook it down in a big vat, they render it. And that's their excuse. Well, once we render it, it's fine. I'm sorry, it was still disgusting, rotten green meat that I don't, that's not good nutrition for my pet.

Let me ask you this, and I know that you can only answer this a certain way. I don't know what kind of certainty that you have on this or not, but this, how possible or impossible is it for the people that are in charge of the whole process here to not know or to know this whole procedure on how it goes?

They have to know.

Oh, they do.

They absolutely 100% know.

Okay. And they just don't care.

So here's the thing. The, the law states that animals who died otherwise than by slaughter— so there's animals go to slaughter and they're slaughtered for use in food. The ones who die otherwise than by slaughter were either euthanized or died in the field. You know, they were sick, whatever. Um, the law says that those animals that weren't sent to slaughter are not allowed to be used for food or pet food. And when we questioned FDA about it, they said, we choose to ignore that law.

Then why is it a law?

Good question. But they choose to ignore it. And their answer every time we go after them— there's about 5 or 6 of us on the consumer side at these meetings against 500 regulatory people. Their answer to us is always, what, you want it to go to a landfill? So wasteful.

So it's not wasteful to kill people though. I mean, cuz essentially that's what you're slowly, at least causing disease or problems or whatever.

Well, you know, their, their answer to it is that it's rendered. So, you know, you take the whole cow and you throw it in the vat with all the other animals that died. It's all thrown into a vat and it's cooked at high temperatures and it's melted down into a big goo, whatever. And so then they skim off the fat and then that fat is used for flavoring and all kinds of other things in the food, pet food. And then the solids that are left are then dehydrated to make a meat meal. So if you see an ingredient on a pet food label that says meat meal or meat and bone meal, you know that's a rendered product because it doesn't say it's chicken or beef, it's unknown meat.

Magic meat.

Yeah.

Okay, well, we're getting a bigger picture of how things actually happen here.

The other things that go in there— so when you throw the whole cow in there, yeah, most commercial cattle have ear plastic ear tags that may or may not have pesticides embedded in them, right? Most of them have some hardware inside their stomach because cows in farms tend to like eat up screws and bolts and nails and whatever is laying around the farmyard. It's just what they do. Cows are prone to something called hardware disease, where they basically have all these pieces of hardware floating around in their stomach. And the way that— I learned this in high school when I was riding with a farm animal vet, it was so cool— the way that they treat it, because it causes GI distress in the cows and they go off feed, they bolus down their throat these big magnets. And so the magnet sits in the middle of the stomach, and all the metal clings onto it. So when you make these rendered products, you know, that's in there too, cuz the whole cow went in. So you've got plastic pieces, you've got, you know, if they had a chain on, you've got whatever's in their stomach.

So when the food is made, part of the equipment, and you can see this on YouTube, just look up how, how dried kibble pet food is made. Part of the machinery is these big magnets., and the magnets pull any pieces of metal out of the meat meal that's going in for processing. And we've talked to people who work in the plants and they're like, oh yeah, we have to clean those magnets every day. They're so full of metal. But the problem is nothing pulls plastic out. So any plastic pieces— Yeah, that's so dangerous. And so, and there's so many, there's so many traditional veterinarians. There's one new new veterinary wannabe nutritionist who is gonna go after me 'cause she sees every podcast and then does a whole bunch of videos about how I'm wrong and the FDA would never allow this. So one of the things that I have said that she's gone after me is that the head of the largest rendering association in the country gave the keynote speech at the animal feed control official meeting a few years ago. In his keynote speech, he said it is almost impossible to have a rendered product that does not have euthanasia solution in it.

Because those animals that died otherwise than by slaughter, a few of them with euthanasia solution might have snuck in there. And there have been recalls for euthanasia solution in pet food. There have been announcements made that, yes, we found some euthanasia in this pet food. And again, FDA will say it's not enough for it to be actionable.

And how often do they not find it?

I don't think they test very often.

There you go.

So the other problem that we have, and there was a lawsuit, so I'm going to give you the lawsuit so that this person can't can't come after me, and I can say, well, I know it's true, is the DNA of animals that are in that chemical soup. So Rachael Ray Nutrish was sued in 2023 because there was dog DNA and horse DNA in there.

Really?

Yeah. So it's real. Other animals do end up in there. And the thing is, nobody does that. Like, you know, who's going to spend the money to do DNA testing?

Well, on pet food, yeah, there's only so much you can test so often, and right, it's really random.

But I would, I would love to just randomly go pull a bunch of food off the shelf and send it out for testing and do the DNA testing and do the pentobarb testing. We had a pet food problem a few years ago and I spent $20,000 testing pet food, trying to find what was causing the problem. And basically I spent $20,000 and couldn't find the issue. And that's just really frustrating. But I think if, you know, if somebody wanted to spend some money and start DNA testing and testing for euthanasia solution, I think we would find a lot more than We would like to.

You, you see, here's the problem. You would think that most people would genuinely want to know. And if there's any time there's smoke, there's probably fire.

Yeah.

And when you find a little bit of smoke, I'm searching for the fire because I'm 99% of the time it's there. There's always that outlier.

Well, and we also like to think that these pet food plants are really clean and beautiful and pristine. They are not. And so there was a great thing, had to be 10 or 12 years ago now, FDA went in and did an inspection in a pet food plant in Missouri, and there was a huge hole in the roof where, you know, birds are flying in and out and bird droppings. And, you know, it's over the food vats. And when we questioned FDA, it was in their report and we questioned about it like, you know, it's like going to rain and there's going to be mold. And they're like, well, it wasn't raining that day. That's a great excuse.

This is the thing, too, because I've run into this so often is a lot of the times This stuff is sitting right out there for anybody to read. It's literally like a slap in the face 'cause it's just sitting there for you, but it's buried into all this other jargon and nonsense within a synopsis of writing, so you don't even know where to find it, but it's there.

Oh, it is.

It's all there.

If somebody wanted to dig in or do a FOIA and get the inspection reports, because they, they're supposed to do kind of regular inspections once or twice a year., but generally they will only inspect if there's a complaint lodged. And I mean, there are reports if you wanna have some really fun reading, you know, where the, the cockroaches were just out of control, cockroaches everywhere. And it's like, you need to remedy this. And then they don't go back for 6 months or a year. The same thing happens in human health. My dad was in a facility for his Parkinson's, supposed to be getting PT. It never happened. And I lodged a complaint with the state and I said, when was the last time there was an inspection? And it had been over 400 days since there had been an inspection. When they went in and did one, there were a lot of fines levied. Mm-hmm. But, you know, again, they only did it because I complained. And so that's the same thing.

You know, anybody watching and that has like issue with this, I just wanna say something in fairness. I don't attack anybody and you clearly don't either. But when you're looking at something and there's facts there, and then you come on the attack, you make yourself look very bad. You make yourself look like you're hiding something, as opposed to looking at it and going, there may be a problem here. It's fine to have your belief set, your side, totally fine. We all deserve that. That's, that's free will. But you should always have an open mind, as I'm sure you do, on conventional things that you may have missed. Conventional things, things that maybe don't coincide with you. You always look and see That's what I always do and I stay straight down the middle. But like I said, when something is, is off, there's a reason for it. So, you know, don't, when you argue about something or you want to challenge something you say, I say, do it with class, with dignity and show facts and then present it. And then we can have a back and forth and see who's onto what. And then maybe you may learn something or maybe the opposite side may learn something.

It would be nice.

I mean, not all pet food is bad, but let me— there are so many good companies, but most of the good companies are the smaller companies. Yes, they want to do the right thing. And, you know, right now, um, I'm a huge fan of raw pet food. I've been a raw feeder for 25 years. I've never had a problem. Most of my patients were fed raw food. But the CDC, AVMA, AAHA, and the veterinary industry in general is very against raw feeding. You'll kill your whole family. I mean, you walk into veterinary clinics and there's big signs on the wall, we We recommend, or we are very against raw feeding. Do not feed raw. You, you know, your family will die of bacterial contamination. Well, clearly we're still here, so I'm fine if people wanna use gently cooked food, but what I wanna see is I want ingredients that I know what they are. Like, I wanna be able to read the label and it doesn't look like a science experiment.

I was gonna say, you don't want a Cheesecake Factory menu label, like you, you're not good with 35,000 things on there that you don't know what the hell they are.

We've seen a huge shift in about the last decade where all of these really good smaller companies are coming on doing the right thing. And, you know, a lot of these are companies that are doing under $5 million a year.

Yes, but you know this, when you mass produce anything— I went through this for years with protein powders and all different kinds of supplements— there has to be multitudes of corners cut to, to spend the kind of money that you have to spend to mass produce. So when you're mass producing, you're cutting costs all the way around. So it becomes this, ah, we could probably throw that in there instead. And by the time you're done, there's like 10 things in there that have been changed. So the smaller companies are always better, but the problem they run into is they can't afford to keep up.

It's really hard for them. And actually, some of them are struggling with— they're growing so fast right now, they can't keep up. They can't, they can't get in new factories. It it take— like, I have good friends that own a pet food company and they invested $2 million just to get started. They need to invest another $5 million to increase the size of their plant, increase their line. It's, you know, there's not that big a margin in pet food and you have to do it because you have a love for, like, to do it right. You have to do it because you have a love for the animals. And one of the things I would say, if you see a company that is advertising on TV all the time, they're spending millions of dollars on advertising. That's why you don't see these smaller companies advertising. They don't have that kind of advertising money. You know, theirs is word of mouth. Theirs is, you know, getting friendly with influencers. You know, they've got to do it without putting out millions of dollars. So like on my website, you can download the list of foods that I'm willing to feed my own animals.

It's not an exhaustive list. A more exhaustive list, Susan Thixton on truthaboutpetfood.com. She researches every year. A company can't buy their way on her list. They actually have to send in all of their receipts for every ingredient that they bought all year long, where it comes from, is it humanely raised, is it organic. And then if everything meets her criteria, then it can get on her list.

Lesson for people listening here then, and this comes from 20 years of experience of understanding how this works, and It goes on everywhere. The places that have the, the biggest names that spend the most money on marketing spend all their money, like you said, on acquiring the customer, which allows them to show you millions of dollars of sales. But they've spent so much money in marketing and it's all tricky because what they do is people create review sites, for instance, and then they go to these big companies and say, hey, you pay us X amount, we'll put you number 1 or 2. I've been dealing with this forever in supplements.

The top 5 laundry detergent. Yeah. Yeah. How much did it cost each of them to get on that list?

That's it. And you see the same structure and the same names. And then all of a sudden, you know, when I really learned this, this, this will kill you, was researching Christmas presents one year for my wife and my mom where I saw it's the same thing over and over and it's always like Men's Health, GQ, and they're, they're sponsored, paid when you read at the bottom. And then you see this one obscure one and you're like, wait a minute, what the hell? What is all of this? And then I started to look and I go, that's the stuff I'm buying. That's what I'm gonna try. And it, and it always damn near hit every time for me. So that's what, but it relates to what you're talking about. And a lot of these smaller companies, they, they rely heavily on word of mouth.

Yeah.

And people that are really transparent and honest about their, their experiences. And so it takes people like you and to put 'em in your clinics. And because that's the other problem, the vets that you go to, they're obviously, it's kind of like humans with medications. The insurance companies drop 'em if they don't write enough scripts. Well, they also have what they're paid for to have in their clinic. Same scenario, right?

The veterinarians, a lot of their education and particularly their continuing education is funded by Big Pharma and big pet food.

Mm-hmm.

So the big 3 pet food companies are Mars, Nestlé Purina, and Hill's, which is owned by Colgate-Palmolive. But Mars and Purina each sell like $23 billion worth of pet food a year. And then Colgate-Palmolive, which is Hill's, comes in at like $6 billion. So there's a huge difference. So basically kind of owned by those two big guys. And now that Mars is buying up all the veterinary clinics as well, well, if, if you make pet food and you own the veterinary clinic, what do the veterinarians have to sell? That— no, there's no conflict of interest there at all.

And then they go in and educate them on why it's superior and so much better, right?

And their education. And you know, the, unfortunately, nutrition education for veterinarians is very limited and they're kind of like, you know, med school for doctors, very, very limited. So like I went to University of Illinois and I graduated in the age of dinosaurs. It was a long time ago, but we didn't even have a nutrition course in vet school. In order to get into vet school, you had to have had a nutrition course, which is mostly livestock nutrition, 'cause I had it in undergrad, and anybody who didn't already have that course had to take it in summer school before we started class. So we are not taught how to formulate a homemade diet for a dog or a cat. We're not for— taught how to formulate a commercial diet. So they, they don't have the knowledge base to do that. So you as a pet owner, if you come in and say, hey, I wanna make my cat's food, They're gonna say, you can't do that. There's no way you can make that balanced and complete. Your cat'll die. Here, you have to use this because it's complete and balanced. Funny thing, in 2000, I wanna say 2017 or '19, in England, they, or in Europe, they pulled 170 pet foods off the shelf and tested them to see whether they met the minimum standards for requirements in vitamins and minerals, amino acids, all that.

And 94% of the canned foods were not complete and balanced, even though it said it on the label. And over 60% of the dry foods were not complete and balanced. So how can we as veterinarians say the only complete and balanced foods are the ones made by these big companies when we go and test them and go, we're not?

And then what they do is then they put all of this out there. If you don't have our credentials, you're a quack and you don't know what you're talking about. Well, here, here's an example. When the, the whole low-fat craze was the '90s, 2000s, and I was in school learning about that, putting the fear of God into me, and in all actuality realizing that was killing people.

Yeah.

In multitudes of ways. And that's the same thing that you're talking about with animals. It's the same exact thing.

Yep.

They're teaching you this one-way street that makes no sense. And then when they find out it's wrong, they'll never admit it's wrong. Right.

Never. Right. Prescription diets, the only, the only ones that are allowed to be called prescription diets are made by Hill's because Hill's trademarked that term with the veterinarians way back when. Funny thing. Hills Packaging started out as Hills Rendering.

Has that always been owned by Paul Moliver?

No, it's, it's switched ownership a couple of times, but the whole Hills thing started because a veterinarian in New Jersey designed a kidney diet for a seeing eye dog, 'cause the seeing eye, uh, place is in Jersey where they train. And so he designed this kidney diet for this seeing eye dog, and then he said, oh, we could commercialize this. And he went to Hill's Rendering, and they became Hill's Packaging, and then they basically colluded with the veterinarians and said, hey, this will be a prescription diet. You have to write a prescription for people to get it, and they can only buy it from you.

Yeah.

So now there are a lot of other companies that make therapeutic diets, but they can't be called— even though they still require a prescription.

Yeah.

But there is absolutely nothing prescriptive about them. There is no medication in there. There is no magic sauce in there.

Oh, I know.

They are Basically overpriced versions of the same thing that you can, like, if you compare the over-the-counter cat urinary tract health kibble, which by the way, cats should never eat kibble. We can talk about that. But, uh, if you compare that one to the prescription one that the veterinarian sells, the ingredients are really, really, really similar, but this one costs twice as much as this one and you have to go get it from your vet every month. What a, what a great scam. And prescription diets are like any other prescription. A prescription is meant to be used short-term. These diets don't have long-term feeding trials. Like nobody ever put a bunch of beagles in a room and said, hey, we're gonna feed them only this prescription diet for the next 10 years and see what happens. Nobody's ever done that. It, like, they're not meant to be fed long-term. They're meant to be fed short-term to solve a problem, just like a prescription would do. But we see the same problem with prescriptions here. We'll put him on it and he'll be on it for life. That's great.

Oh boy. Okay. We got some stuff to unpack here. Go to the, go to the kibble stuff because that clearly, I think one of the most confusing things with pets is feeding them.

Yeah.

What to, what not to.

It is the number one question that pet owners have. Yeah. It's the best thing because everybody knows food's the foundation of life. Without good food, you, you're, no, I, I had everything goes down the tubes.

I've spent more, I think, studying in a couple years than I did as a nutritionist, 20 years just for her because it's, I, I I, I'm lost.

Yep. And you, the problem is you go on social media and you ask, and then you go to your veterinarian and ask, and then you go to your friends and ask, and everybody gives you a different answer.

Everybody.

So the veterinarians, you can take, oh, kibble is fine. It's, it's made by board-certified veterinary nutritionists by these big pet food companies that balance it and make sure it's fine. No, they don't. It might look good on paper. So the problem with all of our animals is let's look at what they would eat in the wild. What is a species-appropriate diet? So what's a cat supposed to eat and what's a dog supposed to eat? Your cat is supposed to eat mice and birds, and it's supposed to eat the whole thing. Like they might leave, like I watch our outdoor cats, I see what they eat. There might be a feather left and there might be a little bit of intestines left. Everything else goes down, but they're meant, cats are obligate carnivores. They're meatosauruses. They're like little velociraptors that need to have their meat. And when we feed them dry kibble, it's at least 50% carbohydrates because You can't make it stick into a kibble without that. Otherwise it just falls apart and gunks up the machine. So when you buy a dry kibble by one of the big companies, it's maybe gonna be 30% meat.

Well, that's not species appropriate for a cat. Cats also are desert animals and they don't drink very much. So when we feed them a food that is only 6% moisture, where are they getting the rest of their moisture from? It's coming from their body because they don't drink very much. So we end up with a bunch of old shriveled up, dried up kidney failure cats when when they're old because we've fed them completely wrong. And you'll notice if you have cats that are fed dry food, they're gonna drink a lot more. One of the things that people tell me all the time is, I switch my cat to a canned food or to, uh, a raw food or a gently cooked food and they're not drinking any water. How do I get 'em to drink water? I'm like, they don't need to. It's in their food. And that's what they're supposed to eat. For our dogs, they're not complete carnivores. Yeah. They're more omnivorous. They're sort of a facultative carnivore.. And could a cat survive on a vegetarian diet? Not very well. I would not see vegetarian cats in my practice. I fired those clients if they wouldn't change their diet, 'cause I knew they were gonna die a horrible death of heart failure or chronic infections, or it, it's just bad news.

You can't replace what Mother Nature gives with a bunch of synthetics and expect it to have the same results. So don't, please, if you I mean, if you wanna be a vegetarian and you want a vegetarian pet, get a rabbit, get a guinea pig, don't get a cat. A dog will survive better, but it's not ideal for them. We do have some holistic veterinarians now who are really promoting vegetarian diets for dogs. They're saying it because they wanna save the planet. And if we would go back to regenerative farming and raise our farm animals appropriately, we wouldn't have a problem. And you know, don't need to do that. Different conversation. For our dogs, again, if you feed dry kibble to them, you're feeding them about 50% carbohydrates. It is really bad for their teeth. One of the myths is that dry kibble keeps their teeth clean. It does not. That would be like your dentist saying, here, eat crackers all day, don't ever brush your teeth, they'll be fine. Uh, not so good. So, and when we look at the requirements that AAFCO lays out for how much protein they need, how much fat they need, how much carbohydrates they need, Under carbs, it says zero.

Wow. They have zero requirement. So if we give our dogs and cats free choice to choose how much protein, fat, and fiber they want in their diet, they will pretty much across the board choose protein around 50%, fat around 45%. And the AAFCO requirements are, I think, 18% for dogs and 22% for cats. Cats, like 26. But so they're basically saying, hey, we can get away with a lot less protein because what's the most expensive thing to put in the food?

The protein.

The protein.

So who created those numbers? Who knows, right?

AFCO.

Okay, so it's just, it's just a created number, right?

It's sort of like, what can they survive on?

Yeah.

And so do you want your animal to survive or do you want them to thrive?

It's just like what I see because I do blood panels for humans. 15 years, and it's— the gap just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I was just having a discussion on average. I said, I want them to be optimal. Average is what is going on right now, and it's getting shittier by the day.

Well, and they just keep changing the numbers.

Yeah.

And so it's like, oh, well, the cholesterol level that we want, it keeps getting lower so that we get more people on statins.

Yes, same. Exactly. That is actually— I have all of this stuff that just got sent to me today showing that the people that have the higher cholesterol longer. I have a whole—

well, that's great because I'm gonna live forever then. Yeah, we have a dairy cow, it's— and it's A2 milk, and we drink raw milk. Yeah, eat all the cheese. So, oh yeah, I know, come arrest me right now.

Here comes the milk police.

The milk police in North Carolina. But it is full fat.

Yeah.

And my cholesterol went up when I started drinking and eating all this, you know, dairy from the cow. And my naturopath is like, I'm not too worried about it. I'm like, dude, I am not worried at all. No, Like, not a problem.

I had this intense fear of fat for 25 years, even as a nutritionist. And the last 2 years, when I changed and went very fat-heavy and protein-heavy— I'm not scared of carbs, but I just don't—

I don't enjoy them.

No, really not that much. My life is flipped upside down in clarity, skin, all my blood panels, everything.

Yeah.

When you take the fat out, you're stripping out all the nutrients.

Exactly. Absolutely. So fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D, just like people, most of our animals are low in vitamin D. Now I'm gonna say this with a caveat, do not run out and buy supplements for vitamin D and give 'em to your pets because the human supplements are way too strong and they'll die of kidney failure with too much vitamin D. Right. So, but if you test it, and most veterinarians don't, if you test it, you will find that most of them are low, particularly the seniors and particularly those who have any kind of chronic disease. So when we look at our cancer patients, their vitamin D levels are very low. We look at these animals with chronic inflammatory disease, inflammatory bowel disease, their vitamin D levels are usually tanking. Even if they're on a really high quality, you know, balanced, raw, gently cooked, each animal absorbs and utilizes it differently. So I had one client who said, I'm feeding this good food, and it was good food. It's balanced. She tested her two dogs. One was an old dog, one was a young dog. Normal level is 100 to like 150, and the one dog came back in the 40s and the other dog came back in the 80s.

Well, the young dog was in the 80s. The old dog who had a bunch of problems was in the 40s. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, well, yes, we do need to supplement because vitamin D falls apart and is destroyed so easily with any kind of processing, any kind of storage. And the pet food companies can't formulate with excess vitamin D. We had a huge recall in 2019. Tens of thousands of animals died because because the vitamin mineral mix that was added to add vitamins and minerals back to the dead food had too much vitamin D. And so tens of thousands of animals died of kidney failure before they figured it out. Wow. And we see these kinds of things all the time. We also, with all the carbs in the food— yeah, all the, all the bad grains that aren't suitable for human consumption go to pet food. So the moldy grains, the broken grains, which are more susceptible to mold— and 60% of the corn crop in this country is affected by mold. And so it's not suitable for human consumption. So what they do is they fumigate it when it gets to the pet food plant.

So that kills the mold. That's great, except the molds, when they die, they release mold toxins. And we had a recall of millions of pounds of food, one of the biggest recalls ever of dry kibble because of aflatoxins in the food. And that is— our pets are very, very susceptible to that. They go into liver failure.

I would urge people, if you can't like financially pay for what an animal needs, just wait. It's what I always tell people that wanted to go bodybuild and run stacks of things and everything. If you can't do it right, just wait until you can.

Well, and if you already have pets and you're like, man, you know, I've been feeding dry kibble. I can't afford the raw food. I can't afford the gently cooked food. 'Cause you know, it's, and it's sort of like eating out at a restaurant. If you're always paying somebody else to make your food, It's gonna be more expensive.

Oh yeah.

There are less expensive ways to make your own. We have a ton of free recipes that people can download on our website, how to balance them, you know, what you need to do. But if we have, and sometimes our animals, particularly cats, can be really hard to switch over because they spray that food with palatants. It's, it's the addictive stuff to make it taste good.

Okay.

So especially cats, they get very addicted to texture. Taste, and smell. And so it can be very hard to switch them. But if you're kind of in that, like, man, I don't think I can do everything she's talking about. I can't, you know, start making food. I got 3 kids and 2 jobs. And I get it. Add something fresh to the bowl. There was a study done years ago where they took a group of dogs. Half of them were given kibble their whole life. The other half were given kibble with 25% of their food replaced by fresh food. So like steamed dark leafy greens, eggs, sardines, berries, like good stuff. And the dogs that got that little bit of fresh food lived 2 to 3 years longer.

Wow.

So we see huge differences. And actually they did a study with Scottish Terriers who, that's a breed that's prone to bladder cancer, and they added fresh greens to their bowls. And the dogs that got the greens were less likely to develop cancer.

Wow.

You don't have to go crazy. Like my dogs, one of their favorite treats is frozen blueberries. Really? Yeah. I'm just picturing— actually, now I also make frozen treats out of our raw milk, and so they get those. But when I run out of that, frozen blueberries, they're, you know, they think that's like heaven. We also raise chickens, so they get fresh eggs all the time.

Yeah.

So anything that you can do to add fresh food to the bowl. One of the best things, canned sardines. So get the best canned sardines you can get, and you know, if you have a small dog, add a sardine a few times a week, week. If you have a big dog, give them the whole can.

I'm going to give you a scenario with my cat because I think a lot of people go through the same thing. But I was— you're gonna probably cringe at this— when I was a kid, my mom, because we— it's an Italian family, so every Sunday we had pasta, and she just used to load my dog's bowl up with pasta, and she would just eat like—

who—

she'd come out with a red face.

We used to clean out the refrigerator. Anything that was moldy or bad went to the dogs, man. I look back at that and go, we'd so fed Do you remember Gainesburgers?

Yes.

In the plastic cellophane. That's the worst thing you could ever feed your animals. Anybody who's feeding any food that comes in the little crinkly plastic cellophane from the grocery store, pitch that right now. It's full of dyes. It's full of sugar. It's like that was the one thing we learned in vet school about nutrition in the grocery store was if you have a diabetic patient, tell the clients not to feed that stuff because it's high in sugar. Yeah. I'm like, really? That's my nutrition training? Like, thank you.

No, and I know people always say, well, just give it to the animals. Give it to the animals. I'm like, no, I will not do that. No, if it's not good for me, I'm not giving it to them.

That's how I am. You know, and grapes and raisins are toxic to our pets. So don't share.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

Grapes and raisins, chocolate, alcohol, you know, the other things that are bad for us. Yeah. But the grapes and raisins are kind of the biggies, um, that we don't want to share.

Right.

Like I, we won't even eat grapes in our house because we have a 5-year-old. That visits quite often and I'm like, I don't want a grape to drop.

No.

'Cause I mean, I've seen dogs go into kidney failure with one grape.

Really?

Yeah. So grapes are no, no, no. My son's dog ate a pound of grapes. Didn't affect her at all. We have no idea why some go into kidney failure and some don't. Yeah. So just avoid them.

My cat will not eat anything. Like one thing I don't have to worry about is like if something falls, falls, she's gonna eat it. We've gotten her to lick, like I got her to lick a sucker one time and then she just looks at me like I'm an idiot. Kit or a potato chip. But here's, here's the scenario I'm going to give you, because I know just through understanding that with her catching something early, thank God that, that I did, with their kidneys like you were talking about. Okay, so she's so like her dad, stubborn, like with food and everything. Now I've worked on that, but it's not translating to her yet. So when I took her in because she was having a lot of hairballs and I got a little concerned, well, then they ran an X-ray and found a little bit of calcium in her I of course went straight to work, like, how do we fix this? And part of it they assumed, and I could be very wrong here, I'm just giving you what the data I was given was that because it was just this Blue Buffalo kibble, like that's all she would eat.

And then they of course put her on a prescription, you know, the Royal Canin Fiber Gastrointestinal. Mm-hmm. But it corrected everything and her, her blood work came out good. The calcium has stopped and it was small again., but what you're saying is that's still not the answer, right? And she needs to be eating something different because she drinks so much water.

Yeah. And she shouldn't. Yeah. And so the answer for fiber, one of my favorite companies, I'm going to do a plug. One of my favorite companies, because they're good friends, CocoTherapy, two women, twin sisters from the Philippines, third generation coconut farmers, and they make coconut products for pets, treats. And so one of theirs is called Hairball Plus, but It's basically ground dried coconut, which is one of the best fiber sources for cats, and they love it.

Really?

So it's so much better than a prescription diet, and your cat really needs to get off kibble.

But I know how many people struggle with getting their cats—

so here's— it took me 6 months when I first— my cats were eating kibble because that's what I learned they should eat until I learned better, and I went, oh my God. So cats, like I said, very, very into texture. So when they're eating dry food, that's the texture that they're used to. You wouldn't believe how much money is spent on figuring out which shape the kibble the cats like the best. It's actually little football shape is their favorite.

Really?

Really weird. Uh, they— little triangles, little square, like they've tried everything, but the little footballs seem to be the number one. And you don't see very many foods that are that shape. So it's weird.

Weird.

Yeah. Like the, in, in, at the food companies, they have labs where they have these animals where they put out all these bowls of food and see which one they go to, and that's, you know, great fun experimenting. But so your, your cat is used to eating something that's a dry texture. So the best way to change her over is to buy some freeze-dried food.

Okay.

Because the freeze-dried raw is a dry texture. So with my own cats, I would take that freeze-dried raw, and some of 'em are in little nuggets, some of 'em are in little patties, but I would crumble it over the food. So if she, and it comes in and pick a flavor, any flavor you want— pork, venison, duck, chicken, rabbit, fish, whatever. So you get that, crumble it over their dry kibble that they're eating, and so as they're eating, they're going to end up eating some of that stuff too. And each day you take out another couple pieces of kibble, put in a little bit more of the freeze-dried, until they're pretty much only on freeze-dried. And we haven't solved the moisture problem yet. So once we get them to like take the new food, it's like, okay, that tastes pretty good and the texture is pretty similar to what I've been eating. Then you start sprinkling little bits of water on it.

Okay.

And a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until you get them completely switched over. Once they accept that, then it's usually pretty easy to get them to go to gently cooked or get them to go to the raw. Any food that you're feeding needs to be at room temperature. So if you're someone who wants to feed a raw food or wants to eat gently cooked food, you know, obviously you're either storing it in the freezer or you're storing it in the refrigerator.

Mm-hmm.

When you take it out of the refrigerator, you don't wanna feed it at that temperature. You want it to be pretty close to body temperature. And for cats, if you warm up the food, it releases the odors and then they're more likely to dive into that.

See, she's got me so like, I'll do anything she wants. And so she'll look at me like I'm an idiot when I put something new down there and just stare at me and make me feel bad.

Yep.

And I told my wife, I was like, you know what? If she's hungry, she'll eat.

You can't starve a cat into it. I, cats will go 2 to 3 days without eating and then go into liver failure. So yeah, I mean, cat, cats are not small dogs. They're like their own creature. So that's, you know, that's why you play with, yeah, the different freeze-dried.

What if she doesn't do it, for example, then what do you do?

It took me 6 months with my first cats that I was doing this with, and I was just really persistent. It was like every day some of that freeze-dried was in the bowl.

Yeah.

And It's like sooner or later you're gonna eat this. And they did. It just, it took a really long, because they, they were older cats. They had been on kibble their whole life. I call it kitty crack. And the 9 cats that we have now were all raised from kittens on raw food. But I guarantee you, if I put a bowl of kibble out there, they'd dive in headfirst.

Really? Because it's like McDonald's.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's got palatine sprayed on it. It is, it is It is, yeah, it is just made to addict them. And it's funny, before I got into all of this, we were visiting Amarillo, Texas because that's where my husband is from. And the Merrick Pet Food Company was started.

That just sounds corporate.

It, well, it is now. It was started by a family who, I guess they raised cows. Were they also the renderers? They were renderers. They were the dead cow farmers.

Oh man.

And so they started canning the, you know, meat that was not human fit. Uh, but anyway, it grew into this big pet food company and they had really cool names like Cowboy Cookout, you know, like all this really cool stuff and it looked good. So I was really into it and I was actually recommending it for people for a very long time. And we went to visit them and the person who gave us the tour of the facility, she said, She told me about the spraying of the palatines and what's added into the food. Whoops. And it didn't ring a bell. Like it didn't register at the time. I was like, well, of course we want it to taste good for them. Like, why would that be a problem? Now I know better. And it's really funny. We, I pushed Merrick a lot for probably a good 5 years or so. And then I started really learning and then Merrick was bought out by by Purina. And the day they were bought out by Purina, I posted on— I probably had 50,000 followers at the time— and I posted on social media that we were no longer recommending it because it was bought by a big company.

Their sales rep showed up at my clinic and laid me low. How dare I? I'm like, I told the truth that you sold to a big company and I'm not recommending it. What's wrong with Well, our sales have dropped. I'm like, sorry. First of all, I didn't know I had that much influence at the time.

Did you work for them with a contract?

Like, I didn't know I had that much influence, so that was kind of cool. Uh, and sorry, I'm not gonna change anything I said. Like, yeah, you sold to a big company and I know they're gonna change it. They have. Fine.

Called integrity.

I mean, I'm like, uh, sorry. You know, and now I look back on it and go, oh my God, I can't ever recommend it to begin with.

But you know, but did you work for them?

No.

Well, then I would have been like, you got about 5 seconds before I call the police.

Yeah, well, it was kind of similar to that.

Yeah.

Like, I gotta go, I'm busy. See ya.

So I, I bought her canned food multiple times and she just stares, stares. And then one time she ate it for like a week and I mean smashed it and then started doing the staring at me again. Like I was an idiot.

Like, why would you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our cats, so we feed, I rotate brands. Really? I'm a huge fan of Roach and they're all like very high quality.

Are they canned food?

No, we feed raw.

Oh, okay.

And sometimes gently cooked. So it comes in 1-pound bricks, which is fine cuz we have so many animals. So, but I rotate companies for a reason. Like I have certain companies that I absolutely love and I could just feed their food all the time. But let's just say, and a lot of times when you, like a couple of the companies that I use, every recipe's very different. But then we have other companies where the protein changes, but all the vegetables in there pretty much sit. So it's like the same recipe.

Yeah.

But with a different protein. And so I look at that and I go, well, what— let's just say there's a micro mineral deficiency or a micro vitamin deficiency and you're feeding— and this is one of the things that the veterinarians say, put the same thing in the bowl every day, you know, don't ever change it because, you know, it'll cause diarrhea. Wrong. You want to rotate. Let's just say there's a micro deficiency and you're feeding the same thing, or there's excess vitamin D in there like that recall, right? You're feeding the same thing day in and day out. You're just— you're exacerbating the problem. So I want to have 5 different companies that I like. I want to have all those in my freezer for my animals, and I want to have 10 different proteins in there. Yeah. So I've got duck, I've got rabbit, I've got venison, I've got goat, I've got beef, chicken.

Well, do you eat the same exact one? Exactly.

And do we go stupid crazy trying to balance every single meal that we eat? I mean, or do we do that for our kids. Like, I look at my granddaughter and I'm like, I think you got some protein this week, you got some fruit. Yeah, we're good. Close enough.

I'm hardcore and I still mix things up, you know. Like, otherwise too, yeah, I mean, you have to, you know, your body does it. Actually, it will adjust to everything and then it stops working. Yeah. So that's— I'm—

listen, God put so many things on this earth for us to eat. Why not? Why not? And, and we're told to eat them all. So anyway, I, for my animals, that's how I do it. We're rotating flavors. And it's funny, there's one veterinarian in England, a holistic veterinarian, really good guy, but he's like, no, you want to feed them only beef until they don't tolerate beef anymore, and then you switch to something else, and then you feed them pork until they can't tolerate that. And I'm like, I don't really like that method.

I don't prefer that method.

I really like my animals to be able to know whatever you end up—

I did that with oatmeal for years, and I don't even want to look cat it. Seriously.

And amongst other things I found out about eating it, you know, you know, there are some— like, some of our cats are not real fans of certain flavors. Yeah. And so my mom feeds the cats and she always gives them two choices at every meal. They have two choices. So it's like, okay, well, if you don't like the rabbit, maybe you'll like the chicken. Okay, well, today it's turkey and beef. Like, pick one.

I've even noticed that when I give— because I'm sparing with the treats, but I, I do, and I've Tuna, duck, I mean chicken, several. And I notice sometimes I'll shake 'em and she comes, but.

So will she eat like a, a freeze-dried treat, like a freeze-dried piece of chicken or?

We're gonna try now that you told me. I mean.

Man, I wish I'd known. I'd have brought so much stuff with me. So one of my cat's favorite treats is freeze-dried pork tenderloin. And, and it.

That sounds good for me.

What do you mean? It is, it is so weird because you're like, in nature, what cat's going to take down a pig?

Yeah.

But they really like it. And right now mine are, they're, the one company was doing a special on venison, so they're getting venison. I'm like, you cats can't take down a deer. We've got 7 barn cats and they're still not going to take down a deer.

No.

And it's really interesting. One company makes whole ground mice and whole ground guinea pigs. My cats eat mice all the time, but they will not eat that.

Really?

I'm like, why not?

That's weird.

My dogs eat whole ground quail, whole ground rabbit. Wow. Because the feathers and the fur, that's, there's a lot of trace minerals in there.

Yeah. Tell me about the books that you've written, cuz you've written a lot. And how many total have you written?

I'm working on number 10.

10? Yeah. When did you start writing books?

So my first book was written on a dare and it was published in 2014.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, you've written 10 books in 10 years, so that's like, well, 12. So you're writing a lot of books.

Well, in one year I did 3 in one year. What? So I've had, I've, I've had times where I'm very prolific and times where I've got too many other things going on and it gets put on hold. I've discovered my writing style. So the first book took me a year to write and I was invited to a Facebook group for Cavalier King Charles Spaniel owners, cuz that's our breed and— you know, on Facebook everybody asks questions. What do you feed your dog? What heartworm preventative do you use? How do you treat fleas? And everybody was like, your answers are different from everybody else's. And I'm like, uh-huh. And so I said, well, I'm a holistic veterinarian. And then new people would join and ask the same questions. And somebody said, you know, you should write all this down somewhere. And I said, haha, maybe I'll write a book. So I did. And so a year later I published the first book, and the 10th book that I'm working on now is the rewrite of that first book. It's, it's great because it's sort of my autobiography of how I went from being a traditional vet to being a holistic vet.

And it has a lot of stories about my own animals that taught me things, my patients that taught me things. But there's a lot of companies in there that I recommend and food companies that I wouldn't— like the Merck thing— that I would never recommend now. So I'm like, I have to rewrite this book. I can't let people buy this and buy these things that I talked about back then. So that's being rewritten. But it really was written on a dare, and I didn't know anything about publishing a book. So I did hybrid publishing. I paid $35,000 to get that book published. Thank God for my vet clinic, because that's how we paid for it.

Yeah.

Now I spend a lot less. Yeah, I still do self-publishing, but the books do very well. And so a lot of my stuff goes toward traditional Chinese medicine because that— I love acupuncture and the food therapy is very big for me. And my goal with the books is to educate people.

Yeah.

Like, you, you need to have this user's manual on how to do things.

Yeah, and don't go to Reddit, please. You're not going to get the answers there.

Well, yeah, I mean, I, I, I used to spend— when I was trying to grow my name, like when I wrote that first book, I thought, oh, you write a book, people buy it, right? Yeah. Yeah, I wish.

It doesn't work that way.

But that's what started this whole journey, because like, okay, I sold the 50 to my friends, now what? And I stupidly ordered 3,500 books when I first wrote it, so my surgery room had 75 cases of books stacked up and my staff was like, we can't move, we can't do surgery, you have to do something with these boxes of books. And I'm like, I guess I'm gonna have to start some social media campaigns.

What was your best-selling book?

The best-selling one was the initial Yin and Yang Nutrition for Dogs. No, actually, I take that back, probably this one, Raising Naturally Healthy Pets. Okay, this one I wrote in '23, I think, um, and then the to it is keeping your pets naturally healthy. So the Raising Naturally Healthy Pets is for like people who are kind of new to the holistic thing. Like it tells you one, how to choose the right pet for you. Like, you know, if you wanna be a vegetarian, don't get a cat. How to find a holistic veterinarian. If you only have a traditional veterinarian, how do you have a conversation with them to get your way without getting kicked out of the office? There's a big chapter on vaccines, you know, what, how, how they A, how the diseases are spread. Would your animal be susceptible? Is it even something like, do you have a hunting dog or do you live in a high-rise? Kind of a different lifestyle. Um, so all that's in there. And then the Keeping Your Pets Naturally Healthy talks about all the different diseases like arthritis and seizures and liver disease and kidney disease and how we would diagnose and treat them from a traditional standpoint versus, or you could try this.

When's your newest book coming out?

Uh, it depends. I have a huge speaking schedule. We're traveling all over the world in the next few months. I'm trying to finish it in between all that. So hopefully by the end of the year.

Okay. Well, when that thing's ready, we're gonna talk about it again. We're gonna get everybody on it because they need to see and know. Thank you so much for coming to see me and for the education. I, I mean, there's probably several more hours of stuff we could go over, probably days. So, so much. We can certainly do another episode of this at a given point when you're traveling back this way. I would love to have you back.

Awesome. Awesome.

So what, uh, what kind of special offer do we have today for the listeners?

Uh, so for all of my books that are on our website, naturallyhealthyPets.com, Jameli50 will get you 50% off all of my books. 50% off my books. 50%.

Well, that is more than generous.

It's, it's not about making money. It's about education.

Well, take advantage please, because I want everybody to really comprehend and understand how to take care of your pets, cuz you may have the best motive, but you may be doing it wrong. Clearly I'm doing some things wrong too, and I wanna fix it. So that's what it's all about is learning and fixing it before you create a bigger problem.

Yeah. And we have probably about 40 courses that are, are associated with our website as well. They're not all taught by me. They're taught by other people in the holistic pet space. So if you, we actually have a course on how to get your cat off kibble, uh, and we have courses on how to feed your cats. We have a homemade food for dogs course. So, you know, if you look at our website, you download all the recipes and you're still confused. Used, there's a course. There's a course on how, how to feed your dogs raw meaty bones.

Really?

Yeah.

So can, do people, or they have the ability to hire you, or is it just courses, or what is your—

So I have done a lot of online consultations over the years. My schedule is a little crazy.

Yeah.

So we have about a dozen other holistic veterinarians in our referral group. So if somebody, you know, has a problem with, um, you know, what vaccine should I, it's like if you just have general questions, we have people that can help with that. If you have you have a pet with cancer, a pet with arthritis, allergies, what, whatever you're dealing with, we have people in the group who can help out.

Is that on your website then?

Yeah. Yeah. You basically, you just email us and we email you the list of here's the people you can contact.

Okay.

Like I have a, a couple of the veterinarians on the list that really enjoy working with cancer cases and, and they kind of specialize in that.

So I'm like, well, have at it.

That's, you know, so if you have a cancer case, we're probably gonna point you in that direction.

Sure.

Sure. But all of, all of the veterinarians in that group are very good.

All right. Well, I'll make sure that everything's linked in the description and that generous offer, Jameli50, by the way, 50% off these amazing books. So Judy, thank you again for, thank you for coming, but for your work, your effort, and the brilliance in which you deliver it. It's, it's really soothing to the soul to see somebody that actually cares that much.

I, I've been doing this for, it seems like forever, but I, it's, for me, it's all about saving the animals and making I mean, we, who doesn't want, I'm sure you want your cat to live to 30.

Well, yeah.

And our dogs are living into their late teens, but not very many are.

Yeah.

And I think people would be thrilled if their animals could have a high quality of life for decades.

Let's keep teaching them how to do it.

Exactly.

All right, everybody, that wraps up another one. So learn as much as you can from this and go see Judy. I'll link everything in the description. That being said, stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Gemelli signing off.