Vital Animal News: December 14, 2025
Fat Cat Drugs? / Practical Raw Food Transitioning / Is Your Homemade Food All Wrong? / Oh, Canada! Et Tu? / Vet Homeopathy Group Closing / Tasty Tips: Holiday Poisons Afoot / and more
When Phat Pharma comes for your feline, but Puff says No Way! to raw and you’re told your homemade food sucks; The real story of Canada’s wild over reach, trying to bury a bird flu fix with a secret slaughter; and keeping the good stuff away from your dog to avoid a Christmas ER visit, it’s the Holidaze!
Ozempets? Seriously??
Making the Raw Leap
Wait: Homemade Food Unbalanced?
On Ostriches and Officious Overreach
Vital Animal Alpha: Last Call to Join Us
Tasty Tips: Chocolate, and It’s Double Dog Whammy
Along the Natural Path
Fixing Your Fat Cat: With Pharma??
Fat cats. Yep, making the leap from cow farts (last issue) to fat cats.
But not just the existence of fat cats, no.
DRUGS for fat cats, along the lines of those in human use.
The NYT has the scoop (hat tip to Luc on Substack who alerted me).
Much like overweight or obese people, fat feline numbers are way too high and their health consequences are substantial.
How, erm… BIG is This?
Veterinarian Ernie Ward knows this is a serious problem. He’s been tracking it, and even founded his own association: APOP! Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (but I like the abbrev better, more reminiscent of a sound something overfilled might make).
He cites 2022 data:
Cats: 61% are overweight or obese
Dogs: 59%
And vets of all stripes make it clear: you’re not aware of when your cat or dog has gone past that healthy set point into fat land.
Current estimates show that 60 percent of U.S. cats are overweight, yet only 28 percent of owners recognize the issue. — Vet Practice News, late November ’25
Big Pharma’s Phat Phix
Never missing a chance to profit again after creating chronic disease, several pharma companies are gunning for market share and currently testing GLP-1 agonist drugs akin to Ozempic et al.
The NYT article spoke at length about one called Okava Pharmaceuticals, a Bay Area maker of a 6 month implant that slowly juices up your cat with its drug.
“You insert that capsule under the skin, and then you come back six months later, and the cat has lost the weight,” said Dr. Chen Gilor, a veterinarian at the University of Florida, who is leading the study. “It’s like magic.”
As in the human experience, pet owners may be more interested in the quick fix (i.e. “magic!”) vs looking deeper to solve Puff’s obesity problem.
First, A Dose of Reality
As cats edge out dogs in the fat stats, and the drugs under study are feline focused, let’s talk facts.
Cats are correctly labeled as “obligate carnivores,” meaning their entire physiology evolved as predators who eat prey. One look at their teeth, claws, and hunting prowess should make that obvious. Our “domestic” versions mirror their wild cousins like lions, tigers, and jaguars.
The fact that they’re now household family members throws that image a bit to the curb. The best they can hunt is often “thing on a string” and most will not pass up a chance to eat dry, crunchy food like particles, aka kibble.
But wait, what holds those crunchy chunks together?
Why, carbs in some form! Rice, potatoes, grains, or non-grains, all sticky carbs, which are long chains of, you guessed it, sugar.
Q: How much carbs in prey?
A: Little to none
Commercial Food Fixes?
Here’s an example of a “fat cat reducing” food from IAMS (a kibble, no less):
You can see the carbs stacking up in the first ingredients, from corn in three forms to beet pulp and sorghum.
If that’s a squint job, here’s a short list:
Chicken, Chicken By-Product Meal, Dried Plain Beet Pulp, Corn Grits, Ground Whole Grain Com, Corn Protein Meal, Ground Whole Grain Sorghum, Powdered Cellulose, Chicken Meal, etc.
[Gotta love the “No Fillers” claim, top of their list of grooviness. Dudes, what do you call “powdered cellulose” then? Is that sawdust or what?].
So, it’s safe to assume those convenient kibbles are the cats’ undoing.
And carby kibble sold to solve the issue?
Please.
But Kibble Could Be Worse…
Here’s the Daily Double way to make your cat fat:
Feed kibble solely or mainly
The kicker that takes it to a whole new level: Keep the bowl out and full of crunchies!
Know any jaguars or leopards that snack all day long?
Even zoos know that’s not how the big cats are built. Once a day, they gorge, like taking down that wildebeest.
That style of consumption works to keep the digestion in top shape, running acidic, like every good carnivore is supposed to.
Free choice grazing turns these predators into little cows.
The normally acid system becomes alkaline, the appetite falls apart, and fussiness often follows.
“I know I USED TO like that food, but now I simply DON’T. What else you got?”
And you tear your hair out trying to find something that Puff will deign to eat.
Diabetes, Shorter Lives, and Obesity
We touched on metabolism a couple issues back [Senior Dogs: Fresh Food vs Kibble Study], and whatever the species, we all metabolize until we breath our last gasp and our soul departs its mortal frame.
When excess carbs are consumed (ALL carbs are excess in cats…), that metabolic system that makes energy out of food goes off the rails.
Especially in the indoor cats whose idea of exercise is a leap to the bed at nap time, the non-stop carbs push insulin levels higher and when insulin never rests, fat is the net result.
Fatty livers, fat bellies, fat surrounding vital organs.
And insulin resistance results from those same carbs, which screws with hearts, blood vessels, and sugar regulation, finally ending with diabetes.
When Diabetic Pets Were Freaks
During my vet schooling years in the late 70’s, the U. of Missouri vet teaching hospital owned a couple of donated Beagle siblings.
These dogs were both diabetic, a disease exceedingly rare in those days.
And of course, in all my school years prior to and including vet school, I’d never met a fellow student or a teacher who was diabetic.
And now? I’m sure diabetes is so commonplace that everyone knows someone with the disease.
Confusing Food with Love; Drugs That Failed
I used to preach about this in my early days in holistic practice.
Maybe too many snacks and treats were the cause of the fat pets?
I was unaware of the carb vs protein polemic at that point in my life, and I knew treats were a big industry, so I wasn’t too far off.
Understanding carb laden kibble would dawn several years later…
But, here’s why these drugs might fail: they curtail hearty appetites.
Another way to say it: they engender a state of satiety. That’s GLP-1’s forte.
“Hey, no thanks, I’m good. Maybe bring that food out tomorrow and let’s try again.”
Turns out the evil empire known as Zoetis (makers of the dangerous drugs Apoquel and Cytopoint for The Itch), tried a version of a canine appetite suppressor drug earlier (Slentrol).
And it bombed.
Why didn’t people rejoice, hopeful their bulgy Beagle’s decreased appetite would result in a new trim fighting weight?
“They saw that as a negative side effect,” said Dr. Murphy, the veterinary nutritionist. “Because the main way they interacted with their pet was by feeding them, and seeing their excitement and happiness when they were eating the food.”
The Fix
I polled my Alpha students this week, asking if they’d
a. Had a fat cat at some point and
b. If a raw diet solved that problem.
Early results are encouraging:
Both dogs and cats who were overweight responded to a raw diet and trimmed up. And several report raw fed animals who simply maintained normal weight, never veering into fat land.
Those who allowed some sneaky carbs in (crumbs, popcorn) simply couldn’t lose the excess weight, even on a raw diet.
So, that’s a small sample, but clearly the wild cousins give us the best examples.
What ever you can do to mock up prey in the food dish, and push these hunters into more exercise will get them to lose weight or never get fat in the first place.
The low hanging fruit? No Kibble For Kitty! Start there!
You’ll find some useful links there for alternatives.
Drugs as a fat cat fix? In a species known to be more sensitive to intoxication than most?
No way.
And many humans are leaving those same drugs, unhappy with how they feel, so… Let’s not put this in our feline friends, eh?
Practical HowTo: Raw Cat Food
I was lucky to be able to interview a key player in the natural animal world, and cats got her started down that path.
Kasie Maxwell was so inspired by what raw food did for her charges in those early days that she went on to found SF Raw, San Francisco’s well known source of real pet food for hundreds of families in her area.
Listen to her very interesting origin story here: How one cat’s death sentence changed Kasie Maxwell’s life
And, if you’re convinced your cat won’t go for raw, my second interview with Kasie offers the solution to make this transition work:
Both episodes are available from the links above or where ever you listen to podcasts. Just search out Vital Animal Podcast and take us along in your ear buds.
Is Your Homemade Food Endangering Your Pet?
Newsweek blares this headline: Warning Issued to Dog Owners Over Homemade Dog Food
Oh oh.
Researchers with Texas A&M University’s the Dog Aging Project (DAP) found that the overwhelming majority of homemade dog diets fail to meet their essential nutrient requirements — potentially putting pups at risk despite their owners’ best intentions.
Hold the presses? Or meh?
Who You Gonna Call?
As always, let’s check in with Nature’s model, and since it’s dog meals they are concerned about, let’s ask the wolf.
Is their every meal balanced?
Are they tested to fit Association of American Feed Control Officials’ standards?
Probably not, right?
And yet, they seem to be doing fine, for literally ages.
What do they know that you don’t, busy in your kitchen making the holy grail for your dog pack (that’d be raw food, but even cooked homemade is a huge step up from kibble)?
What Nature Provides
Something should be apparent when we look at wolf diets:
That diet changes regularly.
For a spell, caribou may be the chief prey, but it won’t be for an entire year. They’ll move out of range and rabbits may take their place. Then deer or grouse, or when times are tight, voles and even berries.
What can we take away from that?
A central principle of all wild eaters: The diet balances over time.
The pet food industry thinks every mouthful must be balanced, but Nature doesn’t work that way. Never has.
Nor would she ever entertain a common error pet owners make: feeding a mono diet, i.e. the same food all the time.
Beware The Recipe
For a spell, I offered cats a recipe to make raw feeding easier for them, as I cringed whenever I heard my cat clients feeding kibble.
It was based on chicken and a couple of Standard Process whole food supplements.
But, always with the caveat to change the meats and organs regularly that made up the bulk of that diet.
As the years went buy, people would reorder the SP supplements and with a few questions, I’d glean that they’d never changed the meat source. Not once.
And then I realized they’d either gotten lazy or were too busy to remember that important point: no bobcat, cougar or lion would ever eat the Same.Damn.Thing over and over and over.
So, I stopped offering the diet, and would caution you, if you have a favorite recipe you follow: Change it UP!
But: Calcium!
One other point of concern often presented itself when a client would say, “I raw feed.”
After my initial congratulations, I’d ask “what’s in it?”
And, listening carefully to their meat, organ, and usually veggie choices (often in too high a percentage), I’d not hear of any calcium source.
That’s a huge missing ingredient, and often overlooked until you’ve studied a bit before preparing your own dog or cat food.
Where do the wild cousins get this critical nutrient for strong bones and teeth?
From eating bones! On the regular.
In addition to being a great balanced source of calcium and phosphorus, in my experience, bones are also the world’s greatest pet toothbrush!
You CAN Call “Meh”
So, to wrap up, you needn’t take the shade that Texas A&M is throwing, as long as you follow the wild model in your kitchen.
TAMU’s “cautionary” finding is one of a few often used to discourage homemade food and encourage a return to the profitable food in a bag or a can.
Don’t fall for that pet food propaganda.
Your little wolf or leopard is going to be just fine, even if every mouthful doesn’t pass some standards.
Rotate the protein, the organs, the additions you like and know that “balance over time” is the reality in the wild.
Canada’s Cowardly Ostrich Slaughter
Sherryl is one on my long time Vital Animal Alpha members (since 2018), and lives in BC, Canada. She was very involved with the ostrich farm you may have heard about that was mercilessly slaughtered late last month.
But, if you’re like me, you might have missed the depth of the story, which is painfully unfolded in this interview on The Highwire:
https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/comply-or-die-a-family-farm-under-fire/
Some of the points you may well have missed:
This flock was fully immune to bird flu, having lost several birds to it much earlier and no further birds tested positive nor showed symptoms
These immune birds were found to be making potent antibodies to the H5N1 virus in their eggs
Part of the plan of these farmers was to further research these to help others thwart the disease
The Canadian government swooped in, stole several of the farm’s females, and awarded a large grant to a pharma outfit to do this development
That same government shut the farmers out of their own farm (for weeks), preparing to kill all the healthy birds
They did this slaughter under cover of darkness, using 22 caliber rifles and trip wires in a hay bale walled pen. Untold stress and suffering ensued for these animals and the owners.
Talk about government overreach!
Please watch this interview, as Del Bigtree interviews one of the farm owners.
As we’ve seen in the US, the main stream media gave its usual biased reports, so the full story was buried and most people missed it, myself included.
As it now stands, the farmers were left deep in debt from their legal efforts to stop this injustice. You’ll see a way to help, if you’re so inclined, when you view the Highwire interview.
Alpha Enrollment Closing Tonight
We’re in the final hours of open membership enrollment in my special acute veterinary homeopathy group called Alpha.
New members have been excitedly joining us, and they will actually be able to join me live on Tuesday evening for our December Live Alpha Q/A meeting.
In those monthly meetings, as in our private discussion group, while homeopathy is the focus, we also regularly foray into all manner of natural health topics, driven by members’ interests.
In November’s meeting, topics moved from acute vs chronic treatment expected response times to cruciate ligament rupture to a dog who’d gone through “Chute Medicine” in rescue and now had a yellow snotty nasal discharge that I thought should have been an easy acute remedy fix.
It wasn’t, poor guy, and it turned out we had to sort through a few different remedies when we followed the case in our discussion group before the Ah Ha! dawned (he needed a specific vaccinosis remedy to unlock his healing).
Anyway, if you’ve ever considered studying homeopathy with a homeopathic vet and group of dedicated members, head on over to get the deets here:
Just don’t wait, the doors close at midnight CT tonight, 14 December.
Hope to see you inside!
Tasty Tips
Chocolate: Holiday Treat with Lethal Potential
Ah, tis the season!
We all know diet choices change this time of year, as holidays roll in and treats appear in greater numbers.
One of the more common ones to be widely available, maybe even at eye level for Sadie, looking to snarf something different from her normal bowl victuals is chocolate.
And, I hope I’m far from the first to remind you that it can be toxic to dogs. And cats, though I suspect they aren’t the chief snarfers in the house.
A vet journal has this sobering insurance data:
According to data from Trupanion, nearly 40 percent of all chocolate toxicity-related claims occur in October, November, and December—peaking sharply during the holidays.
Since 2020, more than 8,300 pets insured by Trupanion have reportedly been treated for chocolate toxicity, representing an 18 percent increase in cases over the past five years. December remains the riskiest month, with a 96 percent spike in toxicity-related illnesses compared to November.”
Double Trouble
Though they didn’t mention this, a secondary caution is “sugar free chocolate,” at least where pets are concerned.
If xylitol is the source of sweetness, it may be fine for you, but Sadie’s exposure to chocolate made sweet with this sugar alcohol greatly increases her chances of dying.
It turns out xylitol rapidly cranks up insulin release, sending Sadie into a severely low blood sugar state.
Symptoms include:
vomiting
weakness
ataxia (dizzy, wobbly gait)
and seizures
A later onset of liver failure can compound the poisoning, if the xylitol intake was high enough.
The Dose Makes the Poison
Every year around this time, the poison centers are extra busy fielding calls around chocolate consumption by pets.
If it’s a tiny dog, eating a candy bar, yeah, that’s worth a call!
If it’s the opposite: a Great Dane eating a tiny morsel of chocolate, you’ll probably be talked down off the fence.
No harm in calling but you can get a sense of the risk by comparing your dog’s body size with the size of the intake.
Who You Gonna Call?
The hot line for 24/7 help if pet poisoning is suspected is ASPCA Animal Poison Control: (888) 426-4435.
If you are witness to the downing of the candy bar, you can use an easy first aid tip, while someone calls the number above.
Grab your bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and pour a good swish into your dog’s cheek pouch, head tilted slightly back.
Not so fast and panicky that you risk inhalation, just a confident, steady pour, maybe a 1/2 cup total for a mid-sized dog of 40-50 lbs.
That will induce vomiting in short order. A bit of a mess, but compared to poisoning, a small price to pay.
So, as Sargent Phil Esterhaus used to say at the end of the Hill St. Blues rounds, “Hey: Let’s be careful out there.”
Along the Natural Path
The hazy dawns still allowed some nice bike weather for a while, but things are in flux to more serious Winter now in UP, India.
The field work above was a couple weeks ago, and this wandering bull was caught coming out a medical clay quarry I’m sure our hospital uses for local applications…
But as the sun continues to rise later and later and has made its huge swing into Southern skies, this is what I saw from my balcony yesterday:
Whoa! Guess I’m walking today, not exactly bike weather! Here’s what that’s supposed to look like:
It reminded me that clear skies and good line drying weather is to be cherished now.
Part of the reason we get so closed in is the local fire fuel:
Cow manure is shaped into those narrow triangular “logs” and used for the morning chill and heating the chai, cooking rice for dinner, etc. It’s a smoky, smoldering fire, never an overt flame, so combustion is poor and smoke fills the sky.
And see that huge pile of rice straw in the back? That’s for rapid “gotta warm up!” fires, the ones with multiple friends and family gathered around, fingers outstretched. I see the big ash piles in the morning, likely from teen warm ups the night before. Better combustion, but still: smoke.
And when temps are in flux like they are, fog rises from the local irrigation canals, blends with the smoke, and may be enough to block out the sun some days. Such is rural India, though Delhi has far worse air quality numbers. I’m happy I’m a village guy, even with the fog.
That’s what I’ve got for you this time out.
Where ever you find yourself on this spinning orb we call home, remember it looks tiny from outer space. And it’s all we’ve got for the foreseeable future, so take care of it.
And get outside fog or no, cold or no, shorter days or longer, and find some greenery with your fur friends in tow, and enjoy. That time spent away from screens and “news” are resets for your life.
I’ll see you near year’s end, maybe sooner if you join us in Alpha,
Will Falconer, DVM
Omg I can’t believe they eventually killed all those ostriches!!! And in such a cruel way 😡😡, the Canadian government is becoming more and more nazi as time passes. It’s disgusting!
I can completely relate to pet owners refusing to stop using treats to interact with their pets. I mainly use treats for training or gaining compliance, but my partner used to feed one of my cats cheetos and such while he ate them watching TV (the other cat wasn't particularly interested except to lick off the salt from potato chips.) No matter how often I insisted he not do that because it was so bad for the cat, he couldn't say no to those wide eyes and gentle paw on the arm. That cat, although only slightly overweight, eventually succumbed to an impacted bowel.
My partner honestly believes it is better to live a "happy" life filled with junk food treats and die younger than to live a longer, healthier life without the dopamine saturation provided by junk food consumption. I've managed to keep him in line with our dogs' raw diet, but two of the four cats we recently rescued still turn their noses up at the raw and had trained my guy to refill the kibble bowl or be pestered until he does. We use the Orijen brand whole-prey dry food, which was easy enough to switch the cats to from their cheap kibble as the first step. The two older cats took to the raw pretty quickly but the younger ones (who had a traumatic first year of life) still only sniff at it, even if I leave it as their only food for two days. (But they may well have been clandestinely given some kibble without me knowing!) I finally got my guy to stop refilling the bowl every time he saw it empty and only feed twice a day the appropriate serving amount. No one is too skinny and the plump one is trimming down slowly.