Just found this transcript out on the 'net... Happy Christmas one and all!
Andrew Prentis is a veterinary surgeon with a practice just a sticks throw from London’s Hyde Park, and when I called in at his surgery, he had his hand in a dogs mouth, performing a spot of canine dental work.
Andrew Prentis “So you can easily get in under the lip there, and brush the outer surface of the teeth.”
Clive Anderson “So this is ‘Haggis’, a Whippet, having her teeth cleaned. What would you say generally about the condition of the dog of today in the 21st century. Are they being treated well?”
Andrew Prentis “A big issue is dental hygiene. There are many, many dogs and cats out there who’ve got filthy disgusting teeth with very, very bad breath.
Clive Anderson “I can see Haggis is quite used to this - what flavour toothpaste have you got?”
Andrew Prentis “This is chicken flavour.”
Clive Anderson “They don’t go for mint?”
Andrew Prentis “No, it’s not recommended to use human toothpaste on dogs, a) they don’t really like the taste and b) the fluoride levels are completely different and human ones are designed to froth up, which dogs find rather hard to cope with.”
Clive Anderson “Well of course they do because then people decide they’ve got rabies.”
Andrew Prentis “Yes, (ha, ha,) exactly.”
Clive Anderson “Now why do they get bad teeth?”
Andrew Prentis “Primarily because their teeth are not getting cleaned by the food that they eat. A dog out in the wild, or a wild animal is going to spend quite a lot of it’s time tearing up carcasses, chewing through meat, crunching up bones, and that has a natural cleaning effect on the teeth, and very many of our patients are not fed like that, and are fed on dry, sticky crunchy biscuits from a packet, or squidgy pate-type food from a tin, which, in many cases does not have an adequate cleaning action on the teeth”,
Clive Anderson “So you’re not entirely buying into that?”
Andrew Prentis “Actually, I’m a fan of bones. I think dogs should be fed - dogs and cats - should have at least a proportion of their diet coming from raw meaty bones.
Clive Anderson “Yeah - and this thing about what to feed dogs, is this quite a lively matter of discussion”.
Andrew Prentis “It does provoke some fairly spirited debate - there is an Australian vet, a guy called Tom Lonsdale, who is one of the loudest voices within the profession, for the raw meaty bones diet”
Clive Anderson.........And Tom Lonsdale’s enthusiasm for raw meaty bones and his criticism of processed pet food has kicked up quite a storm in the pet food world. He has, you might say, put the cat amongst the pigeons. Dog food - bad for dogs! James Spratt and Charlie Cruft will be spinning in their graves. But what does he give his own dogs?
Tom Lonsdale “As often as I can I give them a whole carcass. If I find a rabbit run over on the road, or now and again maybe a kangaroo, down here in Australia, then I’ll feed them that. It’s that physical form of the food which cleans the working parts - the teeth and the gums - trouble is that we’ve divorced pet cats and dogs from their origins, and of course the cats and dogs, they don’t have a voice, so they carry on pretending they’re well - what else can they do”.
Clive Anderson “If I go in to my local pet shop, or maybe a shop attached to my veterinary surgery, I can see a whole range of dog foods that I can give my dog, some that have been scientifically worked out, others that have been devised by vets - all that stress of working out what to give your dog has been removed from me.”
Tom Lonsdale “OK well, sadly you’ve been exposed to the propaganda too, and you’ve tended to believe it - you’ve said ah, well there’s a stress involved in working out what to feed your dogs. Mr & Mrs Caveman had no difficulty, they just chucked out a whole carcass, or the remnants of a carcass to their camp followers. The endless trips to the vets, the mountains of dog pooh in the garden, that washes away into the waterways. These are not conveniences at all.”
Clive Anderson “Let me jump in on the dog pooh, as it were. You’re saying you get better dog pooh if the dogs are fed on meaty bones?”
Tom Lonsdale “Oh, much better dog pooh, yeah, yeah, it turns chalky white in the sun.”
Clive Anderson “I though that was just a joke that we no longer had white dog pooh - you’re saying this is because of the food that they’re given, there’s more dog pooh?”
Tom Lonsdale “About three times the quantity.”
Clive Anderson “Why is that?”
Tom Lonsdale “They’re fed as if they were herbivores - they’re fed grains, and you know yourself that herbivore excrement is pretty copious, isn’t it? And it smells. It’s about time that they started to ‘fess up’ and admit that they’ve been misleading the community.”
Clive Anderson “Are you a hero in the veterinary profession - how has it gone down with your fellow professionals?”
Tom Lonsdale “Now that’s a bit of a mischievous question, if I may say Clive.”
Clive Anderson “Thank you.”
Tom Lonsdale “I haven’t gone down very well with my fellow professionals at all.”
Clive Anderson “Now why should that be? Why aren’t you being heralded as the John the Baptist of the veterinary world.”
Tom Lonsdale “Well look, I can’t know their motivations really, can I? I get about 10% of the vote for Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons elections - that’s the governing body of the veterinary profession in the UK. The majority though, I suspect, are voting through their pocket books.”
Clive Anderson “And when you say pocket books!”
Tom Lonsdale “The reality is that if we introduce a natural diet across the board, then the need for veterinary services will go into rapid decline.”
Clive Anderson “That’s quite a charge if you’re basically suggesting that vets are, I don’t know, conspiring with the dog manufacturers to allow the animals to get ill just so they get their regular, um, patients attending their clinics, and they can apply their charges.”
Tom Lonsdale “Whether it’s witting or not, that’s what’s happening. Eventually, governments will understand the extent their people have been dumbed down and exploited. In the UK there’s been an Early Day Motion tabled in the parliament there and at the last count 43 MPs had signed that motion.”
Clive Anderson “All right, well, we’ll put our faith in the Early Day Motion in parliament as that’s going to improve the early day motions of the dogs..... Now this is something I’ve noticed before. People who tell you how to feed your dog are always certain that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Tom Lonsdale seems certain that complete dog foods are completely wrong. The manufacturers, and the majority of vets, say that he’s wrong. Is there no room for compromise? Let’s go back to Andrew Prentis in Hyde Park.
Clive Anderson “Is this your little dog here - the Jack Russell?”
Andrew Prentis “The brown and white one.”
Clive Anderson “Called Bruno?”
Andrew Prentis “Called Bruno, yes.”
Clive Anderson “According to physician heal thyself, vet, keep your dog healthy, is Bruno fed on all natural products - where would you put yourself on the spectrum?”
Andrew Prentis “A sort of moderate, veering towards the raw. Bruno’s fed a mixture of things, he has a wide variety, I do feed him some commercial diets, there are different types, varying brands. He has raw bones, chicken wings, all that sort. I’m not at the same time, suggesting we should throw the baby out with the bath water and say, well, the last fifty years of commercial dog foods is actually barking completely up the wrong tree. Erm, ‘cos there is a good deal of value in that. We do understand a great deal more about the minutiae of pet nutrition now than we ever did. What I’m saying is that I think there’s room for a balance, and I think there is room for more variety and adding in these elements of raw meat, raw bones, raw vegetable can make a big difference.”
Clive Anderson “And raw vegetables - they can go for that as well!”
Andrew Prentis “The issue on vegetables is that they have carnivore teeth, designed to be able to tear through meat, crunch through bone, so if you’re going to feed vegetable matter to dogs, the best way is simply chuck it in a liquidiser and reduce it.........”
Clive Anderson “That’s the carrot into a liquidiser, not the dog!”
Andrew Prentis “Yes (ha ha) if you look at wild dogs attacking their prey, one of the first things they will do is tear open the abdomen and eat the stomach contents, and what they’re eating there is vegetable matter that has been reduced to a semi-liquid consistency.”
Clive Anderson “As I say, dogs will eat anything.”
Andrew Prentis “Dogs will eat anything, there’s no accounting for taste.”
Clive Anderson........But whether we give our dogs dried kibbles, dressed tripe, kangaroo carcasses or raw meaty bones, we don’t want to spoil them.
Andrew Prentis “The old adage is you are what you eat.”
Clive Anderson “You are what you eat but you giving him raw carrot doesn’t make him into a carrot, obviously what a ludicrous thing to ..... (ha,ha,)............ END
