Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats (10 page)

L
EGUMES

Beans and other legumes are emphasized in several of our recipes for dogs. That’s because they provide a great deal of protein at less cost than any other food, allowing you to reduce your dog’s meat consumption if you
wish. It takes more time to prepare legumes, but when you fix large quantities of food, a little planning about including legumes will be well worth it. Here are some tips for saving time and/or energy when cooking legumes.

Use quick-cooking legumes such as split
peas and lentils.
Lentils are high in protein and because of their thin skins, they require no soaking. There’s also no need to soak split peas, which makes both these legumes good choices on a compressed schedule.

Presoak longer-cooking beans overnight.
Soaking beans at least three hours—and changing the water at least once, if soaked longer—helps reduce intestinal gas after they’re consumed. It also helps to boil the soaked beans for 30 minutes, discard the cooking water, and finish cooking with fresh water. (Beans are done when you can easily lift off the outer “skin” of the bean.)

Use a pressure cooker.
If you have one of these appliances, you can cook beans in 35 to 45 minutes.

Precook a large quantity of beans and
freeze them in recipe-size portions for future
use.
For this reason, the recipes list amounts for both dry and cooked beans.

Suggested legume-for-legume substitutions that provide adequate nutritional value are given with the recipes in the next chapter. Amounts are provided, but you may need to refer to the “Recommended Legumes” table below for cooking instructions.  

V
EGETABLES

Despite their image as exclusive meat-eaters, the wild cousins of dogs and cats do consume plant foods—sometimes these are found in the stomach contents of their plant-eating prey (often the first part of a kill a wolf eats). Sometimes wild animals eat plant foods directly. Dogs especially like vegetables, which are valuable for adding vitamins, minerals, and roughage to the diet. Most vegetables are so low-calorie that you can add them to the recipes in modest quantities with little effect on the proportions of the major nutrients. Some vegetables must be cooked to help carnivores digest them properly, but others may be fed raw, much like the grasses they sometimes nibble in the back yard.

These are the best-liked veggies that can be fed raw to dogs:

• Chopped parsley
  
• Alfalfa sprouts
  
• Finely grated carrots with peel
  
• Finely grated zucchini and other soft squash with peel
  
• Lettuce and mixed greens
  
• Green, red, orange, yellow, or purple bell peppers
  
• Fresh corn (especially if chopped up, but dogs can gnaw on cobs)
  
• Finely grated beets (don’t be alarmed when urine or stool turns pink!)
  

These vegetable favorites should be cooked before being fed to both dogs and cats:

• Corn
  
• Peas
  
• Green beans
  
• Broccoli
  
• Cauliflower
  
• Potatoes
  
• Hard winter squash
  
• Any hard vegetable that cannot be grated or pulverized
  

Though they may also be cooked, whole raw carrots are favored by many dogs who enjoy chewing on them much as they do bones. Such foods help exercise and clean teeth and gums.

Cats generally do not like vegetables, though you will find the occasional cat that will kill for a cucumber. You can add veggies into the cat diet, but they have to be well mixed or they will be studiously picked out and left in the dish in favor of the meat and fat.

Avoid feeding pets vegetables high in oxalic acid, a compound that interferes with calcium absorption. These include spinach, Swiss chard, and rhubarb.

In contrast to most vegetables, potatoes provide plenty of calories in the form of both carbohydrates and protein. Fortunately, they are also well-liked by many pets. So it’s okay to use leftover cooked or mashed potatoes occasionally in place of some lower-protein grains such as rice, cornmeal, and barley. Some people think their animals have trouble digesting potatoes, but others find that their pets relish spuds. Try using potatoes
and judge your animal’s reaction for yourself. (Be sure to cut out all green or sprouting parts, which contain solanine, a somewhat toxic substance.)

A word of caution about fresh produce:
Most likely, many vegetables and fruits have been sprayed at some point during production. (This is another reason to select organically grown vegetables whenever possible. With organically grown vegetables, you are also sure that the produce has not been dyed, waxed, or irradiated.) Be sure to wash non-organic produce thoroughly. If you think it’s appropriate, use a bit of dishwashing detergent (a way to reduce pesticide residues significantly) and rinse thoroughly.

Grow Your Own!

Organic produce may be hard to come by in your area, but you can always grow your own. Even apartment-dwellers can raise high-nutrition vegetables in the form of sprouts and potted greens.

Here’s how to grow fresh, nutritious sprouts. First, buy one or two sprouting jars, or make your own by putting a piece of screen or cheesecloth inside a canning jar ring on a one-quart jar. Add two tablespoons alfalfa seeds or ½-cup lentils or mung beans (all available at natural food stores). Cover with water and soak for eight hours or overnight.

Afterward, drain off the water onto some thirsty houseplants. Rinse the sprouting seeds three or four times a day and place the jar mouth angled slightly down so the water can drain into a bowl or sink. After a couple of days, flood the jar and wash off excess seed coats through a coarser screen, if desired. In three to five days the sprouts will be ready to eat. If your pet won’t eat the sprouts at first, you might try chopping them up and mixing them in the food.

Many dogs and cats also relish wheat grass. They’ll even “graze” directly from the pots, if allowed, in the same way they go for lawn grass. This is part of a natural cleansing instinct, so you shouldn’t try to discourage it. If herbicides and synthetic fertilizers have been applied to your lawn or if your pet is housebound, growing wheat grass can provide your animal with a safe, healthy source of greens.

Here’s how to grow wheat grass. Soak one to two tablespoons of wheat berries (available at natural food stores) overnight. Drain the water onto some thirsty houseplants. Almost fill a flower pot or tray with potting soil and sprinkle the seeds evenly on top, spacing them about one berry apart. Cover with ¼ inch of potting soil. Water daily, just enough to keep the soil slightly moist.

When the shoots are about four inches high, offer them to your animal friend for grazing or “mow” some of the grass down to about an inch with a pair of scissors. Chop the trimmings and mix them into a meal occasionally.

Herbs are special plants. In addition to being excellent sources of minerals, they also possess mild medicinal qualities. Occasionally, add a pinch of dried or a greater amount of fresh of any of the following herbs to your
pet’s food: alfalfa, parsley, thyme, dandelion, red clover, raspberry or blackberry leaves, basil, comfrey, linden flowers, or fenugreek.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that we have considered the major food groups that make up the bulk of the recipes, let’s take a moment to put them in perspective.

Best Ingredient Choices for Feeding Your Pet
gives you a quick way to compare the major ingredients, considering the following factors: cost per gram of protein, cooking time, and best nutrients.

The foods are grouped by basic categories: grains, legumes, meats, and dairy products. Based on a price survey of our local natural food store and a major supermarket, we sorted the various choices within each category of food into price groups. Where I was able, I chose to list the organic foods, as you will want to use them when possible. This is important. The price groups start with the least expensive—foods that cost less than a penny per gram of protein; next, foods that cost about a penny per gram of protein; then, foods costing three cents and four cents per gram of protein and so on.

What we find here locally is typical in my experience for the West Coast. Generally these natural and organic foods are fairly easily obtained on the West and East coasts of the United States. In other parts of the country, it might take more tracking down, and sometimes ordering long distance, but they can still be obtained.

Where the organic choice was not available, I listed the conventional sources. Also, where possible, I used bulk prices, from the bins where you can package it yourself. So if you buy packaged grains at a supermarket (where grains and legumes are seldom offered in bulk), figure a little more for the price.

Chicken, hamburger, and turkey are the best protein buys in meats. Processed foods such as tofu, bread, cheese, and yogurt are relatively expensive.

Now let’s look at some of the secondary foods—snacks, flavorings, and nutritional supplements that are part of a recommended pet diet.

S
NACKS
AND
F
LAVORINGS

Healthful natural snacks, flavorings, and supplements help to round out a pet’s diet, adding both appeal and nutrition. A good general rule for feeding snacks is to allow your animal fairly ample amounts of any healthful food it really likes, up to 20 percent of the diet. The following snacks, which can also be used as training rewards, are healthy alternatives to the kinds of human junk food that pets sometimes get hooked on.

Bones

Both cats and dogs, but especially dogs, have a high calcium requirement. That’s why bone meal or other calcium supplementation
is an important component in my recipes. You may also let your pet gnaw on bones occasionally as a snack, not as a major part of the diet. It’s the animal’s most natural way to get calcium, and many pets relish bones.

Be careful about feeding chicken, turkey, fish, or pork bones to your dog, however, because they splinter easily and can cause injury. Cats can manage much smaller bones quite well (it is really just matching bones to mouth size—we want them too large to swallow whole). They do well with chicken, game hen, quail, and other bones similar in size. I have noticed that if cats are started young in life with the experience of getting raw bones, then they will accept them as part of the diet. Older cats, without this experience, look at them the way you look at the things they drag in from the yard.

Dogs do better with large, meaty bones, again large enough that they can’t break them up and swallow big pieces. We want them to
gnaw
on the bones, which is what exercises the teeth and gums.

Feed your pet raw bones only, because cooked bones can splinter into sharp fragments. Also be careful of frozen bones, which are rock hard and can break teeth. It seems to me that bones once frozen are also more brittle, so I prefer that any bones used are raw and not frozen.

Save the bones you can’t give directly to your animal and simmer them in water to make a mineral-rich stock that you can then use for cooking your pet’s grains. Adding a little vinegar and salt to the brew helps to extract the minerals.

One word of caution:
If your dog is not used to eating bones, he may go crazy with delight when he is introduced to one. As a result, he may eat too much bone at one time, irritating his digestive tract. The result can be either constipation or diarrhea. Also, if your animal’s health is not the greatest, digesting bones may be difficult at first. I believe this problem is related to weak stomach acid that develops because of a nutritional deficiency. So go easy at first and limit the time you allow your pet to gnaw on bones. Watch them at first to make sure they are not swallowing big pieces—a 15-minute trial period is a good start. As your pet’s health improves, digesting bones will be easier. Also note that it is not unusual for a dog’s stool to be hard and white after eating a lot of bones.

Both dogs and cats benefit from an occasional bone fast (one or two days a month in which they are given nothing but water and raw bones). These regular, short fasts mimic natural conditions in which predators have both lean and fat times. They offer the animal’s digestive tract an opportunity to put aside regular duties and get at some overlooked “housecleaning.” The practice of fasting also has the added benefit of keeping your pet’s teeth and gums strong and healthy.

A similar idea is to occasionally feed your cat nothing all day but a small whole Cornish game hen, uncooked, or a piece of raw chicken with the bone in.

BEST INGREDIENT CHOICES FOR FEEDING YOUR PET

Use the table below as a confidence builder when you begin to prepare healthful homemade food for your pet. At a glance you have all the information you need for choosing the most desirable ingredients—the least costly, quickest to prepare, most additive-free, and richest in nutrients vital to cats and dogs. Because protein is basic in planning a meal for these pets (much more important than for humans), cost counts. Check the first column on the left for the approximate price per gram of protein in various foods. Where possible, I used the price for organic food. You can assume less cost for conventional food, about a third or half less. 

Boldface
signifies remarkable values of unusually nutritious ingredients in their category.

KEY

O = available organically grown

A = high in vitamin A

B = high in B vitamins

Ca = high in calcium

I = high in iron

P = high in protein

S = short cooking time (saves time, money, natural resources)