Thanks very much, Bruce, great introduction and thanks everyone for tuning in tonight. I hope we can answer a few questions and arm you with some information that's going to be useful when you're talking to clients about canine nutrition. So, really what we want to do, as I say, is give you some objective facts because there's a big debate going on at the moment.
It's been going on all the time, but I think no more than now with with internet forums and so on, and the big dog food debate, the big pet. Food industry debate. What, what should we be feeding our dogs?
Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? And, and a lot of kind of arguments going on online and in your clinics, I'm sure about, what's the best way to feed feed your dog.
It's almost one of the challenges that we have in, in that kind of environment is that there's too much information out there. And that's true of nutrition as much as it's true of veterinary medicine. We all have the clients coming to us, you know, with a printout or saying, I read on Google or my breeder told me, or the man down the pub told me that this is the problem with my dog, and we know that all too well.
And it is a case that there's so much information out there. How do we, as, you know, pet. Educators and promoters of animal welfare, guardians of animal welfare, how do we kind of get our voice to be heard with responsible and factual information?
So hopefully after tonight's webinar, you'll be equipped to do that a little bit more convincingly, and you'll be a bit more confident in some of the grey areas that exist around dog nutrition. It is a changing field. We, you know, have a lot more knowledge now than we did, you know, even 10 years ago.
So, what we want to do is, build kind of your position of trust with your clients. There's always kind of, other, other voices shouting quite loudly and especially, online, really, really mixed messages, really confusing messagess out there. So hopefully by giving you the factual information, you can build a bit of trust with clients that, that you are, you know, the go to source for valuable nutrition, information.
Now the limitations we have tonight, unfortunately, I could spend 3 hours here talking to you tonight. Unfortunately, I don't have that time. So it's going to be an hour, it's going to be a bit of a, a quickfire buzz around on a few topics, but hopefully we'll get to delve a little bit into some of the more difficult topics or confusing topics and tease them apart.
I also have to say that there's an issue of perspective here. Obviously I totally recognise the fact that I am working, not only in the pet food industry, but for a specific company in the pet food industry, and I'm going to declare that as a conflict of interest, potential conflict of interest, but I'm going to try and remain completely. Unbiased and I'm not here to sell tales to you.
We'll talk a little bit about who we are and what we do and why we're different at the end. But I'm really here to talk in an unbiased way about canine nutrition and give you the facts to to give good information to your, to your clients about the questions they have when they're in the consult with you or or reception with you. So, the media is a funny place these days, and I'm sure all of you have probably heard this phrase that we're living in a post-truth era.
I think that's really, really true, you know, in terms of the kind of issue of canine nutrition and pet feeding. There's a, there's some trends that you've all kind of identified and you hear all the time in clinics, I'm sure, where people are reading information that's quite emotive and quite convincing and they're genuinely worried if they're doing the right thing for their pets. Unfortunately, that information isn't always factual, and it can be, you know, kind of personal beliefs or anecdotal evidence that's, that's being presented to people as facts.
So, . We're going to try and address that now. So, we're really up against it in terms of all that background noise and all that kind of, all the myths and misconceptions that are out there regarding canine nutrition that we're addressing tonight.
And we're up against it as vets, but also anyone working in the pet food industry is up against it. And as a vet working in the pet food industry, you know, it's, it's quite frustrating to see the level of, incorrect information that, that is out there and that's being recycled by dog owners as fact. So I think, first of all, the the question I would ask and and maybe challenge you on and I'm sure you've all thought about it is, as vets, do we have a PR problem?
I think most of us would agree that we do. The climate for vets, vet nurses, veterinary practises in general, the climate, you know, in terms of how clients perceive us has changed a huge amount. And there's a lot of talk online about how vets are, you know, only in it for the money or if they, you know, actually cared about animals, they would do more in certain circumstances.
There's also, you know, this sort of tendency to say, you know, vets are just, lying in bed with the big corporate nutrition companies, the big pharmaceutical companies, and so on, and it's all profiteering at the expense of pets and pet owners. And obviously I think the vast majority of of us as vets would completely dispute that. We didn't get into veterinary medicine for the money, say what you will about that.
We got into it really to be champions of animal welfare. But as I say, there is this, rising, I think, kind of culture that vets are being vilified by a certain segment of pet owners, and that's something that, that we need to address. This, blog on the image on the left is a blogger who has a blog called Planet Pause, and he's a really vocal, guy about vets, about big nutrition, about big.
Vaccinations and so on. And there's a multitude of these people out here really giving very emotive and convincing arguments as to, you know, what, what they should be looking for, what they should be asking as pet owners. But one thing he did say in this video blog that he did was, the next generation of veterinarians need to know that pet owners are going to be asking better questions.
And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think a lot of you would agree that, you know, pet owners or pet parents, as, as a lot of people now refer to themselves as, should be asking questions. They should be researching their, their animals, health, nutrition, welfare, and hopefully they should be coming to us and discussing them.
But there does seem to be a little bit of a revolution which is anti-vet, which, which we need to tackle. So we do have some major work to do as a profession on that, I think. .
I think long before people seek vet advice, they go on the internet, they'll talk to their breeder, they talk to other dog owners. So we're, we're up against it in terms of who they've talked to already and what kind of messages they've heard from people that they've already built a trusting relationship with. We're also up against that post-truth culture where it seems there is a growing distrust of science and the medical profession, and there's lots of so-called experts shouting louder than than us.
So it's up to us, I think, to put our head above the parapet a little bit and try and teach people that we do know about nutrition. We didn't just hear or just have our nutrition training from, you know, the big corporates, and we're not, you know, we're not that biassed or, or basically trying to profiteer from them. So what about the PR problem in the pet food industry?
We've talked about vets, obviously I'm straddling both, both sides, but the pet food industry has a big problem. It's almost become a dirty word, certainly on the other side of the Atlantic in the US, or North America, Canada as well. The pet food industry has almost become, you know, a bad word, or, or, something that's, you know, very, very negative in a lot of pet owners' minds.
And I go back to this guy, Rodney Habib. I would encourage everyone to probably have a look at this TEDx talk that he did. I only came across it fairly recently, but just illustrates a good few points, that, that I would have about this, PR problem that we, that we face and the misinformation and that's out there.
So, Rodney is a pet blogger. His own dog had cancer, and he's sort of been on a mission since to travel around the world and find out what's happening with dogs and why are dogs not living as long as they did, and why is there such an apparent sudden increase in cancer rates in our pets, and why are they dying younger than they did before. And I'm sure he means well.
It's a 15 minute . TEDx talk that he did. So it's well worth watching afterwards if you want to kind of use it as an illustration of some of the things I'm going to talk about.
But I'm sure Rodney does mean well, but his, his arguments unfortunately have quite a few big gaping holes in it. So if we just use 3 of his slides as 3 screenshots from his talk as an illustration, the first one, top left, he, he uses very scary statistics to kind of frame his argument that, you know, there's a big problem out there with our pet dogs. He says 10% of all cancer cases are genetic, 90% are the result of lifestyle and environmental influences.
And then he uses the phrase, what are these factors that are plaguing us with cancer? Now the clue is in the fact that he said plaguing us with cancer, because actually what he's doing there is using a human medical statistic, instead of a canine statistic to basically, as I would think, I would see it, kind of scaremonger. Dog owners into thinking that only 10% of cancer cases in dogs are genetic.
When as vets, we probably all know that that statistic is far, far higher with pedigree dog breeding, line breeding, inbreeding, and lack of genetic diversity, being big factors in why certain pedigree breeds are prone to certain tumour types. So he's using a, a kind of a misleading statistic in, in the first case to frame his argument. The second part on the top right where he's showing these golden retrievers and he's, he's using a single anecdote from one vet that he's talked to that's involved in a study by Purdue University about the longevity of golden retrievers and cancer rates in golden retrievers in the US, which are And plagued with 5 or 6 very common tumour types.
And that, that anecdote that he's quoting from this vet is that dogs in the 70s were living till they were 17, but dogs today are living to 11, and, and he's leaving it as basic as that. Now there's no segmentation there of breed. There's no, statistics to back up the average age or anything like that.
I'm sure we can all remember our oldest patients, and they probably stick out far more, in our mind than the average lifespan patients that we had. But he's failed to mention, you know, the fact that this Purdue University study is really looking at the genetic, kind of incidence or, or predisposition to disease in golden retrievers. And, The other thing that he's failing to mention, I would say is that he goes on to talk about diet and that being inferred that diet is the reason dogs are not living as long as they were before.
But he also fails to kind of acknowledge the fact that a lot of those dogs in the 1970s were fed on commercial dry cable diets that were probably a lot poorer in quality and nutritional balance than they are today. So again, very emotive but actually quite misleading use of statistics and anecdote as fact rather than any kind of scientifically credible, kind of, data and so on. The, the other thing, as I said, you know, the, the inbreeding coefficients of pedigree dogs is the big predisposition to cancer.
He doesn't mention it. He goes on to kind of break down what are these 90%, lifestyle and environmental influences, and, and again, kind of says stress, obesity, infection, a sedentary lifestyle, toxins and pollution are part of it, but diet makes up 40% of all cancer cases, failing to mention that the statistics he's using are from human studies, not dogs. .
And he quotes that that statistic from canine Neutrigenomics, which sounds like a journal, but actually it's a book by a vet that's kind of been largely debunked by the whole scientific and vet community. Neutrigenomics is a valid field in science, but the canine neutrigenomics book really uses a lot of these invalid scientific and misleading, unscientific arguments. So, he's not, .
He's not doing a very good job of making a credible argument there. The quote that he's actually, he's actually quoting is that about 30 to 40% of all cancer cases are influenced by diet, and that is an estimate. It's not a proven fact.
And then the same quote goes on to say the actual percentage is unknown and it depends on the specific type of cancer. And the specific components of the diet, again, in humans. So what I'm trying to do with this slide just as an introduction is really say this kind of misleading information really speaks to pet owners that are concerned or worried, want to know what to feed, and are really, really, sort of guilted into thinking, oh I might be making The wrong choice, and it may have a significant impact on the welfare and the lifespan of my pets.
So if I wasn't educated, that would be a very, very on nutrition and genetics and disease, that would be a very convincing argument for me to think actually the pet food industry is bad, it is corrupt, it's not the right choice for me to choose commercial diets. So, we'll go on and, we'll go through with that kind of framework in mind of, of what we're facing. And I want to cover 5 main areas really, to get through tonight.
Hopefully I do them all justice. The, the last one we might not get to go into in full, but there's lots of information on slides for you to look at later if we don't get there in time. But the big areas I want to cover are the sort of debate that we hear from dog owners and other, you know, dog food brands around, .
Our dogs wolves, you know, should we be feeding them an ancestral diet? Should we be treating them as wolves, in the home? The next one is the big grain free, sort of trend that we're seeing in human and pet food, and, gluten in particular, whether gluten is a genuine problem in dogs, how big a problem that actually is, or are we just dealing with a kind of a marketing fad?
That's, that's kind of appealing to people that that want to choose healthy and natural and and and grain free apparently is that. So we'll delve deeply into that hopefully. The third, the third part is raw feeding.
So the raw feed or the barf movement, which sounds quite disgusting, but, raw is just raw food. Barf is biologically appropriate raw food. Some people say bones in raw food, but the, the real one is biologically appropriate raw food.
That goes back again to the question of is a dog a wolf? So all these things are, are quite linked. And then, what I want to do, Tails.com is a sort of a data driven, and tech tech kind of company.
So we've got some data that we've got from our customers and I just want to talk about weight management and dog owner perception of weight and obesity and whether, whether it is a big problem and it gives some practical tips on how you can address that, in clinic. And then finally, the whole issue of contentious ingredients emerging. Beneficial ingredients, superfoods, all those kind of things that we hear all the time.
What are the new trends? Is there any merit in them, as, as individual ingredients? We'll try and delve a little bit into that and talk a little bit about how labelling confuses things as well.
Hopefully we'll get, we'll get to explore that in detail. But as I say, if we don't, I've included plenty of information for you there. So to start off with, wolves in dogs clothing, are we actually all keeping, you know, basically modified, wolves in our homes?
The fact is that that dogs are not wolves, and we do have a lot of people talking about how dogs are wolves and we should treat them as such, and we only need to look to the wild diet. Bruce mentioned that I've often spoke for the webinar vet on exotic pet topics, specifically reptile. And one of the things that I would always talk about is if you mimic the wild state in terms of nutrition and environmental conditions, you can't go far wrong.
To use that argument or that philosophy with dogs is actually, neglecting a few important facts that, dogs are a different species to wolves, and we'll explain what the, what the inherent differences are and and why the logic that you should treat a dog like a wolf is actually, not, not the best plan. So, I'm not going to get into a big discussion about when dogs were domesticated and how and everything, but just to say that our, our information on that has been changing all along. When I was doing my undergraduate degree, I was told that dogs were domesticated 10,000 years ago.
And we've since found out from kind of DNA analysis and things like that, that there's actually been several centres of domestication and several domestication events in dogs from a wolf ancestor, not necessarily the wolf that we know today. And the, the earliest evidence of dog domestication was in Southeast Asia in 33,000 years ago, so much, much longer than originally, thought, even 1015 years ago. So, we're dealing with, you know, .
An evolutionary step that's happened a very, very long time ago and has been sped up by artificial selection rather than natural selection. So we're dealing with a a wolf ancestor that has transformed into one of the most diverse species on the planet, which is the domestic dog. And there's been several changes along the way that have have made them very different.
Obviously, one of the big things we've done is we've produced a variety of phenotypes or or physical characteristics of dogs amongst the dog breeds, and we've changed them from these kind of fearsome hunters and aggressive . Carnivores down to scavengers through kind of cultural shift when we became agricultural and when we had food refuse. And then we sort of artificially selected for tameness and dogs came closer to human habitation and became what we know today as man's best friend.
But one of the consequences of selecting for tameness, it's been shown in a lot of different species. There's some famous Russian fox experiments on a fur farm in Russia that show When you select for tameness in any domestic species, you actually neotenize the animals. So neoteny means you, encourage that animal or select for juvenile characteristics.
So as we've developed our dog breeds, they've become more and more puppy-like, and they've become tamer. Their, their whole morphology of their body has changed. The skull morphology has, has changed to real extremes in some cases like the brachycephalic breeds, where we're actually subconsciously selecting.
Cuteness and juvenile appearance and even a human facial confirmation of a flat face, protruding eyes, you know, and and large eyes and a sort of a smile. That's subconscious, but it has happened that we've kind of deformed in a way several dog breeds into something that's completely unrecognisable to the wild kind of wolf ancestor, and that has knock-on effects for digestion, for how they feed, and for a lot of their . Anatomy, in terms of skull shape and body morphology as well.
But the main difference that we've changed how we've changed dogs from the wolf ancestor is a change in digestive physiology. So dogs, unlike wolves, are not, kind of obligate carnivores. They actually became omnivores and the big reason they became omnivores was food availability.
And the specific change that happened in dogs, was in, several copies of a gene that, was involved in starch digestion. So if you think about the dog coming into contact with human habitation 33,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago and and the times in between on those domestication events, they were feeding around human habitation because we were wasteful. We were, we were throwing out food remnants or maybe they were even feeding on, you know, toilet, toilet sites and so on, taking bones from scraps from campfires and so on.
But they actually, really adapted quite quickly once they utilise starch in in human food. So there was a a specific gene called the alpha amylase alpha pancreatic amylase 2B gene. And that was a crucial step in the evolution of the dog from the wolf, and we saw that that was, that was an existing one in the wolf ancestor that allowed them to digest glycogen in their prey's liver and muscle tissue.
It was a naturally occurring amylase that they produced from the pancreas, but it was propagated over the domestication process unwittingly and is one of the crucial factors that Distinguishes dogs from wolves in terms of being a distinct species. And then we had positive selection on that amylase gene because we were feeding them our our scraps, which often contained cereal-based foods, so they needed that amylase to do well. So we positively selected for dogs that could consume starch rich diets in the time period after domestication.
So, if someone does say, you know, a dog is a wolf, they can't digest grains, it's actually a complete fallacy. They, they can, they're a different species. The other thing to mention is, which I always find quite funny, not in a ha ha kind of way, but just a little bit odd to say that, we want to be treating them like a wolf.
Well, I don't really think that a wild wolf lifestyle is something that we want for our pets. It's, it's all well and good to recognise where our dogs came from and apply that to, to choosing the right diet and things like that. But within the confines of knowing that they are a separate species and have adaptations.
But just to touch on a couple of points, the longevity of, wolves in the wild is pretty poor compared to, dogs that have really, wrapped us around their little fingers or, or, . Or paws, I guess in this case. Dogs, you know, in this day and age have it handy.
They've really, really, you know, kind of formed a niche or a a symbiosis with us that is very much in their favour, and they're living very, very long lives compared to their wild ancestors. The causes of, you know, mortality, death, and morbidity disease in wild wolves are, are many. And it's one interesting fact, that you can see in the literature if you do a search on this is that, captive wolves live far longer than their wild counterparts as well.
And a lot of the studies that are done on longevity and captive wolves are wolves that are fed on, guess what, a commercial dry dog food. So, you know, we do have carcasses and bones and things given to them as enrichment, but, it's, it's the advances in canine nutrition and zoo animal nutrition that we've made using commercial diets and research that has allowed captive wolves to live longer than than their wild counterparts. There's a lot of negative welfare issues in the wild state, .
One of the big things, one of the big causes of carnivore death, in, in wild carnivores is, dental attrition. So dental, fractures, dental wear, to the dental infections, to the point that, animals starve, you know, starve to death in their, in their later years or kicked out of the pack, to starve because they're not hunting and so on. There's also another, behaviour that wolves do that maybe is a warning sign for us as dog owners and not something to mimic, which is wolves go through extensive periods of fasting when food is not available.
And they have an adaptation and an evolutionary advantage if they've learned to bolt and consume large meals and large food boluses, at in a single gulp. And that's. Not really a behaviour that we want to allow our little mutated lap wolves to indulge in, you know, by giving them a large bone that they could potentially swallow whole.
We all know a Labrador that's done that, that's needed a gastrotomy or enterotomy to remove the bone. So, that's something that I don't think is a behaviour we want to mimic, with our, our captive dogs or our pet dogs. So, moving on from that, our dogs wolves, the kind of answer in in one word is no, and, hopefully we understand why.
It does lead us on to the grain-free and gluten, trend that we're seeing all the time. So I think we'd start with why has grain had a bad rep? Why has it become a bad word?
Why is it seen negatively, and you know, why are a lot of food brands marketing themselves or marketing at least some of their product range is grain free? Well, the, the big thing, the big, kind of, initial factor that That caused the downfall of grain as a quality ingredient was a food recall in the US in 2007, where a lot of foods, primarily wet foods of of pet food, were withdrawn from, from public circulation, withdrawn from the market because they'd been contaminated. One of the ingredients was wheat gluten.
And it was wheat gluten that was imported from China to the US for pet food manufacture. And unfortunately, the Chinese suppliers had deliberately included a kind of plastic ingredient called melamine in the wheat gluten to boost its protein content on on testing. And that caused a huge, kind of outbreak or, or, issue with, pets dying or becoming ill with kidney failure, acute kidney failure.
So a real, real scandal in terms of the pet food industry in the US in 2007. It came from China, it came from wheat gluten. It called into, question all the kind of traceability and provenance issues around food, where does our food come from, where does our pets food come from, how safe is the supply chain?
And I think at this stage it's really, really important to segregate ourselves from the US market because the EU has has one of if not the most highly regulated pet food industries worldwide. And, . You know, the, the sort of the situation in the US is vastly different in terms of the feed controls they have, the legislation they have.
There are countless, unfortunately, there are countless pet food recalls every month, almost, in the, in the news or in the kind of pet food industry in the US. And that's not a big problem that we have over here. We have much more rigid, legislation.
And control checks in place, which is a really good thing. But unfortunately, a lot of the misinformation we get around pet nutrition does come and philtre over from the US. So I think it's important to recognise the difference between the US and the EU and say that we do have it, have it lucky over here by comparison.
I'm not sure I would feed my dogs some of the, some of the foods at the kind of lower end of the US food market. You know, there is a truth in some of the criticism that a lot of them are very cheap and poor quality, or they're cheap for a reason because they're they're poor quality ingredients. But that doesn't mean that all commercial food is risky or poor quality, which a lot of the kind of vocal critics would say.
So the second thing that that has really boosted this grain-free trend is the fact that, human food trends always influence and cross over into pet food trends. So we see that all the time with trendy ingredients, you know, what was, 5 years ago, you know, you were looking at things like spirulina and now you're looking at coconut oil and all these things are, are, human food, fats are trend. And they inevitably cross over into into pet pet nutrition as well, because more and more we're treating our pets as part of the family as humans, we're feeding them the way we would eat ourselves.
So of course that's not a surprise. So we see this trend now is kind of becoming grain-free and gluten free or becoming synonymous with the healthy, natural, holistic, or the paleo trend in human nutrition. What holistic natural and healthy means can, can be different things to different people or different, kind of, segments of the industry.
But that's what we're seeing and that's where the grain free trend is coming from. I think it's really, really important, you know, to say that, just because food is grain-free, it's not carbohydrate free. And a lot of people think that grain or carbohydrates or carbs are unhealthy in themselves.
That's not true. We all have a fairly good background in nutrition and know that to be true, but people who don't have a background in nutrition who've been told that low carb and grain free are things to aspire to in your diet, will, will maybe follow that for their pets as well and think that they're grain-free dog food is carbohydrate free. Now, why would you not want carbohydrate in your dog's food?
It might be a weight issue, it might be, that you think it's more healthy, but generally grain-free, certainly dry foods will have some other non-grain carbohydrate in like potatoes, sweet potato, tapioca, and so on. The other thing to say about grain-free recipes, there's a lot of them, modelling themselves on this wolf or ancestral diet. So, they're going with, you know, meat, vegetable, and legumes ratio or, meat, vegetable and fruit ratio and things like that, that's, you know, 60, 80% meat content, you know, 20% vegetables and so on.
There, there, there's an issue here where we're actually maybe feeding our animals excess protein. Protein is an expensive ingredient, and animals will only really utilise protein for kind of growth and development to a certain level. After that, they are burning some of it up as calories, but some of it does go to waste.
So you can have an issue where you're actually feeding a very expensive high protein, high meat. And food, but your animal isn't really deriving the full benefit from that and, and, and some of it's going to waste. So there, there's, you know, there's a limit to how much protein a dog actually needs in its day to day life for for maintenance.
Is grain a filler ingredient? We hear this all the time, grain is filler. It's just a cheap, thing to bulk bulk, an ingredient out.
Well, no, actually I would say there's . It can be a cheap filler, certainly if it's very poor quality grains, not whole grains, there's like 90% of it in in a very cheap kind of dog kibble or mixer, then yes, that's not very good high quality diet if it's really just full of cereal and not much else. But that's again, not to say that grain inclusion is always used as a filler.
Grain is used because it does have nutritional benefits. It's a really good source of fibre. It's a really good source of B vitamins and there's certain minerals in there that that are very rich in whole grains as well.
And it's also got, you know, a lot of the essential amino acids that dogs need that you don't necessarily get from a single meat based diet. So there's benefits of including whole grain. It doesn't always, it doesn't often signify poor quality unless it's really a huge, kind of proportion of the food, .
Yeah, so looking at the kind of paleo diet, that's the way people are are going when they're when they're choosing grain-free. It's not always what they're getting when they're buying a grain free product. So moving on then to wheat gluten, which was the bad guy in, in terms of the melamine kind of recall in in the US.
But wheat gluten has crossed over as potentially, you know, a bad reputation or a poor ingredient or a dangerous ingredient for dogs because wheat gluten is a problem for a fairly significant number of people. So, people with celiac disease, you know, that's a true hereditary gluten intolerance, that, that we see in humans. But actually it doesn't occur in many dogs at least.
There's only one breed, the Irish Red setter, which has a true kind of hereditary, gluten intolerance, and it's an intolerance, that causes an enteropathy or a digestive upset rather than a true kind of food allergy, which would tend to cause skin issues. So that's the only one that's proven as similar to celiac disease, but unfortunately a lot of people associate with gluten with, you know, kind of. IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, irritable bowel disease in themselves, or know about celiacs and, and wheat gluten has got a bad reputation as a result.
It's a big trend in human nutrition. Looking at kind of the, the breakdown, of kind of food allergies and things and and what the incidence of wheat gluten allergy is, food allergies in themselves, only account for about 10% of all allergies in dogs, and wheat gluten. Accounts for only 1% of all allergies in dogs.
The reason I say approximately is it's very difficult to bring all the data together. Oftentimes it's not conclusively diagnosed, it's going on suspicion or it's going on owner, kind of perception of the problem. So it's very difficult to get accurate statistics on that.
But needless to say, wheat is not the big kind of culprit when it comes to food allergies and dogs. Of all genuine dietary allergies, wheat accounts for about 13% of cases, but by far the most common dietary allergens actually are animal proteins. Now just going back to The celiac disease issue in red setters.
There is one other breed of dog, which may have a gluten, a genuine genetic kind of gluten issue, which is border terriers. We've probably heard of Spike's disease. It's called canine epileptoid cramping syndrome in border terriers, and there's been some studies on that, and it's shown that some of the affected dogs, but not all of them, will respond positively to dietary gluten, elimination, from the diet.
But there is limited data on that, and, and more work to be done on it as well. So just looking at the diagram here, this is, the kind of top three main causes of itching and scratching in dogs. I was going to do a poll, but I think most of you would probably guess that external parasites are the main cause of of itching and scratching in dogs.
But, the third most common after flea bite allergies and inhalant allergies is the food allergens. And I just wanted to give you a few stats on that. The food allergies themselves account for about 20% of the causes of itching and scratching in dogs.
Food allergies plus A to B combined account for a further 20% of itching and scratching. So that does cause a bit of confusion. A lot of dogs that are pruritic and come to the clinic with itching and scratching, and a suspicion of food allergy.
A lot of them may actually have ATP or an allergy to kind of inhaled allergens like pollens and environmental allergens as well as a food issue. Or it may be ATP confused with a food issue, and there's a couple of reasons for that, for that confusion as well. .
It's important, I think, to distinguish that food allergies in dogs generally tend to cause dermatological signs, so things like itching, scratching and skin infections and ear infections and so on, as opposed to gastrointestinal disorders. The opposite is true for food intolerances. Most food intolerances will cause digestive upset rather than dermatological signs, but there can be a bit of crossover there.
So it's a confusing area to get to the bottom of, especially on a limited budget, for instance, or with limited diagnostics. I've mentioned already that plant versus animal proteins, wheat is, is blamed often as a big culprit, but it's often very often an animal protein that's the cause of a food allergen, and eliminating that will, will have beneficial effects. There can be multiple allergens, so dogs can be allergic to more than one thing at once.
And, really the reason allergies occur is, is exposure. So it's important to know that the prevalence of these ingredients often pushes. Them up in terms of what is the most common allergen.
So because wheat and beef and chicken, for instance, are used in many or most brands of dog food, depending on the product, those are featured highly on the top 10 of food allergens in dogs. The interesting point I made about the combined food allergen and AP and how we, kind of distinguish between those. One interesting thing that has come out, and I've included a reference in, in, at the end of the webinar, is the link between HP and storage mites.
And it has been found in a lot of atopic dogs that don't maybe have a food allergy and certainly not a wheat allergy. When they go onto a grain-free or a wheat free diet, their AP improves. Now the link there is that if we're feeding a cereal-based diet to our dogs, that encourages More storage mites when we, when we store the food.
And a lot of atopic dogs have a sensitivity to storage mites. So just eliminating the grain or wheat from the the diet or buying diet in smaller batches and storing it correctly can actually cure a perceived food allergy that actually is, is an atopic dog. The other thing to mention is hypoallergenic diets.
They can, they, they're a different definition depending on what brand of food you're using. So, It's an arbitrary term to some degree. It's very misunderstood by the consumer, but hypoallergenic diets tend to exclude some of the common food allergens.
For tails, we exclude beef, dairy, egg, soy, and wheat, but we also allow the customer to exclude further ingredients according to what their dog's needs are, what they think their dog's needs are. A quick, kind of turnaround or coming full circle that we're seeing, kind of coming towards the, surface in the pet food industry is that grains actually may be becoming trendy again. So human nutrition now is, is kind of moving towards more plant-based superfoods.
Things like, you know, chia seeds are like the hot ingredient on Instagram these days. You know, a lot of people are very interested in superfoods and, and, detoxifying foods and what nutrition can do, sometimes really beyond, beyond the realms of reality, but, there's always going to be trendy foods and fashion. In foods and we're seeing that cross over and ironically it's actually that a lot of ancient grains are now being included in in new brand dog foods with great success.
So, we're even seeing some exotic wheat varieties coming back in on Vogue, I suppose. So watch out for those. Fava beans are reported, just in the last week or two as a very promising grain free dog food ingredient for for plant-based protein, .
I try not to make the, with a nice Chianti reference when it comes to fava beans, but there's lots of different things that, you know, people are, are exploring as alternatives to, animal proteins and and plant protein is a big one. Another big emerging trend is insect protein in pet and human food. I wonder what the appetite for that is amongst, people, but amongst pet owners as well.
Time will tell. And then the other thing that we're seeing is, We've certainly seen a good few inquiries about vegetarian and vegan diets for dogs. That's one to an area to watch as well.
Cats obviously are obligate carnivores and can't really exist very well on a vegan diet without supplementation of taurine and acheddonic acid, but dogs are omnivores and can actually, survive very well on a vegetarian or vegan diet if it's nutritionally balanced and formulated correctly. The other thing we're seeing in terms of pet food trends is, really this humanization of our pets. So, people are treating pets as fully fledged family members and especially where nutrition is concerned, that impacts how, we talk to, to our clients about, pet food.
And we're seeing premiumization, so, you know, very kind of high-end pet foods and expensive ingredient. Being, being used and being marketed very well, and, and very, you know, people spending a lot of money on, on very premium products. We're also seeing personalization and obviously tails we are, we are doing that.
People do like personalization, and we're designing individual diets for dogs based on their lifestyle, health, and, and nutritional needs. And, and really this trend of pets as people. And I thought one of the interesting quotes that I will, say.
David Lomas, he's a lead kind of pet market analyst, talked about millennials as the new, ones to watch in terms of, kind of pet foods, but equally relevant for, for us as vets in clinic. And he said, much as computers have always been there for them, millennials know only a world where treating pets like fully entitled family members is normal, if not expected and expensive. So we're going towards a dog owner that has their dog on Instagram and their dog like Popeye the foodie here has 288,000 followers on Instagram.
A lot of you are probably rolling your eyes over your cup of tea or a glass of wine, but that's the reality of the pet owners that we're, we're going to be dealing with, in the future. And we need to gain their trust, as I said at the start, and be, you know, a kind of a voice that that teaches them some of the facts over a lot of the misinformation out there. So I know we're running low on time, so I want to move on to the raw and biologically appropriate raw food movement.
Raw feeding for some people, in, in particular in the US has almost become this sort of religion or dogma. And it's important that I say initially I am not going to come down on the anti or pro raw food side. I would say on balance that it can be suitable or even beneficial for some dogs and owners, but it does have the capacity.
To be harmful too. And what we have, unfortunately is a big divide which is dividing the dog community. We do have raw and barf evangelists, as I would call them, and it's sort of this sort of noble mission or weirdly enlightened few, kind of, I would say, similar vibe to the kind of anti-vaccine movement in the US.
It's the anti-pet food industry mindset. And they're all talking about how the pet food industry is just profiting at the expense of animal welfare and health, but I think we will kind of like stop right there and say the commercial growth of the raw food sector, commercial raw food sector is absolutely huge and a lot of the proponents of it are maybe doing it for kind of . You know, altruistic reason if they say, but there's a huge profit to be made in the raw food sector as well.
And again, I'd emphasise the difference between US versus the European situation. But I would also emphasise the difference between commercially prepared and controlled raw food production versus home prepared raw diets. And in the EU we have the European Federation and the Pet Food Manufacturing Association which control the production of raw foods commercially.
So there are raw food options out there for dog owners that are nutritionally balanced and safe, to, to, you know, a certain degree, for, for, . For pets and their owners as well. I thought this little Facebook comment on one of these threads was interesting.
Just for the last line, please don't judge those who take care of our beloved pets, the pets, the best we can within our means. There is this judgement of judgement or guilt factor, I think with a lot of the raw, evangelists where they think that anyone who's feeding their, their dogs, dry kibble or commercial diets is, you know, it's tantamount to to animal abuse. And I think that's a really Kind of sad state of affairs where people can't just educate people on the pros and cons.
So hopefully that's what I'm going to do now. The pros and cons of raw feeding, you know, we could talk all night about it, but we're limited on time. So just as a quick list, a lot of the proponents of raw feeding would, would say that it's natural and they would use the ancestral or wolf analogy, to say that it's more natural for a dog to consume raw meat, bones, organs.
And so on, than to feed on it than to eat a dry kibble diet. They report all the time that it has a low residue and better smaller stools. That's probably true for a lot of of dogs, but some dogs that are sensitive to bacterial loads or sensitive to certain proteins won't have better stools on raw feeding as well.
Dental benefits mainly come in if they're feeding, you know, large, meaty bones and things like that because the dog is really chewing and, and, masticating its food and crunching on things, and it can have dental benefits, but just on the opposite side of the slide, we can have dental risks as well with fractures and dental injuries. So, . Edged sword there.
Enrichment, I don't think anyone can really argue against the enrichment benefits of giving a dog a carcass or a bone to chew on. They do absolutely love it for the most part, so we can't really argue with that behavioural enrichment argument. Weight control is a tricky one because People are moving away from, you know, carbohydrate or grain-based commercial kibbles and things onto raw food, report weight control.
I would argue that weight control really is an effect of calorie control, and you can give excess calories with a raw diet just as easily as you can give excess calories with a grain and meat, meal-based kibble diet. The other things they report are better coat, skin, energy levels, digestion, and so on. But unfortunately, we're lacking scientific data on this.
A lot of the proponents are just quoting anecdotal evidence from their single dog or a couple of dogs. My dog does brilliantly on it. Therefore, every dog should, should be on raw.
That's really not how science works. The risks of, raw feeding, we have to mention. Again, I'm not coming down on one side or another, but we have to mention that the risks, really the big ones, are to do with food safety and to do with nutritional balance.
And I think here's where the commercial versus home prepared raw feeding issue comes in. The home prepared raw diets are the ones where really things can go wrong. So we do unfortunately see nutritional diseases that we've eliminated by producing researched commercial diets that are nutritionally balanced because people are going back to home prepared raw feeding.
They're not always fully up to date on what they need to do to balance that diet. We're seeing the re-emergence of certain nutritional diseases, and that's a real big, big risk of going down the raw route 100%. The other thing is food safety.
So, a lot of this raw food, home prepared diets is, is bacterial contamination with things like salmonella and Campylobacter. And although dogs' digestive systems can cope with small amounts of those, often. They can still shed that bacteria in their faeces or on their coat from licking, and they do pose a zoonotic risk to people in the home.
And especially young children, elderly, immunocompromised people, it's really not worth the risk of, of, you know, having that kind of risk of bacterial contamination in the home through raw meat. As I said, we have dental fractures, but we also have gastrointestinal risks of feeding, especially things like bones. Where dogs will swallow them whole and can damage, you know, the oesophagus and and stomach and intestine and even need surgery to get to to resolve that.
As vets, we've probably all seen those cases as the people with their personal anecdote of my dog does brilliant on raw, they've got a smaller sample size than us as vets, so they don't have exposure to that. So it's up to us to, to, if someone wants to explore the raw route that we tell them what the risks and benefits are. The home prepared diets, I would say are a huge effort, expense, and, need a lot of expertise, to provide that safely and in a nutritionally balanced way.
So, one question that that I always put to to kind of raw advocates is why is it all or nothing? You know, should, should you just feed raw and absolutely eliminate kibble? Can, can kibble fit in as a convenient meal if you're going travelling and so on.
You know, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's not a religion. You don't have to choose one or the other.
You can, you can include raw food in your, in your dog's diet to supplement a dry food that's more convenient. But the key really is that the whole diet, the overall diet is nutritionally balanced and consistently given so that the animal doesn't have digestive upsets. You need to take precautions about food safety, and we could talk about that all night, but are running low on time.
But the last thing I'd say, just looking at that picture of a home prepared raw diet, it's got organs, it's got connective tissue, it's got bone in there, it's got pieces of, it's got egg, it's got some muscle meat, it's got chicken feet, which are, you know, parts of carcasses. If we're going back to this being an ancestral and wolf diet, and one of the things that that the proponents of the ancestral diet and raw feeding, always kind of bark on about, pardon the pun. Is that, you know, too many animal byproducts go into commercial foods.
Well, byproducts is a a a confusing term, but effectively it's all of the things that you see in that bowl, which are the, the, byproducts of the human food chain that we find too. Tasteful to use. So actually commercial foods are using parts of the animal that wouldn't be used otherwise.
There's a huge amount of human food waste going to landfill. All of these elements are very nutritious for dogs, and actually the ancestral and raw feeders are feeding them in an unprocessed form to their dogs anyway, and they call it a whole prey diet, whereas those ingredients go into a kibble diet and still provide just the same amount of nutrition. So just an interesting, kind of, .
Contrast there in in the messaging of what we're feeding our dogs. So, just a summary, look at the mechanical, microbiological and human health risks and inform your clients if they want to explore this avenue for their pets that there are those issues to consider. And perhaps instead of going down the risky route of a home prepared raw food diet, you would consider England is actually very, very good and regulated commercial raw foods available on the UK market now, which might be a little bit safer.
And the slide here, which again, our friend Rodney has put up in one of his videos, says, you know, in the past 5 years for salmonella contamination, there was 23 kibble recalls and 14 raw recalls. Where is the FDA? Consumer warning explaining the risks of handling kibble.
Well, what he also says in that presentation is that raw food only accounts for 2% of the UK or the US kind of pet dog food industry, but there's been 14 recalls in that 2% in that year, in the 5 years, where it's only 23% in the remaining. So you're talking about almost a 30-fold increase in salmonella recalls for raw food. So he sort of shoots himself in the foot with that again.
Weight management, I just want to share a couple of quick insights on some of the stats that we've collected from some of our customers because obviously it's a big nutritional issue for vets and nurses and veterinary staff. How do we, deal with the obesity crisis that we're seeing in, In our pets. So, the Pet Food Manufacturing Association did the last white paper in 2014, and there has been some results released of more recent surveys this year.
But the, the big statistic here is, that 77% of vets believe pet obesity is on the rise, but only 63% of pet owners. But 63% of pet owners believe their pet is the correct weight. So there's a perception.
An issue here where pet owners think that their their animal, their dog in this case, is the correct weight, but actually vets believed in 2014, 45% of them were overweight. That 2017 statistic is 49% of vets surveyed at the London Vet Show and BSAVA, the last two shows thought that 49% of dogs were overweight. So big perception issue here.
And here's where we've done some survey work on our customers, asking them, looking first of all of what they've selected when we've asked them to body condition score their dog. So 70 70%, 77% of Tas.com customers said their dog was in ideal body condition.
And we've shown them, you know, silhouettes and outlines and told them the things to look for when body condition scoring their dog and asked them to give them a score. You know, 3/4 of them, over 3 quarters said they were ideal. Only 15% stated their dog is overweight, and we know from clinics that that's a difficult thing to admit for dog owners that their dog is overweight.
More difficult again to admit that they're obese. Only 1.6% said their dog was obese.
But the interesting thing here when we've looked at the data is that of the dogs listed as ideal, 32% of them were actually much heavier. In the breed standards. So we know the weight of these dogs and the condition of these dogs is over what the owners are reporting to us.
And that's probably not news to us. But it just shows that the perception of ideal body condition and weight is a huge problem. And if we're to tackle the growing problem of pet obesity and all the health conditions that come with it, we need to try and teach people to to kind of look at their dogs in a different way.
So, Another stat that we have is when owners identified underweight dogs, 53% of the owner identified underweight dogs were actually in the ideal weight range for the breed. So they're, they're, they're seeing an ideal dog and they're thinking it's underweight because they're so used to seeing the overweight ones. And 41% of the, of where owners identified them as severely underweight were actually ideal.
So really, really big gap there in perception. And the tips, three tips that I would give, I'm probably talking, you know, preaching to convert it here, you probably all know this, but I think. The big thing that we need to tackle is portion control.
It's a lot of confusing messages out there. Every single brand giving different feeding guidelines. We all get asked that question and, and, you know, wonder how do we answer how much should I feed my dog?
Well, we don't know that without knowing your dog's lifestyle, calorie expenditure. And what, what brand of food, it's on, what the calorie density of that food is. It's a very difficult question to answer when you're asked in clinic, how much should I feed my dog.
We've seen that only 9% of dog owners said they know how many calories a dog needs each day. 47% had no idea. And really measuring out the portions, whether it's with a measuring cup or in weight, is, is a big thing to emphasise, so they know exactly how much to give.
13% of dog owners would lie to their vet about their dog's feeding behaviours. I don't think that was a surprise to me. that's only 13% admitted it, which is an interesting stat.
And 1 in 5 dog owners couldn't identify an overweight dog in this survey we did. So just, food for thought, I guess, and, just ways that you can try and tackle, tackle it with portion control and teaching people how to body condition score their dog. I think we are running fairly low on time.
Sean, sorry to butt in. Please keep going. If people need to leave, they're welcome to leave.
But please, the great talk, very informative and feel free to keep going. No worries. I'm gonna go for another 5 minutes and then we'll have a Q&A session if that's OK.
That's absolutely perfect, perfect. OK. I've included more information than we will get through now in the ingredients and labelling section because I know it's a contentious area.
It's an area that's ripe for confusion, and I just wanted to go through some of the the kind of burning topics that some of you have submitted. What's the deal with beatbo? What's the deal with yeast?
Some of you have submitted questions before the webinar tonight. So, beet pulp is quite misunderstood. A lot of people say it's high in sugar, it's, it's high in carbohydrates.
Beet pulp is not included as an energy source. It's included as a fibre source and and particularly an insoluble fibre source. It's included for healthy digestion in very small quantities, so it's not full of sugar.
You will hear a lot of dog owners having read that beet pulp is a bad ingredient because it's full of sugar. It's not, it's a byproduct of sugar extraction, and it doesn't have any sugar to speak of in there at all. You'll also hear this, myth or or misconception that yeast in dog food is a bad idea because it's linked to yeast overgrowth in skin or ear infections.
It's actually brewer's yeast. It's a completely different species of yeast. It's inactivated.
It's used as a source of protein, a rich source of B vitamins, and it uniquely contains all of the 10 essential amino acids that dogs require. So, brewer's yeast is actually a really, really good quality ingredient in most dog foods, unless The very occasional dog is is allergic to it, but that's very rare. Joint supplements, really, really hot topic, and a lot of confusion, and a lot of debate over which are effective, which are placebo and so on.
The only really kind of conclusive clinical proven ingredient to reduce osteoarthritic inflammation and related pain are the omega 3 fatty acids, and there's countless studies on those, but I've included a reference which kind of gives a good overview on the benefits of omega 3 fatty acids. Glucosamine and chondroitin are very, very topical. And, and they're the ones that cause a lot of debate.
Unfortunately, the, there's fairly limited and conflicting evidence and I've included a review in the, in the references for you to read up. It's very, very interesting. Some studies have shown improvements, objective improvements in pain scores, weight bearing and severity of, of signs related to arthritis, but showing that they may be slower acting than non-steroidal, anti-inflammatories.
Other studies have shown, you know, definite impact of subjective scoring of an animal's gait and lameness and so on, but there's there's issues over sample sizes and bias and the significance of the data and so on. But, very good overview there on the Batallade 2017 review. Turmeric and coconut oil.
I don't know how many of you asked about turmeric and coconut oil. These seem to be the two, very trendy ingredients at the moment. Turmeric contains a compound called curcumin, and that has been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties in humans.
Whether it's beneficial in dogs is really unproven. Most of the data that we have for curcumin is actually a curcumin, Curcumin in a mixed herbal remedy. So it doesn't actually take the or get the impact of curcumin alone.
So there's more data and and studies to be done on that. Coconut oil. If you read dog forums online, especially US dog forums, you would think that coconut oil, should put us all out of a job as vets.
It's not the miracle cure. I don't think that people claim it to be. It's just fairly new and, it's health, it's marketing.
Claims are wide and varied, but, there, there is some kind of truth in the fact that medium chain fatty acids, which it's a rich source of, have some benefits. They are mainly anecdotal in dogs at this stage again, and it's also important to say that coconut oil is highly calorific, as a fat. It can be a trigger for pancreatitis, and it can elevate harmful, cholesterol as well.
The topical benefits of using it on skin are questionable and not proven. So I'm, the jury's out on that one. I'm not convinced.
Finally, I think meat and animal derivatives is a labelling thing, that labelling issue that often causes a lot of confusion. And it's really sort of vilified as a sort of an indicator of poor quality or there's something going on with transparency that people can't claim it. But it's a legal term for manufacturing where you may be using mixed quantities of meat depending on availability.
If you have, let's say for instance, a beef and chicken recipe, you have to state the minimum quantities of each of those meats, but you the the overall kind of mixing bowl ingredients may change from one batch to another and. That's allowed legally, but unfortunately, you have to put this fairly opaque description of meat and animal derivatives legally. It's not the hooves, beaks, and feathers type, you know, atrocity of pet food that that many people perceive it to be.
And I've made a deliberate point of putting the same picture in again of the ancestral home prepared raw diet, which is offal, connective tissue, bones, organs, muscle meat, eggs, chicken feet. That could be classed as meat and animal derivatives. So it's not the, the evil, opaque, you know, kind of cover up, labelling that that people make it out to be, especially the sort of enemies of the big pet food industry, conspiracy.
Then a couple of really, really good ingredients that are emerging and there's more, more and more research done on them. One is the use of prebiotics and probiotics are another, kind of issue entirely. But prebiotics are, are basically plant, fibres normally that, encourage beneficial bacteria and, and digestive health, as well as even nutrient absorption and, and, the ones that we tend to use are foss and moss, fructo oligosaccharides and mono oligosaccharides, from.
Kind of things like chicory root and and other herbal herbal supplements, and they are showing really, really good benefits in terms of digestive health. The other ones that we're using quite a bit in our puppy foods and things, and our emerging area of research are nucleotides and beta gleans, normally from yeast extracts, and they're showing emerging benefits in kind of immune modulation, especially in young animals. Initially, the research has been done a lot in agricultural animals like pigs and sheep and.
Like that and poultry, but we're seeing more and more studies done in companion animals as well. And one of the interesting things that we're seeing is boosting vaccine antibody responses and mucosal gut defences, which are really, really important and part of the reason that we use them in our puppy foods as well, where puppies are going through kind of maternal antibody waning, new diets, new experiences, moving to a new home, and being vaccinated, all those things that are, causing kind of immune, insult or, or problems. That's pretty much it.
I just wanted to go through very, very quickly who we are. I think some of you probably will have heard of us, or seen us at some of the shows. Some of you will have heard of us from your clients, but Tas.com has been about, yeah.
Tails.com, it's been about for about 34 years now, and been trading for 3 years and we're the only UK brand doing truly tailor-made nutrition. So what I mean by truly tailor-made is a lot of brands are tailoring to a single life stage or a health condition or a weight loss diet, for instance, you know, single things that, that a dog needs nutritionally.
We're the only brand that can cater for all of the dog's nutritional requirements at once. And the way we've done that is we've designed, our own range of kibbles and a very unique and complex algorithm. That takes the inputs from an online consultation about your dog and, and formulates their, their ideal diet for that moment in time.
We're very much data driven, we're very much customer led, and we're very convenient for the owner in that we deliver to their door, every month. We're also quite affordable for that reason because we're selling directly to the consumer. And, we're definitely not your typical subscription business.
So we've listened to our customer and we, we basically say, when your new bag of food is due to be prepared, you, we will get in touch and you will have the option to pause, cancel, or delay your order at any time. So we don't buy people in or tie people into a subscription. We're finding a lot of vet practises are, recommending us and we've, created a model for a few vet practises to be part of our pilot recommendation scheme where we'll reward them for that recommendation because we do realise we're an online brand only.
So you, we can, you can get in touch and we can talk about that, in terms of vet partnerships down the line. But we sort of say we're dog food as a service, not a product. And hopefully you can see that for yourself.
If you go online at tails.com/vets. There's plenty of information there which will hopefully answer your questions.
But as I said, it's a sort of a very easy 5 step process, 2 minute consultation online about your dog. Our algorithm selects a unique blend of our kibble range. There's over a million possibilities on what we can do and what we can cater for, and we create a bespoke feeding plan and deliver every month.
And I think the best thing for you guys to do tonight after this, webinar, I can't stay all night. Talking about who we are and what we do is look on our Trustpilot, reviews. Trustpilot's an independent review site, and our ratings on there are over 90% 5 star ratings.
So just have a look at what customers are saying about us, for yourselves. Now Bruce mentioned a giveaway. I do want to reward you all for tuning in and listening to me speak for the last hour and 5 minutes.
So what we're doing is for, webinar vet attendees, we're giving you a month free trial code because what we want to do, As a relatively new brand on the market, we've been around for 3 years. We're, we're perfecting tailor-made and, and how we can cater to the UK's dogs and their multiple, issues and needs and nutritional needs. We've been doing that a long time.
We're becoming experts in that. We want you guys to see it for yourselves. So we're giving you a month free trial code to sign up your own.
You can pass it on to your family and friends, but we basically want you to have the tails experience. And as I say, there's no obligation for you to continue after your month free. We'll get in touch and we'll let you, you know, you're more than happy for you to pause, cancel, delay after you receive your food, no problem.
But what you do is if you log, if you go to our homepage, tails.com, you'll see a claim your offer button. There in yellow, just press on that button and the normal offer that we do online is 2 weeks free trial with 1 pound delivery.
You do need to change that. So on the next screen, you'll see the offer code, Happy dog, and on the right hand side it says change. Just click Change and enter your webinar vet code, which is Z99QDF and apply that and you'll get one month free.
And then we'd love to hear feedback on, on, on what you think of it. You just enter your dog's information and we'll send you the food and feeding plan, and you can tell us, what you think. So I've included references you can look at later.
But for now, I'm open to any questions. Sean, just to follow up on that. Folks, we have popped into your question box or into the chat box, not the question box.
A link to that site and everything else. So if you want to click on that link, it will take you directly into what Sean has been talking about there. Sean, just one question quickly, for clarity.
Do you recommend that people transition their pets slowly onto your food or are you happy for them to change one meal to the next? No, as with any dietary changes, we, we give, we give people that information anyway, but yeah, we would always say you transition slowly from your current food onto our food. We do try and match sort of ingredient profile so we don't cause digestive upsets.
So we'll take into account what kind of food your dog was fed before. And that's also kind of we do look at, kind of matching price as well. So a lot of customers think, oh, it's bespoke, it's tailor made, it must be very expensive, but we do kind of ingredient profile matching, we can, we can produce a food which is better quality, tailored to your dog, of a similar ingredient profile nature at a similar cost, because it's directly to the customer.
And that's, that's a concern for some vets if they're recommending tales, you know, are they not selling food in clinic? But I think one of the problems we identified talking to vets is that a lot of vets are selling maybe one bag of food and then losing sales to the internet afterwards anyway, so we do have a partnership opportunity, where we can give you rewards for recommending us if, if you wanted to explore that. That's absolutely awesome.
Sean, I know that some of the the people have submitted questions beforehand that you've had a chance to go through. So I'd ask you if you would start with those. We have got loads of stuff coming through.
Folks, I promise you we are not going to get everything tonight. A lot of questions where people saying, oh, can you repeat that statistic? What was that again?
Please remember that our webinars are all recorded and within a couple of days, they will be up on the webinar vet website. So if you missed something, you can always go back and look at it again. But Sean, if you can proceed with those, submitted questions beforehand, please.
Yeah, absolutely, no problem. One of the things that came up that I hadn't covered and it does come up quite a bit here is the impact of protein on behaviour, on canine behaviour. It's a bit of a controversial area and unfortunately I don't have very definite answers, but I'll do my best to, to, Kind of summarise what has been, kind of studied and published.
So, a lot of people will say hyperactive dogs or aggressive dogs, you know, will get better if you just reduce the protein in their diet. It's, it's often not as simple as just reducing protein, there's often behavioural and socialisation issues around that. But there has been some research done.
There's a there's a paper in particular if you wanted to take this down by De Napoli, D E N A P O L I in 2000. Which looked at the impact of protein, but also the impact of specific amino acids. And they found that there was more of an effect of specific amino acids, in particular, tryptophan and tyrosine had an effect on aggression, self-mutilation and stress responses in dogs.
And tryptophan is a very important one because it's a precursor to serotonin, which modulates a lot of behaviours in dogs. People, of course. They also found that, the omega 3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA, were, very effective in modulating behaviour, particularly in those early developmental periods, and in cognition in, in older dogs as well.
The second study, which goes more into the kind of hyperactivity and aggression, kind of topic, was one by Bosch etal, B O S C H in 2007. And that said that dogs with dominance aggression, it is a bit of a bad word in canine behaviour circles now would call it status-related aggression these days because dominance is a bad word. But they said in 2007 that dogs with dominance aggression, if you add a tryptophan to a high protein diet, or if you change to a low protein diet itself, it may reduce aggression.
They also said that with territorial aggression, tryptophan supplementation of a low protein diet may reduce aggression. So the, the issues there are, they said in May, the statistical significance is called into question because the sample sizes were fairly small. They had 11 dominance aggression dogs, 11 territorial aggression dogs, and 11 hyperactivity dogs, for which they didn't make very many valuable conclusions.
So there's these kind of mixed messages and Subtle conditions of the research that have been done that have led people to believe that protein is the solution to a lot of behaviour problems. My view on that, having read a lot of the literature, is it's really not. Oftentimes things can be resolved in other ways, but there's some evidence to say that protein and tryptophan can kind of influence some of those issues.
The second thing really quickly, that a good few people asked, and I haven't covered, is what is the situation with, renal disease, chronic renal failure in dogs and protein. Is protein inherently bad? Should we, should they be on low protein diets?
Is protein damaging to the kidneys? Well, the, the, the issue here is protein in itself. Isn't harmful to the kidneys.
But if we're putting excessive protein into the body, the kidneys are are having to produce excessive waste compounds, and the waste compounds can cause things in chronic renal failure, dogs like euremia, protein urea, and so on. So reducing protein is recommended, just so there's not excessive waste compounds produced. The importance The thing for renal dogs is the quality of the protein.
You really want them on a high quality, but low protein diet. The, the component that can cause damage at the nephron level in the kidney is phosphorus, and that does need to be limited. So low phosphorus, low protein, but high quality protein is what we'd recommend for renal failure dogs.
But yeah, there's, there's a lot, there was lots of . Kind of repetition, raw diets and grain free really were coming up a lot. But if you have anything else, Bruce, that was coming up, I'd be happy to answer.
Yeah, Sean, a couple of the questions I can answer for you. Just a general theme folks. First of all, the tails food is UK only, it's dog only.
It's, there's nothing for cats as of yet and they don't deliver outside of the UK. That covers about 20 questions that we've got. We do have a global audience listening to us and we've had people from the US and from Europe certain parts of Europe and New Zealand and everything asking questions.
So all the information should be on that. If not, veterinary att.com, just drop me a line on there.
Yeah, as said, go to the website for that, but yeah, it is only and dogs at this stage. The other thing that I'd like to just comment on folks, we cannot pass comment or judgement on any specific brand name. So those of you that are asking about specific brands.
I'm afraid we cannot cover those tonight. And Sean, there's lots and lots of comments coming through. Lots and lots of thanks to you for a very interesting topic.
Couple of comments made about the way you tiptoed very sweetly through the minefield of various diets and that sort of thing. Folks, I'm afraid we have now run out of time. The recordings will be up on the, the website and if you have specific, nutritional questions and that sort of thing, Sean has, alluded that you can email them through on the tails thing.
Have a look at it, use your, use your free trial code if you would like to try it, transition it in as Sean has said. Sean, it is just left to me to say a huge thank you. Once again, I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to you.
As are many, many comments coming through, about the, the great webinar and that sort of thing. And, I look forward to being able to listen to you again in the future. Brilliant, yeah, I had a great time.
Hope you enjoyed it. Good stuff. Folks, I'm from my side that's all.
Good night to everybody and thank you again for attending.
