The Blog

Is your pet healthier or sicker than their wild counterpart?

I'm a huge fan of Animal Planet, Discovery Channel and the great outdoors. The last one isn't a new channel on cable, it's nature silly! One thing I've rarely if ever seen in nature is a wild dog with a tumor, a wild stallion with arthritis or a leopard with diabetes. So why is it that our dogs, cats and horses all fall victim to these "diseases"?

I've always viewed a disease as something you catch. A virus is a disease, a bacterial infection is a disease. Diabetes? Cancer? Arthritis? I consider these metabolic disorders. That's a fancy way of saying that the body isn't working the way it was designed to. When your dog vomits or has diarrhea from a viral infection the body is responding the way it was supposed to, by attempting to eliminate the invader from the body.

Clearly metabolic disorders like arthritis or cancer are different. These "diseases" aren't the cause, they are the result! They are the symptoms.... the manifestations, of an underlying malfunction in an organ system or the entire body. Why don't we see these same disorders in nature? If cancer was genetic wouldn't it have been selectively breed out of a species? If an animal dies early of cancer they are likely to have less offspring and not pass on their defective gene to the next generation.

I think part of the problem is the viewpoint we take approaching the issue. Many of people ask "how do I get rid of this disorder or how do I manage the symptoms?" instead of asking "why do I have it in the first place?". If your pet has arthritis, cancer, diabetes or another disorder first start with the question "why does my dog have this disorder?". What protective mechanism went wrong in their body that allowed this disorder to develop.

If they developed cancer ask why their immune system didn't destroy and remove the tumor cells or go even deeper and ask why the cells are mis-communicating in the first place.1 It's been well established that toxins can cause cancer. In much of the cancer research on animals they induce cancer by way of a toxin. Scientists are much better at inducing cancer than they are at curing it! 2

Can you remember your first pet? How did they pass away? I'll bet you it wasn't from the same diseases that we see today. Why is that?

Ask yourself, is this disorder normally present in nature or was it even present 50 years ago? Is it diet, environment, genetic or a contagious disease?

Dig, dig, and dig until you get to the root cause of the problem only then will the solution present itself.

1 - http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-74217338.html

2 - http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/46/9/4862