Thank you, Bruce, for that intro and thanks everyone for joining us. Yeah, as Bruce said, we've sponsored for a series of 4 webinars, this year on nutrition topics. And for anyone who's joined us for those, I hope you've found them useful.
And for anyone whose first time it is, welcome. I hope you find this one useful. But what I wanted to do, for tonight's webinar, which is the last one this year, is really answer the questions and the requests that have come in, from the previous webinars.
So we've always asked what topics, would you like covered in nutrition? What do you think are kind of your weak points of knowledge or what would you like to know more about? And we had lots of really, really interesting requests for, for further topics.
None of which really would have warranted maybe a whole webinar in itself because there's a lot to talk about on each, but, I'd like to cover as many people's requests as possible. So I wanted to answer some of those questions in a way that's, as always. Data led and evidence-based, want to clear up confusion because there is, we recognise that there is a lot of confusion out there, around nutrition, both for pet owners and for veterinary professionals.
And, you know, hearing kind of new trends and things like that. I always get feedback. It would be good to have a clear stance on X, Y, or Z, position or or trend.
So we'll try and address some of the hot topics that we're hearing at the moment from, dog owners in particular. Want to help you out a little bit with kind of understanding your clients a little bit better. Our customers, at Tails.com are your clients, and we hear and we record, a lot of data about their patterns of behaviour, their concerns, their worries about their dogs and, and their behaviour when it comes to feeding them as well.
In terms of conflict of interest, there's not really one tonight. We're here to provide a free, our CPD on nutrition, health, and behaviour. Last month, or, yeah, last month, I did a webinar on raw feeding.
Which was quite a challenge to remain unbiased and say there wasn't a conflict of interest coming from a commercial company that doesn't doesn't produce raw food. And I deliberately left out any kind of tails data or tails.com kind of sales pitch or anything out of the last one.
I will say I'm going to include this is a data webinar, so I'm going to include. Some of our data insights for this one because I believe one of the unique kind of or the unique position that we're in at Tails.com is we're sitting on a database of dogs in the UK that no one else has, and I would like to share some insights.
I believe they are quite valuable. So there will, there will be a bias towards tails.com data.
I hope you get something from it. So, of all of the questions and all of the requests that came in, from the previous 3 webinars and watching kind of online as well, these are the six broad categories that I'd like to talk about tonight. So, behaviour is, is often something that's, you know, kind of talked about in terms of training, but also the impact of diet and nutrition.
And there's a few myths and there's a few kind of confusing points out there around what is the effect of diet and behaviour. And then I really wanted to try and clear up what's the situation on dental health. What, what effect does the type of food or the type of feeding have on dental health and what can, what is the best advice to give dog owners around dental health and diet.
Age and breed specific diets, to me, you know, that's kind of, very fundamental, part of, of kind of bespoke or kind of targeted tailored animal nutrition. Is being specific to the individual, but being specific to age and breed, there's a bit of confusion around that as well. Then I wanted to go into some of the evidence that we have out there on dietary supplements.
What's proven to work? What's a bit of a grey area and has conflicting evidence and what has no evidence at all. Because I think we're sort of dog owners are really kind of overwhelmed with the burden of choice when it comes.
To food. But then when you add supplements and marketing claims and even medicinal claims, valid or not into the mix, it can be a very confusing marketplace to try and figure out what will work for my dog. And I think the amount of veterinary products as well that are kind of nutraceuticals needs to be looked at, and we need to examine the evidence base.
Can't get into that in huge detail, but we'll try and do it justice. And then really I wanted to share what matters to dog owners because that's something at tails.com that we, really look at and we talk to our customers all the time and we ask them for information and whenever they come to us about about their dog, so we're sitting on an absolute minefield of of data that's useful.
Hopefully. And the final thing which I talked about in the synopsis on, on the on on site on the webinar vet was I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update on the FDA investigation into dilated cardiomyopathy in dogs and the the purported link to grain-free diets. So a lot to get through.
I'm hopeful that we finish, you know, on time tonight and leave some time for questions because I know there's always quite a few questions and we run over each time. So hopefully we get through all of that. So to start with the first topic, nutrition and behaviour, what are the effects of nutrition and behaviour?
We've all heard, I think, you know, the, the kind of, simple solution to any bad behaviour or your puppy or young dog or even old dog being hyperactive or untrainable or even aggressive. Oh, just reduce the protein in the diet. That's a quick simple fix.
Well what level do you reduce it to and are you just reducing the animal protein and what about plant proteins and, you know, does feeding raw meat to your dog make them more aggressive? There's all these kind of confusing elements, and there's quite a few myths and misconceptions around it. The quick answer is reducing protein is not always the simple fix that a lot of people think when it comes to behavioural issues.
And I would say, from our perspective, one of the sort of Frustrating, inquiries that we get from dog owners on a fairly regular basis. You know, one of the nurses on the nutrition team, talks to me quite a bit about it is, oh, we had another inquiry about, you know, a 10 week old or a 15 week old or a 5 month old springer spaniel puppy, and the owner says they're too hyperactive and they're really badly behaved. Can they be Reduce the protein.
And we say we can't reduce the protein lower than the dog's metabolic needs and growing needs are, and that's not going to fix the fact that you've bought, you know, typically hyperactive or energy energetic breed. These, these are working dogs, often behaviour problems come down to, you know, it's not the the dog is not the right fit for the person or the family. So I think It's almost like nutrition is used as a scapegoat for a lot of things, when it comes to behavioural problems.
So just bear that in mind first. I'm sure you already do. What are the links?
What is the evidence base for, the link between diet, specifically protein and certain behavioural issues in dogs? So there's a few papers we're going to go through. We go by all of the current research and, existing research bodies, when it comes to dog behaviour, dog health, dog nutrition.
But we also use our own database to test and learn what works and what doesn't, work for our customers and their dogs. But I'm going to review quite a few papers that I think are, pretty valuable to look at. I've included them all in the references at the end so that if you are interested in, learning about them in more detail, you can look them up and go and look at that in more detail than I can provide tonight.
But the Bosch AA study, Looked at the impact of nutrition on behaviour. What's the current status in thinking and what are the possible mechanisms underlying that. They looked at a good few factors that were sort of purported in in the scientific literature and anecdotally from dog owners.
And the main kind of impactful ingredient that they found that that could have an effect on behaviour was tryptophan. So tryptophan is converted to 5 hydroxyryptophan. And then it's converted to serotonin, also known as, you know, one of the happy hormones, or basically a neuromodulator, that impacts on behaviour.
And, it can influence positively, aggression, self-mutilation, and stress resistance they found in this paper and this study. And they also implicated, tyrosine, having a beneficial effect on stress behaviours as well. So we've all seen the dogs that, you know, have kind of self-mutilation or stress issues, lick granulomas and things like that.
And aggressive dogs we all know and, and very well, working in veterinary clinics. So it's important to say that some studies have shown links and some studies have shown beneficial effects in certain conditions or when controlled against, you know, no. Supplemented diets and things, but in the, in real life, there's many, many variables.
So be careful when you're just recommending diet as a fix all solution to some of these issues. It's often multifactorial, and it often requires multiple treatments as well. The other ingredients that Boscheal looked at were the polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the omega 3 acid DHA docosa hexanoic acid.
And I've talked about this in some of my previous, webinars. DHA is a really, impressive, kind of fatty acid in, in many ways. It's very beneficial in brain development, mental development, and vision development in young animals.
Young animals often get DHA dogs in particular, or specifically get DHA from their mother's milk. And it's been shown that after weaning, if you supplement DHA in the diet, that you can have better learning outcomes, better socialisation outcomes, better mental and, vision development in post-weaning puppies. So it's something that we include, in a very, pure and bioavailable form from salmon oil in, our puppy range, of kibbles, for that very reason.
It's taught to modify the dopamine and serotonin system, and it can modify cognitive performance and behaviour, as I say. So really impressive, kind of outcomes and, and, results, proven results on clinical outcomes around supplementation of, omega 3 DHA specifically. One of the interesting things to me that I, that, I took from this paper was that .
They said hungry dogs or dogs with persistent feeding motivation, whether that was due to hunger or whether it was due to kind of competition and not knowing where the next meal was coming from, that can impact aggression and stereotypical behaviours. So if you have dogs that are, you know, very food motivated and even when fed are kind of persistently food. Motivated, that increases the likelihood that they will show aggression or stereotypical behaviours.
And so they wondered, you know, and they kind of posited that maybe the satiety effects and fibre levels and things in diets could warrant further research. I haven't seen any conclusive studies showing that that that definitely will help, but a very interesting area for further research. The next paper was by Di Napoli Aal.
Now some of these papers you will look at and say that papers from 18 years ago, like why is that relevant now? Unfortunately, we are in a position where there's not many good papers being produced year on year that show very conclusive evidence of the link between diet and behaviour. So I kind of cringe myself when I'm using papers that are 18 years old, but that we have to go on what the evidence base shows us.
And if people are not being funded or people are not putting in the research into producing conclusive. Evidence we have to go on on what's out there already. So apologies for that.
But what Di Napoli and colleagues showed was dietary protein content and tryptophan supplementation can have effects on three things dominance aggression, territorial aggression, and hyperactivity. So they looked at 11 dogs with each of those three, owner described and behaviourist, diagnosed conditions. Or behaviour problems, and they did a prospective crossover study where they swapped in and out randomly the diets and for a, you know, guaranteed and controlled period of time, and then had a 3 day lapse and then put them onto the next diet.
And they had the owners apply behavioural scoring. They were trained to behaviorally score their dogs daily. The higher the behavioural score, the worse the behaviours were, in terms of kind of frequency and severity.
And they tested low protein of 18% versus high protein of 30%, but they also tested two other diets which were low and high protein, supplemented with tryptophan. So unsupplemented low, unsupplemented high, supplemented low, supplemented high, and they randomly allocated those. And what they found was for what they labelled dominance aggression, which is a bit of a bad word in dog behaviour circles nowadays.
We're talking about status related or resource related, aggression, in today's kind of framework when we're talking about dog behaviour, dominance theory has, has been debunked. But, basically what they saw is that the behavioural scores were highest or those behaviours of aggression towards people in the household were worse when an unsupplemented high protein diet was fed. So they're seeing an effect of a high protein diet, or they're seeing a beneficial effect of decreasing the protein.
But then what they also saw when they decreased the protein diet, what was that there was an even better behavioural score when they supplemented that low protein diet with tryptophan. That's fairly compelling evidence. I know it's a small sample size, but it is fairly compelling evidence that there may be a link with reducing protein and adding tryptophan.
Both can have beneficial effects if we're dealing with status or resource related aggression in in dogs. What they also looked at, as I said, was territorial aggression and hyperactivity and a few other behaviours around hyperactivity. But in territorial aggression, they couldn't make a conclusive, kind of a recommendation or conclusive, evidence around low protein diet.
They said. That a tryptophan supplemented low protein diet may be helpful because it bordered on significance in terms of improvements in behavioural scores there for the territorial aggression. That's the classic aggression of a dog, you know, barking at the window at passersby or chasing the postman.
It's an aggression aggression that gets ingrained because it's reinforced by the fact that whoever they're barking at in their home turf leaves when they're barking, so they think the barking had that effect. So that's a very different, kind of, . Focus or different kind of basis for that behaviour, which is why it may be modulated differently by diet.
And then finally in the hyperactive dogs, so going back to, you know, our, our little springer spaniel puppy that's completely hyperactive but totally normal for his breed, they found there was no dietary effect on hyperactivity, and they also found no dietary effect on fearfulness scores or excitability. So sort of debunking the myth that you can just, if your dog's too bouncy and full of energy, that reducing the protein will have that effect. And I would say from our point of view, if it's inappropriate to reduce protein beyond a certain level, we don't do that.
We talk to the owners and we, we, we try and be educational and supportive with our customer experience team. But if there are cases where we're going to try reducing the protein somewhat by changing the dogs blend. We don't get a huge amount of positive, you know, overwhelmingly positive, even anecdotal report back from the owner that we solved that problem.
So I think on balance the hyperactivity and protein, is, is possibly more myth than fact. So moving on from behaviour, there's lots, the more there's some further reading in the, in the final section, that you can delve into. Moving on to nutrition and dental health, this was something that came up as a question, nearly every, webinar we did.
This year, what are the links, you know, between, kind of nutrition and dental health? Can food really help? Do dental shoes work, which is better, wet food or dry food, or is there actually an effect?
What should dog owners be doing, you know, if they're not brushing their dog's teeth and so on. So, a whole range of questions around kind of dental diets and how many times, you know, should dog owners be brushing their teeth, if at all. What is the, the issue with, dental shoes?
They're very calorific. Do they actually have a beneficial effect? What about raw meaty bones, you know, do raw meaty bones have the same effect or better than some of the other ways that we look after our dog's oral health and prevent periodontal disease and so on.
So let's have a look at some of the evidence base around that. So, Gower Adal in 2006 looked at this and, and, there was another study later on which we talk about, the same, same group of researchers. In this study, I would say we're really lacking on large cohort studies apart from these two papers which you know, have good study design and, and really show any effect of kind of diet on oral health.
But this study looked at over 38,000 cats and dogs, I believe over 25,000 or 27,000 were dogs. And what they saw was that soft diets were associated with increased frequency and severity of periodontal disease. Harder foods that required the animal to kind of prehend them and masticate them forcefully or vigorously were actually beneficial.
So feeding a dry diet, if you're feeding commercial diet, feeding a dry diet does have a positive influence on oral health scores. So the scores that they use or the measures they used were mandibular lymph nodes, or lymph adenopathy, dental deposits, so calculus on the teeth, tartar and calculus, and, they also looked at periodontal disease, signs in cats and dogs, and they found feeding a dry diet does have a positive influence on those three, parameters in both species. Buckley etal, another study, looked at the impact of home prepared diets.
So whether they were cooked or raw, but, normally they were kind of soft, kind of home cooked diets, and home oral hygiene, factors. So whether pet owners were brushing the teeth or using other kind of commercial products, on oral health in cats and dogs. And they fed a home prepared diet alongside commercial food and looked at the effects of the two in over 17,000 dogs and 6000 cats in this study.
So we're really dealing with numbers that can show significance here as opposed to some, some of the other studies that really don't have as many in their sample size. And the home prepared diet, significantly and negatively unfortunately impacted on oral health. There was a significant benefit of feeding only commercial food if at least part of it was composed of dry food.
So they were saying that even mixed feeding, so me feeding wet and dry commercial foods, was, had a benefit compared with home cooked soft foods. So really they saw a mechanical effect of chewing and masticating and prehending a hard food, if at least it was part of the diet. And then they also found, and this is a really important point, I think, when it comes to making recommendations on toothbrushing or dental shoes and so on, you know, commercially available dental shoes, was that there was improved oral health only if those things were practised daily.
So if you were giving a dental toe on a daily basis. And also I would say that if the animal was prehending and masticating that dental shoe and wasn't, you know, your typical kind of Labrador inhaling it in one, because that's not going to touch the sides when it comes to, the kind of, dental arcades. So toothbrushing and dental shoes, can have a beneficial effect if they're practised daily.
That's what they found. I'm going to talk a little bit about our dental dailies because dental shoes, are a kind of hot topic and a lot of people are quite cynical about them. Do they actually have an effect?
We've seen in a kind of, unbiased research kind of study that they can have an effect, depending on obviously the formulation and so on, if they're used daily, on reducing the buildup at least of of plaque and calculus, and sometimes helping with deposit reduction. But we did, we reformulated our dental shoes, some time ago now, probably about 2 years ago. And, there has been a commercial trial done on them.
It's not peer reviewed, put my hands up to that. It's, we couldn't afford to have it peer reviewed at the time, but it was a fairly compelling, trial, and it is a commercial trial, so I can't publish it here. There's a little bit of taking my word for it, but.
It did indicate significant improvements in overall oral health scores. So they used to, two scoring systems by an independent, independent vet to examine dogs in the study at 48, and 12 weeks post trial of, of, daily dental shoes. And they saw an improvement in that gingival index score and reduction in dental deposits in many cases.
There was no worsening of oral health scores over time in any of the trial dogs versus the control dogs that didn't have this or had a different, more basic kind of formulation. So we would be very honest in our marketing claims. Part of my role as the vet intels.com is to sort of regulate marketing claims and talk to the marketing department about what we can and cannot say.
And we don't make medicinal claims where they're not warranted. That's really important. So I would be very honest and everyone at Tails would be very realistic in the fact that our dental daily shoes are a maintenance aid.
They're there to slow down or halt the progression of periodontal disease and plaque and calculus deposit, over time, but they're not, you know, fix all or an alternative to daily brushing, and we, we don't say they are. So that's really important and I think certainly when I was in practise, I had that, . Question all the time when I lifted a dog's lip and said, oh look, there's quite a bit of calculus here and gingivitis, and it may be time to think about a dental scale and polish.
I had the rebuttal, but we feed, you know, a dental stick every day. Well, that may be well and good, but if you haven't brushed your teeth in 7 years and your dog's life, then there will come a time when, perhaps a scale and polish is going to start us back at it on a good footing. So moving on then to age and breed specific diets.
For me, this is quite, fundamental that we tailor the diet to, certainly dog's life stage or age, breed specific, a little bit more, grey area perhaps, but there is some evidence out there which we'll talk about. And, recently went on, Radio 4 show to talk about, you know, our breed specific diets, a marketing gimmick, and so on. Had a 15 minute conversation, edited down to 2 minutes, so the edit unfortunately didn't do justice to, to what I talked about.
But, we're learning all the time about dog nutrition and cat nutrition, pet nutrition in general, and we've learned a huge amount because of commercial diets being formulated and being known quantities, and we We've learned a lot about what dogs actually need in terms of, in general, but also in terms of breed specifics and life stage specific because we have volumes and volumes of data on that. So, there's a good few, there's lots and lots of studies out there looking at growth curves and so on. But I thought this was an interesting one from just from last year.
Looking at various ways of plotting kind of growth charts and monitoring body weight in dogs. And what they found and what we would concur with really in, in a broad sense, is that the breed size category has greater effects on on growth, more, more than. Requiring different curves for individual breeds.
So when we talk about toy, small, medium, large, and giant breeds, those are the kind of five categories that we look at in general terms on modelling and growth charts. But then obviously we look into breed specific factors as well. What they found also quite interestingly was that, early neutering was associated with a slight upward shift in growth trajectories.
So, animals were putting on more weight and growing at a higher rate than than animals neutered after 37 weeks. But those shifts were so small in comparison to the kind of individual variability amongst dogs that they said separate curves for neutering or, or, sex weren't warranted. And that's something that's borne out in, in a lot of the research.
We do say, and at tails we do reduce the energy calculation requirement for dogs based on neutering. Status, a factor of 5% if a dog is neutered or spayed, because it has been shown in multiple studies that there's a slight decrease in metabolic rate. So with all the various factors, you're looking at a kind of consensus of about 5% in reduction of calorie allowance is probably a good idea for adult dogs.
Energy and nutrient provision. Absolutely acres of research into the effects on this in different breeds, and this is where we can get very breed specific breed size definitely, but even certain breeds. So if we look at the diversity of dog breeds and all of the studies that have been done on how they grow, how quickly they grow, and so on, we do see that, two things energy provision, so the plane of nutrition that dog is on.
And how quickly we're allowing it or forcing it to grow. That's the first factor. The second factor is the nutrients within that diet itself, quite apart from kind of how many calories we're providing on a daily basis.
Those two factors, calorie allowance and nutrient provision, are really, really impactful when we get it wrong, and no more so than when we look at some of the extreme ends of the breed spectrum. So your chihuahua maturing in as little as kind of 9 or 10 months to kind of an adult skele, let's talk about skeletal health. Adult skeleton, you know, whereas the Great Dane can go anywhere from 24 up to 36 months for full skeletal maturity.
And if we get, let's talking about skeletal health, if we get calcium and phosphorus levels wrong, or if we get the calcium phosphorus ratio wrong at any point. That dog's life, it can, it can be a nutritional insult or a developmental insult for that dog. But more so, possibly in the dogs that grow, you know, very, very quickly, a 2 or 3 week period where that dog is getting, you know, a wildly inappropriate calcium phosphorus level or calcium phosphorus ratio in the in the diet can really have knock-on effects because Comparing it to the human, I talked about this in the raw feeding webinar, comparing it to us who grow and mature, you know, in kind of 1820 years we've done our growing and we're fully mature adults, .
A dog of, you know, a toy breed is growing much more rapidly. So a 2 or 3 week kind of unhealthy diet for us mightn't have a huge effect, but a 2 or 3 week unhealthy diet for them are unbalanced diet may have a significant impact. So we've got the known quantities.
We've worked it out. It's not, it's not done and dusted. We're always learning and we're always revising the research, but we have volumes.
Volumes of data on what we should be doing in terms of macronutrient and micronutrient levels for dogs of different breeds of different ages. And that's really something that we work on at Tails.com and we're always improving our algorithm to suit suit those dogs in in more and more ways.
When we look at going back to kind of homemade and raw diets, one of the, the big issues is nutritional balance, and there's lots of studies, if you want to look at last month's webinar that's, that say, if we're going to recommend homemade, people really need to be clued up on how to balance that diet. And unless you're a nutritionist, it's very, very difficult to do so. In terms of raw diets, if we're going to recommend them, we should be recommending that people are educated about the risks in terms of food safety and nutritional balance, but they should probably be going with a very well recognised and regulated, raw commercial company.
So there's a few papers there looking at kind of growth curves and energy and nutrient provision in dogs and what effects they can have. So moving on then to what matters to dog owners. You all know what matters to dog owners.
You talk to dog owners every day at work, and you have your own perspectives on that. But I think that we have a bit of a unique perspective, sometimes at tails.com.
Because we can analyse the data in a, we're a data driven company, we're a tech company, we collect data, not in a, you know, surreptitious way. But we collect data on every dog, and every owner when they come and tell us about their dog and, and, and try us out with a free trial. And when they remain a customer, we gradually accumulate more and more data, on that dog and how it's fed and what health conditions come up in later life and so on.
And what matters to the owner. We do a lot of surveys and our Customers love to tell us what they think of our product, what they would like from us, what their dog loves about it, what their dog doesn't like about it. We're constantly customer led and trying to improve all the time our offering by talking to our customers and gathering those insights.
So hopefully, I can share some of them with you and you find them interesting. The big thing, the first thing that's important to our customers and potentially your clients when you're recommending them food is palatability. Because if the dog doesn't like the food, then that's game over in some ways, or at least our customers think it's game over.
The fact is if we produce a a diet for a dog, a recipe for a dog that they don't like. Then we can actually, we do have the luxury of going back and trying again with different kibbles, different flavours, different, ingredients and so on and trying again. And so that's something that we always reiterate to, kind of the vet community when we're, I'm talking about, tails.com and how we work, but also to our customers that we can try again.
It's not just one blend for for each dog. So palatability is the first hurdle to get over when you're recommending diets in clinic, because if, especially with some of the prescription foods, historically, palatability has been an issue, and if you're trying to get a sick dog, to eat, you know, it sometimes needs a lot of temptation to do so. So palatability is something that we've really worked hard on, at tails.
We've been. Around now for kind of nearly 6 years and trading for nearly 5 years and we've constantly been researching and improving our palatability and we have some unique insights on that. So palatability in general, what is it?
I think we all Think of palatability as a kind of a value or . Factor of the food itself, and it is definitely a food factor, but there's other things involved as well. So it's the appeal of food for the animal and the ease with which it's eaten.
Now we have to say that it's not just the food itself that that plays into palatability. There's also the importance of kind of pet and pet parent or pet owner sensorials. Apologies if you hate the term pet parent, but it is growing in popularity.
. I use it occasionally. So defining palatability is, is, quite extensive really. It's not as simple as it looks, and this is a very simplistic diagram of it.
But if we think of it in terms of three major factors, it's kind of a triad. There's the pet factors, there's the food factors, which I think we would all initially go to. But also there's a very powerful owner factor.
Because, the owner is choosing the food, the owner is the consumer in in certain ways because they're the the buyer, they're making the commercial decision to go with a certain brand of food or to take your recommendation for a diet off the shelf in your clinic, as opposed to something they can buy online, for instance, or, or at the supermarket. And if the owner doesn't like the look or the feel or the the branding or the smell, of the food, oftentimes they're not going to feed it to their, their beloved pet. The other thing that is an owner factor that has been studied and is very, very interesting is owner psychology and the owner pet bond and how the owner's behaviour around food, especially a new food, can influence the pet to try it or not.
So that's something that we work on, very hard. We give tips to kind of transition the dog onto their their free trial of tails of common food, but often we fall down and one of our most common early cancellation reasons is dogs didn't like the food. And it may not be that the dog didn't like the food, but there can be all of these complicated factors at play.
So it's a problem commercially that we want to solve. But it's also something that we can lead on in terms of knowledge and and kind of defining all of those factors and and exploring all of those factors in palatability. In terms of the food kind of things, they are kind of physical and chemical attributes of the food and the nutritional profile of the food.
Macronutrient composition of food is a very big topic at the moment in pet foods, where we're leaning more towards, you know, protein being king and meat content being, you know, a kind of indicator of quality and so on, and pet owners going back to the philosophy of dogs and cats as carnivores and. Eating ancestral diets like wild cats and wolves would eat and so on. Talked about it in the past, not going to get into it now too much, but we're talking about all these factors feeding into whether food is palatable or not, and it's a problem that we need to solve if we want to have customers liking Hotels.com has to offer.
It's a problem that you guys need to solve if you're trying to get animals to eat therapeutic diets and so on, or even if you're kind of selling maintenance diets in clinic as well. So the key pal palatability drivers for us or for any pet food manufacturer. Are first of all, your ingredients and high quality ingredients I would say are, are really the basis of any getting any diet right, feeding the right quantity as well and tailoring the diet to the dog's individual needs.
Those are the three kind of pillars of what we do at Tails.com because we believe it's going to add kind of years of healthy, happy life to, to, pets. The other palatability driver, big one, big category is the manufacturing process.
So how a food is made, what controls are in place in the process, you know, if you have, kind of. Outside factors or unwanted factors coming in or or variability in your process, and that can lead to palatability issues when it comes to the texture, density, colour, and the flavour, whether kind of kind of aromas and things are sealed within the cable or whether they're on the outside. All of these kind of processes and manufacturing, .
Kind of factors and really feed into palatability massively. And then when it comes to us and what we do, you know, how we store food, how fresh our food is, because we're, you know, blending, kind of recipes individually for dogs, our food is very, very fresh compared to some of the stuff on the shelf, and so that's not a huge problem. But what kind of blends we're producing as well, you know, if we're combining flavours, certain flavoured kibbles with others, does that have a big effect, and also how it's, transported, of course.
So those are the big drivers of palatability in broad terms. What we're in the, we're in a kind of great position in some ways of being able to test and learn about palatability in a way that a lot of other food manufacturers are not because we are designing individual recipes for dogs and we know what happens to that recipe when we send it to that dog's home. And we know what the consumer behaviour is afterwards.
And we know that if we change the dog's blend over time, certain things happen and we change automatically over time to meet the dog's growing needs. But we know that if we, we've examined the data and we've, if we introduce. A new ingredient or if we improve our kibble range, we always monitor what the effects of that are.
But in very simple terms, how we measure palatability would be using what's called an AB test. So it's basically comparing, you know, let's use a kibble as an example, kibble A versus kibble B at the same rate in a, in a blend going to the a cohort of dogs. We make those tests and we look at .
Kind of indicators that can tell us what was the effect? Did the dog find that palatable? Did the dog's owner cancel at a higher rate for the reason dog didn't like the food, if we included X percentage of kibble A versus when we included X percentage of kibble B?
So we're getting down to a very granular level of, of kind of data analysis in terms of, if we make it one single change, how does that affect this cohort of dogs? And what we talk about is improving conversion and retention. So just talk to you a little bit about the kind of tails model and how this works and how it helps us.
Conversion is when, you know, dog owners. Get their free trial, whether it's 2 weeks free online or whether it's 1 month free that that you know, we often offer to vets and so on. If they convert to their second box and pay for their second box, that means they're obviously happy with their free trial and they're, they're happy to pay.
We do email them before we do that, so it's not like they're tricked into paying for their 2nd box. And then the other measure that will allow us to see if we've, you know, if we're doing things right and if we're getting it right for that dog and that customer is looking at ongoing. Customer retention.
So customer retention after 3 months, customer retention after 6 months. So we, we're in a really good position to know what happens to our food and how our consumer behaves with our food and who the end user, the dog, how, how they interact with our food over long periods of time. We've built up real unique insights in terms of eligibility for that reason.
We also use these kind of tests to validate new product development, so NPD if we're designing a new treats range, for instance. Or if we're adding a new kibble with different, nutritional benefits into our, extensive kibble range, then we can improve and extend our offering by kind of testing and learning how that affects certain cohorts of dogs as well. We're doing it to gain knowledge ourselves, but we're also doing it to be industry leaders.
Our mission as a company is to be game changing and to change the world of pet food for good. There is no one out there. I'm not gloating on this, but there is no other company out there doing the tailoring and data analysis, to the level that we're doing, currently.
So we want to be game changing and we want to share those insights and I definitely myself and our data team and data scientists want to share some of the insights we've got, publishing next year, hopefully. So talking about our data scientists, we can do wonderful things with data tails, and this is part of the reason I call it new data insights, but just using palatability as an example, we can look into, flavour preferences of dogs. So we can look at, you know, single, if we talk about just animal proteins, for instance, meat.
And fish. Talk about animal proteins and we can look into single protein, recipes, mixed protein recipes, you know, mammal meat and fish, and so on. Any combination of, animal protein ingredients in this diagram, we can look at them, we can do what's called heat mapping.
So we can see where certain combinations are popular, where certain ones are causing problems with conversion to second box or retention of customers after 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 months and so on. And we do heat mapping to to identify. Well, actually, we find that there's more cancellations when we mix, and this is totally hypothetical.
I don't know the results, but for instance, when we mix lamb with salmon, we have a negative effect on 3 month retention versus when we mix, you know, lamb with beef, for instance. . So we're we're looking at data all the time.
We have a data team that are basically their job is to be looking into the data and improving the offering that we have for our customers and improving that conversion and retention. Not only that, but we also look at kind of blend and cable relationships. So the way tails works, if you don't know, I'll just do a very quick summary, is that we have a 2 minute consultation online where we ask all of the information we need as nutritional inputs from an owner about their dog.
It takes about 2 minutes and we ask them a series of questions and with some variable answers and so on. And that allows us to produce the ideal blend for that dog and calculate their calorie allowance based on lifestyle factors. We normally produce at any one time or every month, we send them a 3 kibble blend and the blend or the cables in there, and the proportions of those kibbles change over time.
So when we're looking at blend analysis, and when we're looking at kibble relationships, we do what's called a network relationship diagram. This kind of, data analysis was actually, often used in in solving crimes, quite interestingly, where they're linking kind of, different factors, locations, and people, to a crime. But our data scientist has used this model very effectively to look at pulling out certain cables in our range and seeing what impacts they're having when blended together.
So very briefly, this diagram shows red is bad, blue is good. So we're seeing more cancellations for kibbles in a blend for dog didn't like the food if that kibble is red. The size of those circles in general, so whether it's a large red or a, a large blue, means the number of, of, blends that kibble is in.
And then the, the thickness of the lines means the strength of the connection. So if we have dogs on a 3 kibble blend and all of those are red and the connection between them is strong, then that's not a very palatable blend. Our data scientists would probably do a much better job of explaining this diagram.
But very quickly it just allows us to, to examine what are underperforming what kibbles are are performing really well. And what can we learn from that? And how can we make all of our blends still 100% optimised and designed around the dog's individual needs, but also in a in a taste they absolutely love so that they're we retain them as happy customers.
Going one step further into kind of granularity and and looking at the data, we can pull out any number of factors or variables to look at and we can examine. By breed size, so we can look at, you know, your toy to your giant breed size categories, but we can even get down to a level of breed specific. So what are the, you know, favourite flavour combinations for a cavalier King Charles versus a, Labradoodle versus a springer spaniel versus a border collie.
We get down to breed level in our database, because we've got, several 100,000 dogs, in our database at this point in time. Not only that, but we can look into, geographical things, so we can say that, what's her name? Mila, and forgive me, but I don't know what breed Mila is.
I think she's a Cavauchon or a mulchi or something like that. We'll say no more, but we can say that, you know, a Maltese in Manchester, has, is less likely to cancel, for not liking the food if we include X percentage of this kid. In the blend or this flavour in the blend versus a Chihuahua in London.
So we really, really are sitting on a gold mine of of of the data that we can harvest, we can look at and we can learn from and hopefully next year one of our objectives is to start publishing some of those insights. The other thing that our customers and your clients care about is health conditions. So we get dogs, we get dog owners coming and, you know, their dogs don't have any specific health conditions or health needs, but they're still finding that tailoring the diet to their, their dogs, lifestyle factors and so on.
And having the convenience of delivery and taking the guesswork out of portion control. Everything else we offer, you know, in favoured flavours and so on is, is, very beneficial for them, and they like that service. But when we have dogs with health conditions that can be supported by, diet, we're seeing really, really positive impacts there.
And what happens, how owners tell us is that they tell us in the sign up when they do the nutritional consultation. That their dog has a health condition, we have a tick box list. One of the, concerns on the Radio 4 show last week was, oh, but if my dog's condition isn't there, could you, could you send me like a harmful blend.
We do ask customers if their dog's health condition isn't on the sign up tick list, they get in touch with us. And because it can be more harmful for us to put up a list of 27 clinical conditions on the website and people get a clinical condition type diet or a diet that supports that. Then, then if they're, you know, don't have if they have the condition and they have to come and ask for it.
So we can cater for lots of health conditions, if people get in touch with us if they don't see it online. Generally though, between new and existing customers, new customers will tell us, existing customers, dogs can develop health conditions down the line, and generally they raise an inquiry with our customer experience team. That's often passed on to the nutrition team and we analyse that data and we look at trends over time.
So by far the biggest, kind of, health condition that we get told about in new and existing customers is digestive issues. So it could be anything from flatulence to anal gland issues to, kind of loose stools and so on. Skin and coat, issues, we improve a lot of the time with, with our diets.
Other things would be behaviour. So we talked about that at the start, people asking behavioural, about behavioural issues and can we help with diet. Weight concerns, you know, people come to us and tell us their dog is very underweight or very overweight.
Sometimes if we haven't got the right inputs or an owner hasn't told us about treats that they give at home, for example, we might have overestimated calorie allowance and they find the dog's weight is creeping up. We make it very, very easy and user friendly for them to control that on their own logged in area, their dog's dashboard and say, my dog is now this weight, this body can do. And we'll adjust the calories accordingly.
But oftentimes we're getting inquiries coming in, can you help my dog lose weight? Can you help my dog gain weight? And we can do those.
So by monitoring all of those trends over time and looking at how we can improve based on that data, hopefully we can improve the whole product range and and have more and more kind of satisfied customers. I think at this point, also important to say apart from kind of the data and what we're learning. Is looking at consumer trends and one of the big trends we're seeing in in dog owners, just generally two big groups that are kind of growing in terms of pet ownership groups.
One would be the kind of empty nesters, so people kind of, late 40s, 50s plus, who have a dog already or or get a dog, because of, empty nest syndrome in some ways. This is a very, very broad, categorization. But the other one is kind of young, active, families or, or, young couples that are very much, becoming aware, very aware and very interested in health and healthy lifestyle and the impact of nutrition on that.
But three big trends that we're seeing in the pet food industry are identified as carefree joy, performance fuel, and preventive care. So carefree joy. Be things like I'm making the right choice and I'm making a guilt-free choice for my pet and I'm not going to buy just any old stuff off the shelf.
I need to know it's provenance. I may follow trends on, you know, free from because I'm transferring them over to from human health, claims sometimes or human nutrition claims sometimes, or there may be some merit in some of those, but they're kind of free from, trend and we're definitely seeing in the pet food industry. Ingredient reputation, you know, grains, grain-free, wheat in particular, gluten, and being seen as a bad ingredient, whether or not the kind of empirical evidence backs that up.
Sustainability and local sourcing, again, we're seeing more emphasis on that, with kind of new generation of pet owners. Performance fuel, we're seeing in the kind of really upwardly mobile, . Young and old dog owners, but kind of outdoorsy active families as well.
The high protein trend is definitely something that we're seeing crossing over, for two reasons, one being that we're seeing kind of paleotype or kind of simplified or macronutrient breakdown, diets, but we're also seeing, you know, the kind of ancestral dog as wolf, diet kind of trends coming in as well. And then preventive care, so proven versus perceived, you know, what can nutrition really do for health? Food is the first medicine.
I talk about that quite a lot. But, actually looking at kind of the proof there, some, some claims are really not backed up by science and some are. So we'll talk about supplements, superfoods is another big trend that we're seeing on kind of labelling and so on, an ingredient list that is quite powerful marketing, to the, the dog owner today.
So let's talk about dietary supplements. I know we're running, fairly short on time, so I want to cover just two, if not three main areas, joint supplements and behaviour supplements. So joint supplements I've talked about before, I'll just skim over.
There's a few studies here showing kind of differing results, but, omega 3 is the only kind of well established clinically proven. Ingredient to reduce inflammation and related pain for osteoarthritis in dogs. There's a couple of studies out on that.
The Rochidal one is, is pretty good if you want to have a read more on that. Glucosamine and chondroitin, there really is conflicting evidence and Batalidol do a good summary kind of paper of what that is. We do see some kind of improved pain scores and weight bearing, kind of tests, or pressure plate tests and so on and weight bearing tests.
So objective measures of pain and, and kind of mobility. We're seeing some improved ones, in certain studies, but obviously much slower acting than non-steroidals. For instance.
And then, quite an interesting study on some of the more kind of herbal remedies that are gaining in popularity at the moment. Curcumin is the active compound in turmeric, often asked about turmeric and is it really anti-inflammatory. And this study combined curcumin, collagen and green tea.
So, you know, what the results were. A result of is up for debate, but they found an interesting finding where there was, let me get it right, there was no improvement in the kind of pressure plate tests, but there were some improvements in the physical manipulation or pain score tests by vets and when they're examining the animal. But like anything, a lot of these things are difficult when it comes to identifying a single factor, and no more so when it comes to the kind of calming or behavioural aid supplements.
So we are lacking single factor studies. This is a good example. This study by Dierbo Adal said that they saw beneficial effects on anxiety type behaviours when they used the combination of counter conditioning, desensitisation, .
Punica granatum, which is pomegranate, Valerian rosemary, and linden tea extract, and L tryptophan with an omega 3 to 6 ratio. So did they throw, you know, the kitchen sink at it? I think they kind of did.
It's not very valuable to do a study like that and make claims that some of those herbal remedies have an effect. The other one, Piper meisticum or Kavacava, which is used in some of the commercial veterinary calming aids. That has been shown to have short term anxiolytic effects in humans when it's used over a period of a few weeks to get over short-term anxiety.
But there aren't very good studies, as far as I'm aware, done on dogs with conclusive evidence to the, to the same degree. And there are also some concerning issues with kind of liver toxicity in humans with long term use. So going back to the behavioural issue at the start, tryptophan and to a lesser extent tyrosine are the ones that keep coming up as the sort of proven calming or behavioural supplements.
Digestive supplements very quickly, prebiotics, foss and moss, so fructo oligosaccharides and mono oligosaccharides, have been clinically proven to benefit digestive health and nutrient absorption, often coming from, plant extracts like chicory root and so on. Emerging benefits coming out on, ingredients or supplements around nucleotides and beta glucans on kind of immune function, the gut mucosal defences and and digestive function. Even benefits in AP and so on.
So that's a really interesting study to look at. And then finally, just to wrap up before we have a few questions, I said I would mention the, the kind of FDA study in the US on dilated cardiomyopathy in, in dogs. It's an interesting, case, but I think it, it has, the FDA have done a little bit of, scaremongering to a certain degree because they've come out with a fairly, alarmist statement on this, earlier in the year, and they've kind of left it hanging as we're still investigating, we actually don't know.
So what happened was, that, various veterinary cardiologists in the US were seeing dilated cardiomyopathy in fairly atypical breeds. It's, it's, a heart disease of obviously, . Certain breeds are predisposed to, but they were seeing it in a variety of atypical breeds.
And when they started investigating, they did identify there was potentially a link that a lot of these animals were on interesting diets. The things the diets had in common was that they were mostly grain free and often had high levels of legumes, pulses, or potatoes in. There's been no news since August.
There was a, a kind of press release done in July, another one in August, basically saying the investigation is ongoing. So it's not really helpful to come out with a statement to say, grain-free diets are causing heart disease in dogs. That's quite alarmist.
I've had loads of inquiries about that. There's a huge number of possibilities of what this could be. It may not even be diet, but some of the dietary possibilities would be an implication in taurine levels or taurine availability in the, in the, diets, but confusingly, some of the dogs had normal taurine levels and some of them didn't.
There could be anti-nutritional factors which we know exist in legumes and pulses, for instance, but they're normally denatured by cooking. So we don't know if some of these products are raw, grain-free, or whatever. They haven't released the brands or the actual diets.
There could be formulation errors. It's difficult sometimes to formulate grain-free or limited ingredient profile diets to be absolutely balanced in terms of micronutrients and micronutrient profiles. So they could be.
Formulation errors in these small number of brands. They could be quite boutique diets, they could be quite niche. They could be inexperienced brands that don't have an animal nutritionist formulating them and and hoping for the best.
So it's really, I would say, let's not all get alarmed. It's a wait and see approach. Let's see what the FDA come out with.
And let's just say that grain-free is a growing trend and for the large majority of dogs, this was a very small number of dogs and when you talk about the US dog population. Minuscule really, not to say that them getting DCM is minor, but it's a very small population. So grain-free grain-free diets, if they're formulated by nutritionists with good quality control, are unlikely to be a problem as it stands.
I'll just finish up by saying, we are at London Vet Show. I'd love to talk more tonight, but we're running out of time. We are at London Vet show next week, so the 15th and 16th of November on Stan T40.
If you want to try us for your own dogs or, dogs, you know, do come and speak to us about, we kind of want to talk about the technology and data behind tails, but we're also giving away 3 months free for vets, and we're continuing, talking to vet nurses. We, launched a vet nurse rewards programme at BVNA last month. So do come and say hello, and also if you want to keep up with.
What we're doing and some of the data insights that we're going to be publishing and so on, and what we're uncovering around dog nutrition. Join us on Facebook on our veterinary page. We have a consumer page and a veterinary page.
We'd love to see you there. And just I've included, for your own references and further reading quite a list of papers that you can get some more CPD hours racked up on. Sean, as always, that was absolutely fabulous.
You set a very high standard in the first of 4 talks and I'm very pleased to say you have maintained it all the way through. So thank you so much for that. Thanks a lot, Bruce.
We do have a couple of questions that have come through. Adrian wants to know, do Tails.com dental chews have less calories than the classic PIH dental chews.
The classic what? Dental chew? Pets at home, dental shoes.
I can't answer categorically on the pets at home ones because they don't know the calorie . Density of all of the brands out there. That, that would be quite an encyclopaedic knowledge.
The product team will be able to tell you straight away. I believe one of the benefits that we do recommend is that they're lower calorie than most of the commercially available ones. And certainly some of our treats range, we deliberately designed them to be quite low calorie, high reward, high meat content, and so on.
So, we definitely have, calories and waistlines at the heart of everything we do. Excellent. Christine wants to know, can your diets be made using hydrolyzed proteins?
Yes, absolutely. So we do have some kibbles in our range that have hydrolyzed proteins in. One of the things apart from the kind of health conditions, that we list on site, which are joint disease, digestive issues, skin and coat and pancreatitis, one of the other things that we cater to very well is, digestive dietary intolerances and food allergies.
So people can specify a hypoallergenic diet and we'll The top 5 common food allergens, and they can even specify more exclusions, you know, what what else they'd like to exclude from their dog's diet, but we can get down to single protein, single animal protein, single carbohydrate, and we also have hydrolyzed proteins in our range as well. So we're seeing really, you know, significant improvements to dogs. Dog owners where they couldn't find, you know, a diet that worked or weren't adhering to, you know, your, good advice of doing a strict diet trial.
We can basically tailor the diet around suspected or diagnosed, food allergies and intolerances and yeah, hydrolyzed proteins are part of our range. Excellent. I'm just scanning through while you're talking here.
We have loads and loads of comments coming through. Excellent speaker, really easy to listen to, engaging, brilliant as always. Thank you so much.
And it just goes on and on and on. So that's absolutely brilliant Sean. Thank you feedback from my plans for a podcast soon.
Excellent. Sonia poses an interesting question. She says, you mentioned people are becoming more concerned with sustainability and locally sourced food.
Can you please tell me where the meat comes from, to make tail food? Is it from high welfare farms, barn reared, free range, or caged hens? Yeah, absolutely.
So all of the meat in our dry blends comes from within the UK except for lamb at certain times of the year, because it's just not possible to source, lamb at certain times of the year. So the lamb sometimes does come from New Zealand primarily, but all the other meat is locally sourced. So what we say is the quality of our food is the most important thing.
And as as locally sourced as possible. So most of the vegetable, components as well, are from within the UK and we hold our suppliers to very high standards, some higher standards than some of them we used to before in terms of traceability and quality of supply, and, and sourcing and so on. So yeah, we take that really, really seriously.
Excellent. Christine has followed up with her question that she had on hydrolyzed diets, and she wants to know, are your hydrolyzed diets available on your trial offer as well? Yeah, so, the algorithm, basically the three part process when you, when you sign up for a free offer, you do your 2 minute consultation, we've designed our whole range of kibbles that's changing all the time depending on what we're learning and so on.
And then the algorithm is the really clever tech bit, that the brains of the operation coded for and designed for every permutation. We say we have over a million possibilities. So the algorithm will basically calculate or design your dog's diet based on what you've told us.
Now, sometimes depending on what you've told us, it might not come up with, you know, fully hydrolysed diet. So if you say, if you know that your dog needs a fully hydrolysed diet, what you would do is just sign up and create their profile. Pause, so don't get your delivery.
It'll say what date would you like your delivery. Just press pause and then just drop us a line and that will go through to our nutrition team with whatever wild requests you have. And that's part of our service.
We say we're, we're not dog food as a product, we're dog food as a service. Our customer experience team has won awards on, on the service they provide, . Our Trust pilot rating, we were mentioned today in there, they got some awards, and we were mentioned on their blog because our Trust pilot rating is sky high and most part of that is to do with the fact that we're a service.
So you can always just drop us a line or ring us up and, and we will endeavour to to cater to your dog no matter what it's individual needs are. Well, if that's not a wild claim that you can test him on folks, then I don't know what is. So Christine, go mad.
There you go, there you go. Sean, you said that well we, I said this was number 4 or 4 and it was the last of the webinars. Our last question tonight comes from one of our regular attendees, hi.
And He's just opened the door for us for some more webinars and I, I'm sure you are not going to be able to answer this tonight. But his great question and topic for future webinars are, what are your thoughts on new tendencies for vegetarianism and grain-free pet food? So, grain-free pet food, I think, and I've talked to other pet food manufacturers, a lot of the, popularity of grain-free is to do with marketing.
I'm not gonna, you know, beat around the bush on that. A lot of people are following that trend because it's seen as healthier. It's seen as better for weight control in humans and pets.
But whether Whether dogs actually need to have a grain-free or a specifically a gluten-free diet, is, you know, that's not as important as it is in in in humans. Even in humans, sometimes it's up for debate whether people are actually gluten intolerant or not. So there's, there's a market for, there's a genuine need, but there's also a marketing kind of propagation of that trend.
And I think as long as, you know, your diet, whatever you choose, whether you choose to make it yourself, whether you choose raw, whether you choose a commercial dry food or a mixed feeding, basically go with someone that has formulated that diet to be balanced. And it's a little trickier to to balance a grain-free diet, but it can be done. On the flip side, whole grains are and can be a healthy part of a dog's diet.
They do have beneficial effects, and dogs differently to wolves have over 30 gene copies and related to digesting cereals specifically because they were domesticated around people and feeding on leftovers which contained cereals. I've talked about it loads in the other webinars. In terms of vegetarian or even vegan diets, dogs are omnivores.
So technically it is possible to feed a balanced diet from vegetarian or even vegan ingredients. It's very, very difficult. It's certainly very difficult if you want to kind of a DIY approach at home.
Cats, absolutely not, and they're obligate carnivores and they need to. And acheddonic acid, which have to be supplied synthetically if you're producing a commercial vegan diet for cats. They do exist.
There are commercial vegan and vegetarian diets for dogs and cats. We're not doing vegetarian options for dogs as yet. I don't know if we will in the future, but that's not for me to say.
But it can be done in dogs. It needs to be synthetically altered in cats, and I've certainly seen in my clinical days, I've seen cats, a couple of cats on a vegan diet that weren't doing so well. So I'm, I'm quite averse to that idea.
They're an obligate carnivore. Why should we deprive them of meat? Why would you choose an obligate carnivore as a pet if you're going to make it vegan?
That's nice, yeah. Right, folks, I'm sorry but we have run out of time. Sean, there are loads and loads of comments coming through, thanking you and Saying how pertinent it is and how relevant the information is.
So once again, thank you so much and we're not gonna let you get away with no more webinars. We're gonna, we're gonna have to get you back again. No more webinars for 2018 I think.
Well, we'll let you get away with that one but 2009. We look to get you back again. Sean, as always, it is my pleasure to thank you for your Participation tonight.
It has really been outstanding as have all your webinars been and we will hold you to 2019. Alright, thanks everyone. Thanks Bruce.
Thanks folks for attending. That's it for tonight. From my side, it's good night.
Thank you to my controllers in the background as well. Paul and and Peter for making everything run seamlessly. Good night folks.
