To main Burns Pet Health website | Burns Online Store | About Burns Pet Health | Sitemap | Contact Us | We’ve just heard that Burns Pet Foods are the top, number 1 dog food on the Whole Dog Journal’s list of Top Dry Dog Foods.
This is good news for us and also for you and your pet. Because you know you’re feeding your pet the best food you can buy.
Did you visit our online store recently? It is completely renovated. Let us know what you think.
Here at Burns Pet Health we are pleased to announce our new online pet food store is open! We’ve moved to a more up to date system where you can create an account and buy Burns Pet Foods and diet supplements securely with confidence.
In the bargain basement you can now purchase taster packs of all our foods so your pet can try them and see what they prefer.
Of course our customer service standard stays the same and you can call us or email whenever you need to without obligation.
Please remember that our pet health questionnaire is the place to tell us about your pet and any health issues. We can then suggest diet and supplements to relieve symptoms and improve overall health and well-being.
Burns Pet Health sister company Land of Holistic Pets is launching a new distributing programme in Japan. The new initiative aims to bring Burns and Robbie’s products to the market of caring Japanese pet owners.
http://ideas4petretail.co.uk/news/land-holistic-pets-moves-japanese-market
Luath was the chosen and beloved one, a collie dog of dubious breeding but very loyal and clever.
He loved to laugh, run and discuss the ways of the world. His years of experience and learning had given him an insight, respected by all who knew him.
Luath climbed upon the wall overlooking the city and the pack of dogs and shouted - “Rejoice that we are not men but dogs”. And loud cheers went up from the Pack!
Luath started to speak and said “Say not, I have found the truth, rather I have found A truth”.
There was murmurings from the pack but Luath raised his voice “ many of you have suffered many small irritating health problems and others more serious ones. The time is upon us my friends to take control and educate our owners”
A boxer dog in the pack shouted “Speak to us of teaching.”
And Luath said:
“No man can reveal that which already lies asleep in the dawning of his own knowledge.”
The vet may speak to you of his understanding of health but he cannot give you his understanding. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. – This is why we have the Burns Pet Health!
A Collie bitch said, “Speak to us of Self Knowledge”.
And Luath said:
“Your heart knows in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
Your body tells you that which is good and that which is bad – let your body tell you right from wrong.”
A Young Labrador spoke, saying; “Tell us about pain.”
And Luath said:
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Much of your pain has been chosen by your diet.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.”
Then an old dog, bred not for looks but work, said, “Speak to us of Eating & Drinking.”
And Luath said:
“Since we have to kill to eat, wither it be plant or animal, let it be an act of worship.
When you kill - say to it in your heart; By the same power that slays you, I too am slain: and I too shall be consumed.
For that which delivered you unto my hand shall also deliver me into a mightier hand.”
Make sure that what you deliver into a mightier hand is nourished well and able to nourish the soil - Eat Burns Pet Health Foods.
Let me start with a few facts about dogs -
It defies the laws of nature for a dog to starve itself to death.
If left to their own devices dogs would scavenge to satisfy not only their appetite but their nutritional requirements.
Dog training is remarkably easy and if your dog is a fussy eater you have probably inadvertently trained it that way.
Just think about this situation - we sit a 4 year old child down at the table with a choice between a plate of vegetable broth or ice cream and jelly and let the child make its own decision.
You know the answer and you also know which one is the healthy option. As responsible parents we do not allow the 4 year old child to make that kind of decision - we naturally insist on the healthy choice first.
The Pink Floyd Album - Another Brick in Wall - “If you can’t eat your meat, you cannot have any pudding” - it has been drummed into us down through the generations - responsible eating or no treats!
So why do so many dog owners ignore these basic rules of parenting with their dogs?
Why do dog owners constantly try one food after another looking for something the dog will like?
All the while, what owners do NOT realize is that they are encouraging, training their dog turn up their nose at food.
The dog learns that this behavior results in some other form of food, hopefully tastier than the last.
Often as not, and I hear about them every other day - the dog finishes up getting fed nothing but chicken or turkey or mince.
One of the questions I ask in the pet health questionnaire is “Does your dog eat all its food at one go?” or ” Leave some for later?”
The ‘later’ answer comes through time and time again and it is the first big indication that the dog is getting too much food and someday will probably stop eating for a number of days and the owner starts to worry!
The dog is not eating! An owner gets comfort from seeing the family pet eating and if it’s not eating, it’s a worry.
So how do we deal with the fussy dog? How do we retrain the dog to eat naturally and to eat the healthy option and make both the owners life and the dog, much healthier and happy.
Let us take a lesson from normal parenting - What do we do with children? - We exercise discipline!
Firstly, to prevent the problem developing we should be feeding enough that the dog eats all that is presented and is going round the bowl looking for more.
So if your dog walks away leaving food then that needs to stop.
Measure out the amount of food presented and if any is left measure that and deduct from the next meal plus a little more.
Use this approach at every meal, until all that is presented is eaten. At every meal!
With the fussy eater - put food down - if it does not eat- remove all food after 5 minutes - and do not give any food until the next meal.
At the next and subsequent meals follow the same procedure until the dog eats the food.
Do not worry if it takes 1, 2 or even 8 days - the dog is simply not hungry enough.
By taking this approach you are exercising discipline and at the same time training your dog that there are no alternatives! It takes discipline as an owner but we should do it out of love for our dear pets.
Give your dog a chance and remove any dog toys made with vinyl/PVC products from the house.
Owners need to be very cautious about the origin of their pets toys and what it is made from.
Products are all around us in our home - doors, windows, drainpipes and dogs toys, dogs feeding bowls and water dishes.
Chlorine is one of the main chemical building blocks but under certain conditions it produces one of the most toxic pollutants humans have yet created - Dioxins.
Dioxins cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, immune system damage and probably other that we have not yet found out!
These dioxins are the by-products of the manufacturing process of vinyl or if it is set on fire.
The story does not end there however because vinyl is usually a hard and brittle it requires the addition of other chemicals to make it soft, flexible, able to take colours and even scented.
To do this “phthalates” are added - pronounced with an “f” before “th” sound!
These chemicals do not actually bind to the PVC and here is the rub - they move freely around it and also out of it!
Over the lifetime of the vinyl product, the phthalates will leach out of the product completely into, skin, mouth, water, air and earth - in fact anything which comes in contact with it. More so when heat or pressure is applied to the products.
Dogs just love chewing plastic, squeaky toys and in doing so, if they are vinyl, are probably ingesting these deadly chemicals as they go.
Not only do the phthalates affect the kidneys and liver, but they can seriously interfere with the reproductive system.
According to researcher Dr. Santillo at the Greenpeace Research facility these phthalates interfere with the chemical communication at the cellular level. He is of course referring to babies in the womb! Pups will no doubt be affected in the same manner.
A Danish report in 2006 looked at the health risks to pets from phthalates and the rate of transfer into and potential effects on dogs and cats. One observation they noted was that when swallowed, soft plastic toys very quickly became hard indication that the phthalates had leached out in a short space of time into the digestive tract.
China and India have become powerful players in manufacturing - hardly a day goes by that I do not get and email from some supplier offering dog toys, or cat feeding bowls, leads, packaging etc. While EU legislation is place in for children’s toys, the same cannot be said for pet products.
Other additives in vinyl include:
Lead - used as a softener. affects the nervous system, causing behavioural and cognitive problems. Often in coloured products as well originating from the above mentioned countries.
Organotins - stabilisers that may affect the immune system and sexual development of cats or dogs.
Alkyl-phenols - used in the preparation of phthalates are well know for their ability to mimic the hormone estrogen.
Bisphenol-A - used as a stabiliser and helps to stop the vinyl breaking down. An estrogenic endocrine disrupter - linked to some cancers
In Traditional Chinese Medicine and other Eastern medicinal practices, diet is used in the prevention as well as treatment of disease.
The philosophies used are very different than the approaches used by Westerner practitioners who by and large view the symptoms as the problems and suppression of them, the cure.
The Eastern approach sees the symptoms as a result of another underlying problem. A bit like a Tsunami being a symptom but the earthquake the underlying cause.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, medicinal herbs are regarded as part of the diet when symptoms become apparent.
Food is not simply a source of calories and chemical compounds like protein, fat, and minerals for dogs and cats. Foods are looked at in how they influence the pets body as a whole: blood, fluid, individual organs and a body’s Qi (energy/life force).
One of the basics of Traditional Chinese Medicine is balance.
Each food has yin or yang properties to consider, and each food has a yin (cool, damp) and a yang ( hot, dry) constitution.
A diet should be designed to minimize imbalance in your dog or cat, not create further imbalance.
Balance is determined by Yin and Yang although both contain elements of each other. The white area is Yin with a Yang pair (black circle within the white area) The black area is Yang with a Yin pair (white circle within the black area).
It is not necessary to fully understand the principles of Yin and Yang to understand their influence in terms of diet.
Basically foods have a variety of effects on the body dependant on their Yin or Yang nature. Foods which heat the body are Yang, foods which cool are Yin. Thus we need to watch for balance in terms of not only Hot and Cold (Yang and Yin) but Dry and Damp (Yang and Yin).
In normal health the relationship between Yin and Yang is harmonious and dependent on each other.
Foods are broken down into many categories. Those being:
Direction – does the food influence Qi (energy), blood, or fluid upward, downward, inward, or outward. Skin problems for example are usually considered to be outward problems associated with excess body conditions. In simple terms, the body is pushing out the excesses through the skin.
Flavors – sweet (help digestion), sour (astringent/ drying) , pungent (spicy/ stimulate circulation, ie Garlic), salty (soften) and bitter- (aid digestion).
Meridians - how the food affects specific organs: spleen/ pancreas/ stomach (warming foods), lung/ large intestine (moistening foods), kidney/ urinary bladder (sweet), liver/ gall bladder (cooling foods).
Temperature which has to do with the way you feel after you have eaten – cooling as with salads, warming as with oats, hot as with spices and neutral where there is no appreciative change.
And in addition, Traditional Chinese medicine attempts to achieve balance with the seasons - spring/summer (cleansing - why many skin problems only occur in these seasons) - and fall/ winter (warming/ nourishing).
Examples of cooling (Yin) foods:
Examples of warming (Yang) foods:
Thus a proper holistic dog food or holistic cat food will pull together many of the facets above in order to produce a product which avoids excesses and seeks to balance the impact that the combined ingredients have on your pets body.
I was in the United Kingdom during June and attended a number of dog shows with my Scottish based dog food company www.landofholisticpets.co.uk.
At one of the shows in Blackpool (located on the north west coast of England) a lady approach the booth and pointed out that she fed raw food to her dog and did not and would not, feed grains of any kind.
My first thought was why should this lady even bother to approach the stand as it would be clear to all attending the show that brown rice was a major ingredient in all my products.
I asked her outright why? “Because dogs would not eat grains in the wild” she responded. This prompted my next question to establish whether or not this lady knew much about nutrition. I stated. “Like humans, dogs required glucose in their diet - could she explain to me how her dogs acquired glucose
if she did not feed grains.” The lady was quick and said. “From carrots, turnips and peas and other vegetables” which was of course the correct answer.
By now it was clear that this woman knew something about dogs diet and had obviously did a good deal of work in attempting to establish what a good diet was but the reason she was at my booth still eluded me!
I decided it better not to question the reasons but started to explain that I had a pet food business in the United States and that I even had a wife and house there.I also enlightened her to the fact that we regularly have coyote’s in the garden and had seen them chase the deer on many occasions but that they had as much chance as me of catching them. They did get the odd fawn or injured deer and would regularly catch a rabbit but the biggest danger the coyote’s posed was to the neighbours dogs. The coyote’s hunt in packs and when dogs are let out in the yard at night the coyote will cut off the dogs escape route back to the house while the other will hunt it direct.
It is not the first time owners have had to rescue their pets facing off to the coyote. I also explained that I had visited a coyote rescue centre in Indiana and was shocked to see grass cuttings being thrown into the compound and coyote’s eating it like cows.
By this time, the woman was clearly enjoying listening to the adventures from afar. I was enjoying telling them and thankful for being able to. I explained that the landscape in Indiana was such that for miles all you could see in the summer were soya beans and corn fields. To an English or Scottish person who has never seen this is belies belief that you can drive for hundreds of miles in the USA and all you see is corn and soya beans. The UK countryside is a interesting mixture of wheat, barley, fields of milking cows and wild terrain with sheep all interspersed with dry stake dykes (fences built with rocks and no cement) and plentiful hedgerows.
The corn, which all ripened around August, September and the coyote’s, like ourselves are prone to eating their share of the sweet harvest of fresh ripe corn. A ’seasonal’ variation in their diet! It also put to bed the myth that wild dogs do not eat grains. Wild dogs will eat almost anything to satisfy their need and know an easy meal when they see it. It might not be their first choice but as Paul Newman once said “why eat hamburger when you can have fillet steal at home?”
The lady purchased 6 small packs of my meat free mixer for her dogs made up from Brown Rice, oats, vegetable and herbs. She simply wanted to add to her knowledge. (No corn included in any of my formulations)
The term ‘Human Grade’ ingredients of which Burns Pet Health Products are made is taking on a literal meaning with consequences. Simply because we use the human edible part of the chicken we are facing a world demand from companies who are producing foods for human consumption.
In effect, where before the chicken we used for our pet foods was only used for that , the Asian human food companies are not only eyeing up our raw material in America - they are buying them for inclusion in human consumption goods for their own markets.
At Burns Pet Health, we see this as an ongoing and increasing problematic area in terms of maintaining the quality of our products and keeping costs to a minimum.
Also, this development is putting severe pressure on other protein sources driving up demand and thus price. Coupled with this is a shortage of chicken fat and the domino effects spill over to turkey and other poultry fats.
Combined with the above has been the severe storms and tornado’s almost wiping out the poultry industry in Arizona. Most of the producers there do not own the livestock - they simply rear it on behalf of bigger players. In effect, they are sub-contractors rearing the chicks to a suitable age.
The effect of the storms destroyed the rearing houses and left them with many young birds with nowhere to live. They will probably find that their short life is curtailed even further simple because of the lack of habitat
The other interesting facet of quality protein, and this showed up during the big pet food recalls, is that in order to limit prices increases, pet food manufacturers were turning to cheap protein sources and supplementing the diets with synthetic essential amino acids. In Europe, they have become quite skilled and making a low quality ingredient look impressive.
In many diets you see the term ‘ vegetable protein isolate’ which is a fancy name for vegetable protein rather than the real deal . The giveaway is always further down the list in the form of L-lysine or DL-methionine or even taurine - amino acids - the later which dogs normally make themselves but need other amino acids which normally are in the protein.
We are keeping a close eye on developments but envisage that over time, quality protein will become more and more expensive.
Burns Pet Foods has been nominated as one of the best dog foods in the USA yet again!
More news when we know how we got on.
