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If you haven’t been aware yet, thousands of pets are experiencing serious sickness and/or dying from commercial pet food.
While Purina was the original brand incriminated, many more brands have joined the suspect list. Here’s the latest, from a Facebook page tracking this, called Saving Pets One Pet at a Time.
What to do?
Here’s what I recommend, to be featured Sunday in Vital Animal News:
Two things:
If you see sickness after eating commercial food, especially a new purchase, STOP feeding that food. Immediately. You might see food refusal. DON’T “doctor it up” in the hopes that Sadie will consume it. She’s talking to you. Please listen.
Put homeopathy to work!
The chief symptoms in most following ingestion of one of these suspect foods appears to be vomiting.
Sometimes that’s bloody.
Sometimes there’s diarrhea, which is also bloody in some.
Some have rapidly sickened to death, others, once the food stopped, recovered.
As liver enzymes were elevated in at least one reported case, something toxic is suspected.
Testing continues, but labs are slow to get results.
In the meantime, this remedy is likely to help, if your dog or cat falls sick with symptoms like those above:
Arsenicum album.
It’s a homeopathic remedy, so you’ll easily find a 30C potency, that number following the name. The brand doesn’t matter, many homeopathic pharmacies will make this.
If your local health food store no longer carries remedies (looking at you, Whole Foods…), try another source.
If nothing local, a homeopathic pharmacy online will send it to you, like Homeopathy Overnight or similar.
Overnight is wise if you can’t get it locally and you have a sick animal from eating commercial food. Time may be of the essence.
How to use Arsenicum for food poisoning
Ignore the generic label on the tube, and give one pellet as a dose. It works as well as 3 or 5 pellets, that’s homeopathy for you.
-If your animal is acutely ill (just happened, vomit and/or diarrhea, +/- blood), repeat that pellet down the throat every 15 minutes until you’ve given 3 doses.
-If your animal has been sick for a day or more, stretch those doses out: once every hour for three doses.
Then, you assess your animal, over the next few hours, without more doses:
A1: (assessment) Sadie’s coming around. Feeling better, more herself, vomiting or loose stools are resolving.
P: (plan) Watch & wait. Sadie is on her way, and more remedy won’t speed that up.
A2: Sadie was clearly better but, oops, she’s getting worse again.
P: Repeat a round of Arsenicum as above. It worked, but Sadie needs it again.
A3: Nothing improved after Ars.
P: Try the remedy Phosphorus 30C, same protocol as above.
Between these remedies, you should see betterment. If the first doesn’t help, move to the second. That’s what any good homeopath would do.
And, of course, if poor Sadie is really crashed, bring her to your local vet for fluids and supportive care.
If antibiotics are offered, politely refuse them.
This is not an infectious disease, it’s a poisoning. Antibiotics will merely plunge her immune system into chaos, not helpful at this point.
Finally, if you have Venzeo on hand, the gentle but effective daily detox made by my sister company, Venjenz, do use this at a full label dose, but 3-4x/day.
Okay? Okay.
In the rest of this next issue of Vital Animal News, mailing to my Vital Animal Pack subscribers only, you’ll get more:
What the heck does “up to date” on shots really mean?
Sue the bastards! (An earlier dog food scam, promoted by genuine vet nutritionists on the take)
How bad teeth can shorten life (and even lead to cancer)
And more!
Let me know in the comments how you do. Symptoms are always key.
Dr. PLEASE remind readers if a healthy happy dog refuses to eat something...
THERE IS A REASON....do NOT force the animal the food, THINK, test and THROW THE STUFF OUT...
Our dogs/cats have better noses to detect junk...
Thank you.
P.S. My dog refused fresh Hills Kibble...we LISTENED....
Thank you for the update Dr Falconer. I have been following this page after reading one of your other posts regarding food and purchased the best foods list. We switched shortly after seeing this info and our dog quit eating his food. It was not on the list at that time although it is now. We pitched the food we had open and the store took the other bag back with a refund. Our dogs are not on raw but on human grade freeze dried from the list of recommended foods and he loves it! He is losing weight, his hair is getting softer, and he had a little bald spot on his tummy when we adopted him 3 years ago that hair is coming back. Thank you for accidentally posting on Steve Kirsch’s page. We would have never known! Ziggy Piggy thanks you too!