You are the most important environmental factor for your dog. For a companion dog, you, the parent are responsible for providing everything that is needed for their health and welfare. Nutrition, Exercise and Vaccinations are your decisions to make. Getting educated on how to properly take care of and advocate for your dog is crucial because YOU are the most important environmental factor for your dog.
Since you are the most important environmental factor for your dog, it's important that you understand how nutrition works to either help create optimal health or destroy it. Nutrition is food, which provides energy comprised of macronutrients and micronutrients. Just like humans, when a dog eats more food than they actually need and particularly the wrong type of food, their bodies will begin to store that excess food as fat, which leads to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Despite these disease becoming normalized, they absolutely are not and you and your dog deserve so much better.
Dogs are descendants of the wolves. And just like wolves, they have 42 teeth designed to cut meat and bones.
They are genetically designed to survive by eating prey, not kibble, or any other product that is mass-produced in a factory regardless of brilliant marketing tactics made by the kibble companies themselves. Feeding raw, which aligns with a species appropriate diet, that includes meat, bones, organ meats and some fruits and vegetables is the way to go to increase your dog's lifespan and health span. "Raw diets are high in antioxidants such as vitamin C, vitamin E, and some flavonoids. These may have some matrix effects and synergy that are beneficial to health."
As you are the most important environmental factor for your dog, providing opportunities for lots of regular physical activity is "an integral part of both health promotion and disease treatment in humans and animals alike." The impact of regular physical activity has been extensively studied and is linked to improved cardiovascular health, mental health, sleep and weight management. According to this study, physical activity for dogs help "appropriate weight management is known to increase lifespan, improve quality of life, and reduce the incidence, severity, and clinical symptoms of osteoarthritis."
In addition to exercise and proper diet, understanding the importance of vaccines will enable you to become their best advocate as you are the most important environmental factor in your dog's life. Vaccines can be an important part of your dog's life, but they don't come without some risks.. Vaccinating too young and too frequently can lead to complications, known as vaccinosis, which is an adverse reaction to vaccines chronically or acutely that can present as skin infections, ear infections, paralysis, gastrointestinal issues, behavioral changes.
We have found that vaccinating according to the traditional AKC guidelines, which are outdated, increases the risk of your dog having an adverse reaction. Pure-breed dogs are at a higher risk of adverse reactions. Once core vaccines are administered for most dogs, always, always, always request titer tests be done to determine antibody levels and immunity before giving any vaccines. You can read more about our recommendations here. If you have a bulldog, we do not recommend vaccinating at all. Read up on why here.
You are the most important factor for your dog. It is important that you are informed so you can make the best possible choices for them.
If you are looking to change your dogs' diet, please click here for our raw food brand recommendation, here for our home cooking recipe and here for our supplement recommendations. We have no affiliation with the brands we recommend. We did our research and would only recommend the highest quality and cleanest products that we would or have given to our own dogs. If your dog is chronically ill and would like some guidance on how to get started, please visit Bobzilla's Happy, Healthy Life Made Simple here.
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