Pets
Published
Nov. 24, 2023, 5:49 pm ET
Some pet dogs are gaining consideration on TikTok due to their house owners who’re feeding them a raw-style meals weight-reduction plan.
Kayla Kowalski, an authorized canine nutritionist (CertCN) from Phoenix, Arizona, has made it huge on social media together with her out-of-the-ordinary fashion of canine diets which might be made up of uncooked meat and different dietary components.
Kowalski’s curiosity in pet well being began after she and her boyfriend rescued their canine, Rudy, who battled quite a lot of well being and psychological points as soon as he joined the household, she informed Fox News Digital.
“I didn’t know too much about dog nutrition, [but] kibble just wasn’t doing it for him,” she mentioned. “It was making a lot of his issues worse.”
“And then we came across the raw diet and that just really transformed him.”
After sharing her journey on social media, she began gaining lots of curiosity from different pet dad and mom who additionally wished to strive the uncooked pet food weight-reduction plan with their pets.
It was then that Kowalski determined to turn into a CertCN and create her personal business.
Today, she builds customized diets for patrons and shares unique recipes in her e-books.
What began as implementing each uncooked and cooked meats as a topper to her pets’ meals became one thing totally different. She slowly eradicated using a well-liked shopper model and started including extra uncooked bites — together with turkey and hen necks, duck toes, goose heads, beef kidneys, livers and extra.
All three of Kowalski’s dogs, Rudy, Buddy and Rylie, are on an entire uncooked meals weight-reduction plan.
“Just like humans, [dogs] need certain vitamins and minerals to be as healthy as they can,” Kowalski mentioned.
“If you look back to how dogs ate hundreds of years ago, how wolves eat, it’s really how they are biologically meant to eat.”
Kowalski sees pet retailer meals as one thing that was made out of “human convenience.”
But she mentioned if that’s the popular meals for different pets based mostly on the recommendation of veterinarians, she, alongside together with her brother, Nick Kowalski, advocate hydrating the meals with water or bone broth for higher digestion.
Additives don’t should be sophisticated, she indicated. Steamed Brussel sprouts and most veggies, a uncooked egg plus the membrane, ripe bananas or any fruit apart from grapes can be added to a canine’s meals bowl, she mentioned.
Now that the uncooked weight-reduction plan has over 441.3 million hashtags on TikTok — and Kowalski has tens of millions of views on her personal movies — veterinarians are chiming in.
“Feeding dogs raw meat with so many different ingredients shown in these videos can be hard on their stomachs, causing severe diarrhea and pancreatitis and making dogs sick,” Lindsay Butzer, a veterinarian from Boca Raton, Florida, associated to Fox News Digital.
Butzer mentioned she has seen how a few of these additions for a specific household of dogs could trigger extra hurt than good.
“As appealing as it is to watch these videos of creators building bowls and explaining why each ingredient is healthy, with all these unique meats and ingredients to feed a dog, as a veterinarian I do not recommend feeding your dog this way,” Butzer added.
She can see that the addition of 1 uncooked protein supply or vegetable and grain could also be higher on a pet’s digestive system than quite a lot of “exotic ingredients” suddenly, she mentioned.
“As a veterinarian, I am an advocate for kibble and freeze-dried raw pet food brands that are studied, labeled and approved to be a complete and balanced diet for our pets,” Butzer famous.
Kowalski, nevertheless, prefers the holistic strategy in relation to pet well being and has spoken with quite a lot of veterinarians which have discovered her strategies to be useful for dogs.
“As a holistic veterinarian, I’d like to address the growing interest in raw food diets for pets, which, contrary to popular belief, is not just a trend but a health-conscious choice for pet owners,” Dr. Katie Woodley, a holistic veterinarian and founding father of The Natural Pet Doctor in Colorado, mentioned in a press release with Fox News Digital.
“Recent studies, including those found on PubMed, have provided compelling evidence supporting the myriad health benefits of raw food diets compared to traditional kibble, processed-food diets.”
Dr. Woodley has checked out quite a lot of recent research to assist this weight-reduction plan and her analysis has proven that the uncooked pet food lifestyle can positively alter the general well being and well-being of pets, she mentioned.
She is an advocate of uncooked pet food diets due to the dietary advantages; however this should be rigorously thought via and managed nicely.
“When formulated and managed correctly, raw diets offer a natural, nutritious, species-appropriate option that aligns with the dietary needs of carnivorous pets,” she mentioned.
“It’s not about following a trend; it’s about making an informed choice for the health and longevity of our pets.”
She encourages her clients to note that the uncooked pet food weight-reduction plan is simply as balanced and filled with nutritional vitamins and vitamin because the dried kibble.
Most importantly, Kowalski recommends that pet dad and mom be told in relation to studying extra about their pet’s well being and the uncooked weight-reduction plan.
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