When is Senior Truly “Senior” With our Pets?

Did you know that parakeets can live twenty years or more? Cockatiels, thirty plus. For cats the world record as far as I know is fifty-six years old. Dogs can easily live twenty to thirty years. So why does your veterinarian and the pet food industry tell us that your pet is a senior at five or seven years of age?

If you stop and think about it, it actually protects their theory when any pet over this age is ill. If your dog passes at ten years old, your vet can say they lived out their whole life. But what is the truth?

First and foremost, pet food companies only formulate for your pet to live an average of seven years. That is the number of years they feel they are obligated to keep your pet alive. That’s not how long they will realistically stay healthy but they will be alive. Now your veterinarian and their animal hospital will most likely tell you to feed a specific food every day of their life. Would you only eat one food from birth to the grave? No! You need a diversified diet to maintain health.

The second part is that veterinarians are taking the advice of the pet food companies as gospel and also of the drug company representatives that propose that their drug was what extended your pets’ life to beyond age 7.

So, if your funny looking wolf can potentially live until twenty years plus in nature and your cat can live well over thirty years old, then what is wrong with your pet?

Let’s start with medical care. Every month you give your pet a dose of a sub-lethal dose of poison for heartworms, fleas, ticks or whatever, yes essentially, it’s still poison. How many doses before your body would start to break down? Now let’s add vaccines that actually attack the body’s immune system and again contain toxic poisons such as mercury and aluminum that over time will break down the body.

Now we feed an unnatural diet to an animal that by nature’s design was born to eat an animal-based diet and not a food consisting of only sugar producing carbohydrates. We know the perils of sugar-based diets but still blindly opt for pouring dry kibble out of a bag instead of real, species appropriate raw meat diets. Is it a matter of convenience or sheer ignorance?

Hip and joint problems, dental loss, hair loss and skin problems, loss of eye sight, and everything we associate with age is not really part of a normal aging process, but the accumulation of all these toxins and deficiencies.

My own mom passed at age forty-five. My dad was only sixty-six. This is not old age but the environment that mankind has created. We have also created it for our pets. When I was a kid and even working in college with a veterinarian, we never saw pets on a schedule and rarely saw them sick. We routinely saw injuries that were acute or emergency situations. There were no preventive drugs and vaccines were minimal.

We need to wake up. As we get older, our health becomes more of an issue and we must start to watch the foods we eat and even attempt more exercise. The truth is this, even the smallest adjustments to a less toxic lifestyle can give us and our pets many more years on our lives. No, your pet doesn’t walk as far because he now old. It is because he hurts. The body breaks down because it doesn’t have the proper nutrients to rebuild the cells that keep their bodies together. Food is life...let’s us all live it to the fullest!