Just like any parent, I'm always on the lookout for new and better everything for my daughter, Molly, a five year old toy poodle. I look for better health insurance, better ways to train, improved toys, more tools for her dental hygiene (yes, I brush her teeth), and better nutrition. In fact, I've recently been looking into a "new" form of diet, commonly known as BARF.
You want to feed your daughter vomit?? What kind of nutritional value could that possibly have? Actually, BARF is an acronym for Bones and Raw Foods. It's a rediscovered way of feeding canine children, like Molly, which takes into consideration some basics that society seems to have forgotten.
In a world where even humans drive up to a window and order the same processed food nearly every day, I suppose it's easy to understand why we would forget and choose to believe what the kibble manufacturers have been telling Doggie and Kitty Parents for nearly a full century: They'll get all the nutrition they need, all in pellet form. But wait! There's more! It's now available in three different flavors and we've added yellow and red food coloring to make you think you're feeding your kids real food!
The other day when I was refilling Molly's dish, she sniffed at the kibble and looked up at me expectantly. She seemed to be asking, "Kibble again? Couldn't you spice it up with something different every now and again?" That look made me really stop and think about what I'm asking my Girl, the dog I call my daughter, to eat day in and day out.
After all, if I was stuck eating the same food every day, regardless of nutritional value to my body, I'm sure I'd be a whole lot more skinny than I am! I just wouldn't bother eating. Why should I? I'd know what it was going to taste like. I certainly wouldn't look forward to dinner if it was going to be the same thing as breakfast. So why should I be the only one who needs some variety in my diet?
That got me started on a different track of thought. Molly recently went through a sickness that attacked her stomache lining. Initially, my vetrenarian thought it was cancer and I was devastated. I did nothing for four days except spend time with her and just cry. Dr. Brenda and Dr. Sterling, of course, sent blood work and samples of the infected tissue off to a lab to confirm before telling me it was indeed cancer. I anxiously awaited results. It turned out not to be cancer, but Molly was still very ill. At least her illness was something treatable and she got on the road to recovery!
The moral to my story is that if she's getting all the nutritional value she needs from her complete-nutritional-value-kibble, then why was her immune system unable to fight that illness when it was small? There are other things that my daughter has needed to go see the docter about, too. Things that shouldn't have gotten as bad as they did, had her immune system and body really been getting all that she needed. The other dogs we live with, Tessa, Moe, Pepper, and Cody have each had something go wrong with them that never should have escalated to the extremes they did. Tumors, anal gland infections, inexplicable dehydration are just some examples of what we've fought in the past.
I don't have plans to jump in before I know more about canine nutrition that I'll ever know about human nutrition, but I will certainly be researching the topic with the ultimate goal of regulating Molly's nutrition myself. Not only does Molly appear to be missing some key element of the nutritional value from that kibble I give her, but she's also missing out on the spice of life: Variety.
No comments:
Post a Comment