Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats (23 page)

DOG SIZES

Use this table as an approximate guide in determining how much herb to give your dog. If your dog falls into a size between those listed, then use the next higher group.

CHAPTER 7

EXERCISE, REST, AND NATURAL GROOMING

Y
ou can’t expect to keep your car in top shape by merely filling the gas tank. You also have to change the oil, lube the joints, replace parts that wear, and get an occasional tune-up. Without this kind of attention, even the best car eventually becomes a junker.

Certainly, animals can’t be equated with machines. But like machines, they need more than just the right fuel (food). Besides a healthy diet, animals need pure water, fresh air, sunlight, regular exercise, grooming, space of their own, and much more.

So while good nutrition is essential for maintaining or improving your pet’s health, you can’t stop there. Many additional factors, both obvious and subtle, affect well-being. What we must do is develop a broad view that allows us to see the many diverse elements as a whole—a whole that can enhance your pet’s life or threaten it.

Consider for a moment the difference between the lifestyle of our pets and the ways of their wild ancestors. A typical city dog, for example, eats highly processed foods nearly all the time and never spends a fresh, sunny day investigating the path of a stream or running hard through sweetly scented woods on the trail of prey. Instead, she devotes most of her life to sleeping or pacing indoors on vinyl floors and carpets made from synthetic fibers. Her time “outdoors” is often spent in a stuffy parked car waiting while her owner does an errand.

She doesn’t socialize much with her own kind, but does have an intense mutual attachment with one or more humans, who often display complex and confusing emotions. But mostly the humans are at work or at school, and she is alone in the confines of an apartment, house, or yard.

If she is lucky, every week or two she’s treated to one of her great delights—a walk through the fields. But her fun is somewhat marred by painful foxtails that lodge easily in the abnormally long, curly hairs of her coat. When she gets home, she quenches her thirst with tap water that smells of chlorine. Sometimes, largely because of these conditions, she’s a bit irritable and snappish, or depressed and bored. But overall she’s good-natured and takes each day as it comes.

Do our animal friends really have to lead lives lacking in so many basics? Let’s examine an animal’s real needs and see what we can do to meet them.

The circumstances that affect a pet’s health are complex, of course, but we can understand them better if we remember one basic principle: The less we interfere with nature, the more life’s processes flow healthfully. Not all of us are able to let our dogs run free in natural settings, even occasionally, but we can control many other important factors that affect the quality of a pet’s life. Among these are exercise, grooming, and exposure to environmental pollutants.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXERCISE

For the wild cousins of domestic dogs and cats, regular exercise is an integral and necessary part of daily life. They
must
keep on the move because they
must
hunt for food. A walk to the food bowl is the only exercise many house pets ever get.

Yet regular exercise is essential for optimal health. Sustained, vigorous use of the muscles stimulates all tissues and increases circulation. Blood vessels dilate and blood pressure rises. As a result, tissues become oxygenated, which helps to clean the cells of toxins. Digestive glands secrete their fluids better and the bowels move more easily.

Join your pet in jogging, taking a walk, playing ball, or chasing sticks and Frisbees. Nearly all dogs benefit from half an hour or more of daily vigorous exercise. If your pet is old and weak or has a bad heart, settle for slow walks around the block.

Cats, on the other hand, are not inclined to chase balls or jog, but they usually get enough exercise if they are allowed outside part of the time and have a suitable place to “scratch.” The practice of removing claws (equivalent to cutting off the last joint of each of your own fingers) is not only cruel and painful, but it also eliminates the important feline exercise pattern of using the claws to knead and stretch, which benefits the muscles of the forelegs, backbone, and shoulders. A cat that can’t perform this ritual is likely to become weaker and thus more susceptible to illness and degeneration.

Most cats also love to play “thing-on-a-string,” chasing and batting at a piece of string with a loop or mouse toy attached to one end. Pet stores sell many such toys for both cats and dogs. When playing games with a pet, however, do not use your bare hand as the “bait” or the object of teasing. This can teach your animal that it’s all right to scratch or bite your hands, a lesson you will want him to “unlearn” in the future.

Make sure the toys you give your pet are safe for biting and chewing. Some of the best toys are those made of leather, rawhide, and similar natural materials. Another word of caution: Don’t leave your animal alone with a ball of yarn or string. Your pet might swallow some of the string or become dangerously entangled in it.

If your dog is temporarily unable to walk because of a sore foot or a partial paralysis, encourage him to swim in place in a bathtub, large trough, swimming pool, or natural body of water to get exercise. Swimming strengthens the body in the same way running does. If your pet tends to sink, place a towel or cloth as a sling under the body for support. This exercise is especially good for dogs with back problems.

QUIET AND REST

Every creature needs a clean, quiet, private place to sleep and rest, a place where it will be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Even if your pet sleeps in your bed some of the time, provide a suitable place or two of its own. A lot of animals—especially big dogs—are denied these havens. Many are left out in the elements, but unlike their wild cousins who have a cozy den to hide in, they must make do with a patch of dirt next to a noisy street or perhaps a drafty slab of cement beneath a porch roof. The difference is an important one.

Cats and smaller dogs are happy with a padded basket or even just a clean folded blanket or towel in a corner or on a chair. Large dogs don’t necessarily require a bed such as a basket, but they do need some kind of secure, clean place that is comfortable in both winter and summer—such as a carpeted corner in a room or dog house, an old chair,
or a special rug of its own in a quiet spot.

Use natural fabrics and stuffings for the bedding, such as cotton, wool, feathers, and kapok. Woven wool fleece (called Sherpa Wool or Flokati) resembles sheepskin and makes a warm, soft, washable natural cover for a pet to sleep on. Sold by the yard in many fabric stores, it provides the same healthy sleeping benefits as more costly sheepskin mattress pads sold for human use. Buy enough to cut two sheets a little larger than your pet’s body. No sewing is needed. Pets love them and, besides, they look so cozy curled up on them!

Study your pet’s preferences and try to provide several quiet sleeping spots, given the circumstances of your home and climate. Your pet might like one quiet, out-of-the-way place and another that’s closer to the center of activity, where it’s easy to keep an eye on things. Cats instinctively gravitate to small, defined areas with a little elevation, which makes them feel safer. Commercially made window perches or carpeted shelves affixed to windows give cats a front-row seat on all their favorite shows on “cat TV.” You might also consider carpeted cat houses on posts, sold at many pet stores.

Are you worried that your pet sleeps too much? It’s normal for a pet that is left alone most of the day to sleep a lot during that time. But if your companion animal does not greet you on arrival or goes back to sleep soon after you come home, it could mean the pet’s low on energy. This is especially true with dogs. Cats naturally sleep more than dogs and often take frequent naps throughout the day and night. My way of deciding if a cat sleeps too much is to learn if there are several active periods during the day and if the cat grooms himself several times a day. The healthy cat will alternate sleep with activity—looking out the window, going outside, exploring, and grooming. If this activity is rare, there may be a problem.

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO HEALTHFULNESS

A clean animal is a beautiful animal, and, more importantly, a healthy one. Every living organism is constantly breaking down and eliminating natural metabolic products and old cells. Ordinarily, about a third of the body’s cells are dying at any one time. Each of these cells must be broken down and replaced. In today’s world, the body must work even harder to counteract the heavy load of synthetic chemicals in the air, soil, water, and food chain.

These accumulated toxins, as well as external dirt and secretions, can encourage the growth of germs and parasites. They also sap general vitality by overburdening normal organ and glandular functions. A buildup of toxins may not cause a specific disease by itself, but it can make a pet more susceptible and set the stage for worse conditions—infectious disease, acute inflammation, or gradual organ degeneration punctuated by occasional flare-ups. For example, an animal with chronically inflamed skin may develop
a sudden moist eczema (“hot spots”); another may get an attack of nephritis (kidney inflammation) arising from a silent degeneration and loss of kidney tissue over years.

If you doubt that this load of toxins our pets face every day is a heavy one, take a closer look at some animals you know. Give them the checkup described in
How to Give Your Pet a Quick Checkup
. I see a lot of animals that show low-level signs of chronic excessive toxicity. Oily or smelly secretions on the skin, ears, or eyes or deposits on the teeth are signs that the body is struggling to eliminate toxins.

Here are three natural ways you can assist the hard-working organs—the skin, liver, kidneys, digestive tract, and lungs—that carry wastes out of your pet’s body.

• Daily exercise stimulates waste removal through improved metabolism and circulation.
  
• An occasional day of fasting relieves the digestive tract of its usual duties and frees the organs to break down toxins stored in the liver, fats, and other tissues. During a fast, the organs can also consume excess baggage, such as cysts, scars, and growths. The process and the therapeutic uses of fasting are described more fully in chapter 15.
  
• Regular grooming not only removes dirt and secretions directly, but stimulates the skin’s natural elimination processes as well. Let’s take a closer look at this important aspect of pet care.
  

NATURAL GROOMING AND SKIN CARE

Nobody ever gives a wolf or a bobcat a bath and those animals seem to do just fine, so why should we have to groom our pets? For one thing, a wild animal moves from place to place, which means it can get away from a colony of parasites such as fleas. A pet, on the other hand, keeps getting re-infested with these critters from the eggs dropped in its quarters.

Furthermore, a lot of domestic animals are bred to have abnormally long, or curly, or very fine hair, which can be too great a challenge for their limited self-grooming tools—tongue, paws, and teeth. As a result, mats, plant debris, and dirt build up, predisposing the skin to irritation. Also, dust and debris on your pet’s fur can contain various toxic and unhealthful contaminants, such as lint from synthetic fibers, tiny flakes of paint, or debris from automobiles (including asbestos fibers from brake linings).

Of course, it’s better for the pet’s health if you remove this debris from his coat than if the animal licks it off and swallows it. Because we humans have intervened in the natural order and changed the physical structure and environment of our animals, it’s up to us to help care for the skin and coat of those pets that need it.

Long-haired pets need daily brushing with a special “slicker” pet brush made for picking up hair. Short-haired animals may need brushing less often. Another excellent
tool for regular grooming is a flea comb. Frequent brushing and combing stimulate hair and skin health, bringing normal secretions from oil glands onto the skin and discouraging fleas. It also keeps mats from building up and helps to remove burrs and other plant debris.