Pet Nutrition and Yorkshire Terriers

Good pet food is essential to good pet health.

Food, in addition to love and exercise, keeps our pets healthy. So why, when we’ve so many pet foods available to choose from, do we have such unhealthy pets? Wait, you don’t think of pets as unhealthy? Think again. Half of our dogs develop cancer. One third of our cats develop cancer. About one in five of our large spayed dogs becomes incontinent. Bladder problems in cats are so common that they support many cat-only practices. One in ten dogs that I see has severe allergies. More than half the dogs I see have painful arthritis, bothersome enough that they limp. Does this sound like health?

What’s food got to do with all this suffering? Well, our pets’ bodies are made from what they eat. If they eat great food, they’ll have healthier bodies.

Great food is not great advertising. Purina, Pedigree, Science Diet, and Hills have great advertising, but not good food. Prove this to yourself. Compare the ingredients of these foods with what your pet would eat if it were in the wild. Actually think about your pet’s genetics and what its ancestors ate for thousands of years.

Here’s an example: Yorkshire Terriers developed in Yorkshire England. Historically, that is, for thousands of years, Yorkies would have been fed beef, wheat, and barley but they would not have been fed fish, avocado and tomatoes because these foods are not native to England—the shipping of produce around the world has come only in the past few hundred years.

One of the aspects that develops over centuries is the DNA for digestive enzymes. Thus, our Yorkies naturally developed digestive enzymes that work best with the foods they normally received, such as beef. This is why offering Yorkie packaged foods with corn, fish, avocado, or soybeans is likely to produce a dog that is not optimally healthy.

Appetite is not the key to whether the food is good for a pet. Sure, a Yorkie may enjoy eating food with corn and soy but that doesn’t mean it’s good for your Yorkie to eat every day any more than eating at McDonalds every day is good for our kids.

We’ll cover more breeds and food issues in upcoming Caring for Pets blogs.