When doing anything with dogs, everyone tends to focus on certain details. That famous detail. Sometimes details are important, especially if they have a foundational significance, but often the focus is lost on the most important thing: the goal. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about breeding or nutrition; the detail is not the goal, the focus. The detail is just one building block, but there’s still a need to build something bigger.
The reason why details always come into the spotlight is usually due to a few things:
- details are easier than the big picture
- it’s easier to focus on one detail than ten or a thousand
- compartmentalizing things makes them easier to explain
The Happiness and Bliss of the Liver
The vitamin A provided by the liver is a frequently used example of how the whole is overshadowed by a detail. Liver dosage is based on vitamin A, and the liver is valued for its vitamin A content. Although retinol, vitamin A, is extremely important, the value of the liver comes from all its other nutrients, which are often forgotten.
Beef liver is most often recommended. I do so, as do many others. At some point, a misconception arose that beef liver is somehow better than other livers—and I have my own burden of sin in the germination of that belief, as much responsibility as in using the liver once a week. But the reason for favoring beef liver wasn’t its higher vitamin A content; it was the basis for why beef liver could be used in fewer grams.
The emphasis on beef liver over pork or chicken liver is actually due to three reasons:
- better availability
- pork liver smells more
- dogs have tolerance issues with larger gram doses (read: stomach upset)
The vitamin A content has only been a determining factor for dosage, and the attempt to reduce liver grams has been due to concerns about dogs’ stomach issues and the fear of owners abandoning liver use due to their own food aversion.
The detail has been the vitamin A, which has overshadowed the real issue: the nutritional value of the liver.
Efficiency or Quantity
I have long been concerned that perhaps I emphasized things incorrectly in the past. I lost focus in a way. Beef liver is not the best possible option. It just has the most vitamin A per gram. The best might actually be what is considered the worst, namely chicken liver. The reason is, once again, in the quantities.
If a 20 kg dog were given about 4 grams of beef liver daily based on vitamin A intake, it would, for example, provide
- iron 0.3 mg (3% of the requirement)
- thiamine (vitamin B1) 9.6 µg (2.4% of the requirement)
If chicken liver were used instead, following the rule of thumb give three times more than beef liver for the same vitamin A intake, the situation would be with 12 grams:
- iron 1 mg (10% of the requirement)
- thiamine 24 µg (6% of the requirement)
More of everything else would be obtained with only a moderately higher food amount, while the vitamin A intake remains constant.
The supply issues with chicken liver, however, are a reality.
Did you notice? I’m talking about considering the whole and how details, in a way, obscure or hide the whole. But that demonstrates why details must be used. They give us a measure, something concrete to hold onto and use. The goal, however, is the dog’s nutrition and health. Here, two separately highlighted details underline the goal; liver should be used more.
With two details, I explained why chicken liver might be a better option (and I haven’t even mentioned its milder smell and more pleasant texture yet). If I had explained on a practical level using details and considering the whole, I would have had to list all the known nutritional values of the liver and how they affect overall nutrition and health. That would require a book (yes, I already have a framework for it, but no idea if I’ll ever finish it).
If you still want a detail, here’s one: chicken liver is worth giving at 1.5 g/kg every day.
The Goal is a Choice
Details make explanation easier. But it’s important to understand that they are examples of all the factors that create the whole, which is why liver is healthy and should definitely be given to every dog.
There is a clear emphasis difference in the use of details:
- is liver dosed at the minimum possible amount that provides sufficient vitamin A
- is liver dosed at the maximum reasonable amount for a more comprehensive whole
If the focus is on vitamin A, the first is appropriate. If the aim is for maximum nutritional benefit, the latter is appropriate. And the dog decides which goal is more correct in practical implementation, or if the truth is somewhere in between.
If we exclude beginners in the dog world, for whom everything is new and wonderful, and thoughts, claims, and facts come more than the brain can handle, then the typical Katiska reader hardly needs encouragement to use liver. In that respect, using liver as an example is perhaps similar to the waste of time I’ve been guilty of in raw feeding lectures encouraging people to raw feed; that’s why they came to the lecture in the first place, and time shouldn’t have been wasted motivating the already motivated.
Liver is just an example, a detail, and if you now focus solely on the nutritional content of liver in your dog’s diet, you’re missing the point I’m trying to convey with a detour through a bus ride via Pori: nutritional benchmarks set a minimum threshold that must not be fallen below, and after that, one must strive to see things as wholes. Like the value of the liver is more than the amount of vitamin A, and the value of fish is more than the grams of omega-3 fatty acids.
It’s difficult. I have a strong tendency towards details, but it doesn’t come from the detail being an end in itself. It comes from a desire to understand what, why, and when—like why varying the colors of meats is a waste of time or why chicken breast fillet coated with canola oil doesn’t do the same thing as minced pork and beef, even if the nutritional composition in Excel is similar.
Yet, because of the detail, the idea of giving liver once a week took root in Finland; I didn’t invent it by focusing on the whole despite all the explanations. I answered the detail question of how much liver should be given for vitamin A, and because it is stored, a once-a-week dose is sufficient—I lost the overall value of the liver to the vitamin A detail and guided people to a worse way of using liver.
I’ve been guiding phone clients to much larger liver amounts than Katiska’s instructions advise (when liver is an essential issue, it’s not always). It comes from the greater significance of the liver than just the amount of vitamin A would suggest. And since vitamin A toxicity in dogs is quite relative, more correctly completely theoretical, larger doses are safe.
There is another reason for higher liver usage calculations—but unfortunately, it’s also quite detail-oriented.
In liver dosing based on vitamin A, Fineli values have been used. However, they are old analyses, and especially the vitamin A amount may very well be off. Danes and Swedes report lower levels, and their cattle are fed the same way as here. The United States also reports lower amounts, but their values are hardly comparable—the feeds and the use of supplements are entirely different.
That means perhaps the amounts in Katiska’s articles should also be checked.
Good Food, Better Health
As soon as a dog has any problems, details come into the spotlight. No, I’m not advocating the problematic detail-centricity of the “holistic thinking” of the woo world, which is practically always holistic disregard. I mean the way one single factor is pointed out, and it’s said to be the culprit.
Often reality is much more complicated. It’s rarely just one factor. Usually, there are several factors, and when the number of broken parts exceeds the dog’s tolerance, there are issues like heartburn, skin problems like yeast, gastrointestinal symptoms…
Veterinary medicine certainly requires details. The problem arises in understanding their significance, and nowadays, the detail often overwhelms the whole. Increasingly, kidney failure is being diagnosed using slightly elevated SDMA, creatinine, or urea as indicators. There’s a focus on a mathematical value and belief that it gives absolute truth. All other factors are forgotten, the whole formed by the food and the dog that alters the laboratory’s reference values. Attempts are made to force the dog into the limits, not change the limits when the dog no longer matches the originally set parameters.
Simply using more meat raises values above the upper limit. It’s a result of metabolism and is genuinely a sign that the kidneys are doing what they’re supposed to do. Not a sign of disease just because the dog doesn’t eat or live as the reference values assume.
I’m straying a bit down side paths, but that’s nothing new.
I’ve considered the biggest problems in Finnish veterinary medicine to be that a perfect score in mathematics surpasses social skills and psychological suitability, in addition to the ability to understand wholes. Perhaps the admission requirements should emphasize more on the humanities. Diseases are not a list of bullet points or laboratory analyses. The tool has become an end in itself.
When the whole is forgotten, it’s easy to tell a track greyhound owner that an old sedimentation rate of 5.5 is normal or scare them with a cancer diagnosis at 2.5, leaving them in a panic. In a trained track greyhound, white blood cells are always low, just like in a human athlete, and it doesn’t mean leukemia just because the value is different from that of an overweight lazy pet dog. Then, the normal value for other dogs also means inflammation in a peak condition dog, not health.
Or when a vet demands the same dog to be in intensive care overnight because its hematocrit is 62. In a pet dog, the same value means clinical dehydration, but in a greyhound, it indicates good condition and that the dog has just performed a sprint. Again, the same individual value is not useful if you don’t understand the whole and the context from which the value is obtained.
Of course, understanding the whole requires special expertise, but medicine is special expertise. It’s a basic requirement that unusual things are known. If one gets stuck on just one measurement value, they’re bound to fail.
Allergy is often closing one’s eyes to both the whole and details. A fabricated cause is taken to explain everything. In the old days, a similar general explanation for all evil was bad air. In even older times, it was a curse. Now it’s the dog’s allergy.
I’ve long demanded that every allergy diagnosis should be initially treated as a medical error. Especially whenever the diagnosis is made with a blood test for food allergy and storage mite is included—and the prescribed treatment is a scam also known as anallergenic or hypo food. But that’s no longer about details and wholes, but about incompetence, errors, and lying.
- Functional veterinary foods: Is there any basis for health claims?
The dominance of details in feeding is always related to diseases and what is attempted in treatment. A familiar example for most is carbohydrates and yeast—if the food contains carbohydrates, it feeds yeast. The claim is true and not true. Indigestible carbohydrates may feed yeast because they serve as a growth medium for bacteria in the large intestine. Digestible carbohydrates do not affect yeast in any way, although they do affect weight as the dog gains weight.
It’s easy to latch onto the corn in dry food, but what is done for a raw-fed dog that doesn’t get carbohydrates and suffers just as much from yeast or gastrointestinal issues?
Allergy is the Worst of Details
In allergy claims, the detail theory is constantly clung to. Sometimes the dog is allergic to grains, sometimes to peas, sometimes to every possible meat. The latest trend is being allergic to chicken fat, while fish oil allergies are already yesterday’s news—neither of which they are allergic to. Ever.
Dry foods are a whole whose composition is unknown. It’s a complete waste of time to point out, say, chicken and say that’s the culprit. Or wheat. Of course, they can be a problem, but that’s not known that way. The reason is that it’s not known what the so-called chicken or wheat even is. They are never the same as the grilled chicken bought from the store or the wheat flour found in the cupboard. They are completely different as food and in their composition.
Not to mention what the other parts of the food are.
Just as indigestible carbohydrates affect the bacterial population in the large intestine, so do all other components. Each of them, proteins, fats, and generally indigestible food, affects differently, but the result is always the same. Yeast or gastrointestinal symptoms, those also called allergies.
Even the calcium content of the food causes completely similar problems, even though there is certainly no allergy to calcium. The reason is then in the source of the calcium and how it affects, for example, the digestibility of the food in the stomach, which affects intestinal health, which affects the bacterial population, which can manifest as diarrhea or yeast.
If anyone now thinks that things are better in raw feeding, they’re not in terms of ingredients. No one knows what parts are in the food. Plus, when looking at the product description of practically any meat product, there tend to be as many question marks as in dry foods. They just aren’t questioned in the same way as dry foods.
That’s why it’s so essential to treat food as a whole. As a package whose parts cannot be influenced. For the same reason, food also affects the stomach as a whole, not as individual parts.
That brings, for example, the uselessness of an elimination diet. The goal is to try to come up with an explanation with separate details that a completely different whole, from which one detail is then taken, has caused problems for the dog.
In terms of the dog’s own health, elimination is always a risk, even a threat. The focus is not on trying to explain that a single-protein meat product made by manufacturer X containing lung and cartilage (really, it contains dozens of different proteins) doesn’t work for the dog—that’s already known from the dog’s history. The focus is on getting a diet for the dog that it can live on for the rest of its life. Elimination doesn’t offer that. It doesn’t even provide the means for it.
Then elimination itself is a detail, a detail that loses the whole: the contents of the food bowl.
With dry foods, no elimination can be done. They are just trials with one food. The same trials every owner of a problematic dog has already done numerous times before arriving at the vet’s office. When the vet mentions the word elimination in connection with the hypo-foods they sell, one should start guessing whether it’s a medical error or a consumer protection issue, or both.
This is currently a very big problem. I claim, without evidence, that if we now dug into the patient records of veterinary clinics, 60% of those with gastrointestinal and skin issues have been diagnosed as allergic and 30% as IBD types, and in those dogs, 95% have been recommended treatment with the clinic’s hypo food along with the elimination claim. Fortunately, some also get at least some medication.
Dog for Food
Overall, the setup of detail versus whole is a somewhat abstract issue. Or a matter of attitude. What each person perceives as a detail. The most common claim against meat-based feeding (also known as raw feeding) is precisely the focus on details.
It’s pointless to calculate the dosage of zinc or vitamin D because you don’t calculate your own eating either (except when bikini season is around the corner) and you get everything from food without even thinking about what the food is. Thinking about the liver or kidneys is also pointless detail because you get everything from food, regardless of what the food is and without caring that the liver and kidneys are also food. Then you’re not anywhere else but badly lost.
The whole is always lost when there’s an absolute desire to do something. Feeding must be raw or it must absolutely be dry food. Then the owner focuses on one detail, in this case, the feeding style, due to their own desires. It’s often claimed that the basis of desire is the dog, but it’s not. The basis of desire is then the illusion of the automatic healthiness of raw feeding or the desire to take the easiest route.
If the dog is healthy, then the owner’s desire can lead. If the dog is sick or has problems, then it doesn’t matter what the owner wants. Then what the dog needs must be done. Want and need are two different things, although they are often imagined to be the same thing.
At a hairdresser, as a paying customer, you can demand a particular hairstyle (provided you haven’t previously burned your hair with perms and home bleaching). When there’s a problem that can’t be solved and help is needed, it’s completely unsustainable to dictate what kind of solution you want. When you couldn’t initially solve the problem, where does the idea come from that your own expertise is enough to decide what help is acceptable?
I’ve occasionally told clients that I’m not paid to tell them what they want to hear. I’m paid to tell them what they need to hear.
People don’t like the claim that most don’t feed their dogs according to what the dog needs or even what would be good to feed them. People’s feeding choices are too often based on social acceptance. That’s why in Facebook group discussions, people get excited about anything as long as some completely random and unknown person just says something is good. That’s all it takes: “this has worked great for us and Rekku likes it too”.
- Sacrifice your free time for an online lecture on the Idea of Feeding. It explains why people make feeding decisions.
When asked, there’s something to solve with the dog. Puppy feeding is a typical example.
There’s a received rule. Either from the breeder or from their own live or social media circle: the puppy must be fed three times a day. The puppy starts eating poorly, which leads to adjusting the food with various tricks to get the puppy to eat three times.
The number of feeding times is then the detail that prevents seeing the whole. The whole, more accurately the focus, is this time the appropriateness of puppy feeding. The goal cannot be someone’s opinion on the number of times food is offered. The goal must be to get enough food for the puppy. The implementation must then be appropriate for the goal.
I know very well that the puppy owner is worried. They’ve been told that a certain amount of food must be eaten three times a day, or bad things will happen. The owner’s focus is not lost because they don’t know or can’t. Instead, the advisors’ focus is somewhere other than the puppy—and the starting point is that if you feel you can advise, you also know.
The problem is trying to force the puppy into feeding. It should be the other way around. Food is made for the dog. Then the solution is very simple. Feed only twice a day. Or once. And ask those who know if the puppy gets enough of everything it needs—sleep better when you don’t worry.
- Puppy feeding and growth
The dog doesn’t eat feeding times. The dog eats food. That statement can be applied to almost anything, and it always holds true. What’s important is not what you do or how you do it. What’s important is what is achieved by the action. Yes, I’m often a pragmatist.
The Magic of Application
We know what to aim for. We also know the order of importance of things. We know that there are several ways to implement them. This automatically leads to the freedom to apply. I would even say that it leads to the necessity to apply.
Everyone who trains dogs knows that tools must be applied. What suits one doesn’t suit another. And for a third, something entirely new must be invented.
That’s why no training method bound to rules and models of action is ever a functional way—it’s worth understanding that strict rules are made for productizing, not for dogs. When there are suitable, impressive-sounding theses and preferably some detail or gadget different from others, it’s easier to package and sell. Those ® and ™ symbols don’t appear in the method name for nothing.
The same applies to feeding. Yet people have always tied their hands with rules and absolutes. When the same palette is combined with superstition and deception, we’re in the state where barf was—the worst feeding mistake of the era.
Food and feeding can and must be applied. It doesn’t mean that the wheel must be reinvented, but if some modification works better, things can be changed.
There are only two absolute rules:
- you only get from food what’s in the food
- food must provide what the dog needs
The first point usually means something ethereal, superstition, and the vibrations of the universe. Unfortunately, it also means in this miserable real world that sellers of foods and supplements lie. There are too many examples to list, so the responsibility is on you: learn, and don’t believe claims just because the claimant wants money from you. But it also means you need to know that you don’t get energy from cottage cheese or calcium from buttermilk in amounts meaningful to a dog. Or that rotting food is not somehow healthy. Or that plant enzymes cannot function in other organisms other than causing poisoning.
The second point is even more difficult, and its application requires more expertise than what an ordinary dog owner needs to know and be able to do. So take advantage of us who are supposed to know. Still, it’s good to have some idea of what’s involved.
Dog needs are, in a way, average intakes that a basic lazy, basic healthy adult needs to stay healthy. Or at least not suffer from severe deficiencies. So when articles talk about dog needs, they always mean a healthy, ordinary pet dog. The matter becomes more complicated because needs also assume the dog eats dry food.
Because of dry food, for example, the protein requirement, about 5 g/kgME, doesn’t hold true in raw feeding. That amount also includes plant protein, which must be eaten more than meat protein because it is qualitatively inferior. Then the need for a meat-based diet is lower because it gets more and better from a smaller amount.
The same applies to energy intake, which according to recommendations is around 350 – 550 kJ/kgME for ordinary dogs in ordinary conditions. It is also based on dry foods and assumes that the food contains about 40% carbohydrate. In raw feeding, there are no carbohydrates, so the food amount cannot be composed using that need formula.
Both values are also such that the detail obscures the entire real whole. The dog’s protein need can never be calculated. It’s guessed if a numerical value is absolutely necessary. With normal feeding, protein intake is met without calculations, and if the dog for some reason shows symptoms of protein deficiency—such as dead coat and flaky skin—then the quality and amount of proteins must be changed regardless of what the need calculation says.
The same applies to energy. If the dog gains weight, it’s getting too many calories. If it loses weight, too few. It’s totally irrelevant what the calculation says.
The dog’s calcium need is 130 mg/kgME, and often a 50% – 100% absorption buffer is calculated. Truly, that means wanting to ensure that the dog has enough calcium in its food for muscles and bones, no matter what, and if vitamin D isn’t obtained. Overdose is not a problem because it’s collected in poop bags.
But if calcium is a problem for the dog, say due to heartburn, then that amount exacerbates the symptoms. Then it’s necessary to know that the 130 mg rule is already on the side of overdose and the assumption is that vitamin D isn’t used. But because the dog is given enough vitamin D, the amount of calcium can be significantly reduced because vitamin D enhances absorption.
The dog’s zinc need is 2 mg/kgME, and it suffices for basic immunity and sperm production in males.
If you have a dog with clear symptoms of zinc deficiency, e.g., poor coat growth, then the amount of zinc must be increased because the poorly absorbed grams of dry foods aren’t enough. Or if the dog can’t eat zinc due to stomach issues, then give less because it’s known that even a lower amount keeps the dog alive.
So the detail must be known. But it’s also necessary to understand what it means and how it relates to the whole, also known as overall nutrition. Similarly, it’s also necessary to realize what’s appropriate for that specific dog.
True Broad-mindedness
One of the basic claims of the old and nearly dead barf was that only long-term nutrient intake matters, not daily intake. The claim is idiotic because most nutrient intake and consumption is precisely daily. Easily stored vitamin A or vitamin D are exceptions, except that barfers often took vitamin A from carrots, whose beta-carotene isn’t stored, and thought vitamin D was obtained from the sun or by licking fur, neither of which is true.
Similarly, in terms of amounts, rarely used vitamin B12 or iodine are quite lonely exceptions.
Truly, long-term intake applies only to two nutrients. Calcium isn’t needed all the time because bones can always be broken down (though, with the amount of bone barfers fed, that never came up, and paradoxically, it had to be obtained every day).
Nor are calories needed every day if there’s enough fat. But usually, such an energy deficit isn’t related to food, but to not giving food.
Barfers weren’t entirely wrong. If the matter were stated that not every day needs to be eaten healthily, but it’s enough to eat correctly most of the time, the matter changes. That all means that a fasting day can be held if needed. Or a chicken leg day can be given in the name of pizza Friday. Or a liver casserole day on candy day Saturday.
Then details can be pushed aside, momentarily, and practice purposeful feeding—in fact, one of its variations. Then a chicken leg day doesn’t serve calcium intake, although it is obtained, but takes care of teeth and the dog’s mental state: giving it something fun to eat.
The same purposefulness includes prioritizing things. We were about to have a litter in a couple of days. The female stopped eating. Then it’s not considered how many milligrams of vitamin E it gets or what is the quality of the food’s protein amino acids. The only things that matter are getting any food inside to provide calories and preferably some calcium.
One day the female ate grilled sausages (yes, grilled) and a roll of liver sausage seasoned with glucose syrup. The grilled sausage tricked the dog into taking a calcium tablet, and the liver sausage a vitamin D. Next went ready-made liver casserole, a splash of oil, buttermilk, and a sausage.
Although the food sounds unhealthy, it’s actually not. It’s not rule-compliant, but it’s purposeful food that provides what was needed at that moment.
The Purpose of the Detail
Details are needed. If they’re forgotten, it goes just as wrong as if nothing else is considered. I’ve sometimes been grumpy about NRC believers who think food and nutrition are the same as NRC intake tables. They no longer distinguish details from the whole.
The smallest factors determine the foundation, or framework, in which to operate. And the focus of the operation must be the dog. Truly, not just in words and claims. When those are somehow balanced, one begins to be a strong player. I’ve known a couple of people who have an almost intuitive ability to build the best possible diet for their dog in the easiest possible way, and I envy them—not always, but sometimes, and usually when I fall into the third stool syndrome, thinking about things too complicatedly in a roundabout way.
Truly, it’s a much more complex web. You need to know the basics, the detail. Then you need to be able to apply them to achieve the desired outcome with the most reasonable implementation. And then you also need to understand how all the different things are interconnected. The good part is that this isn’t a dog feeding-centric issue. It applies to everything; I just happen to be more interested in dog nutrition than everything else—although everything is interesting too. 42 and all that.
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