Functional Dog Treats Health Benefits for: digestion, joint care, skin & coat health
Functional treats are just a fancy name for dressing up healthy meat based dog treats. If we didn’t mess with a dogs natural and original diet, many of the issues they have would go away.
That is particular true of many digestion issues, however joint care and skin and health often need a lot of extra help because our dogs are living longer and breeding techniques often breed skin allergies into dogs.
In this article we look at how Functional dog treats, or healthy dog treats as we call them, can assist you in your specific dog health areas:
FUNCTIOINAL Dog Treats for Digestive Health
In reality, this is one of the major benefits of our healthy dog treat range.
Dogs evolved from wolves only 20,000 years ago and they retain almost the exact same digestive systems as the wolf, a 95% carnivore.
The most unnatural thing you can feed your dog is grains or vegetables because they are geared to catch meat, rip meat, eat meat. Commercial dog food is 70% grain or vegetables (often potato) and this involves crushing whole wheat or rice or similar, cooking it, extruding it, adding oil, sugar and salt to get your dog to eat this most unnatural substance.
Your dog might have perfect formed ‘mr whippy’ type stools, but it may also have grain overload, flatulence, and bad breath and teeth, all indicators that their food source is wrong.
The only thing as a raw feeder I do that is unnatural is add a little bit of very high fibre pellets to bring my dogs stools together. If I fed the whole of the animal I would not need to do this, but that isn’t always practical, or nice.
Some functional treats will be full of probiotics, prebiotics, chicory or beet pulp. But again if your dog is on a commercial dog food diet, all they need to help address the lack of meat in their diet is our meat based dog treats.
This will explain how wrong most dogs diets are. Having evolved from one of the greatest modern day carnivores HUMANS subjected them (DOGS) to eating a few vegetable scarps to save money. Over time commercial companies saw a great profit to be made of doing the same. This has now made this horrible practive main stream and accepted – even recommended by “vets”.
NOW, if you feed many commercial dog foods fed dogs, raw meat or even dried meat dog treats, their stomach will gurgle and they might have loose stools for a few days. This should shock everyone in the industry but it doesn’t as too many people make money off grain.
All you need to do when feeding your dog healthy dog treats for the first time is persevere in small batches until your dog’s stomach learns to process real natural food it was meant to eat.
Healthy dog treats as functional treats for JOINT CARE in dog
The main vet inspired and priced dog joint care products on the market have glucosamine and chondroitin in them. These are two of the major ingredients in our dried dog bones.
If you want to maximize the natural amount of glucosamine and chondroitin that your dog has access to, then you would do what I do and feed your dog shark cartilage on a daily basis. It, like green lipped mussels, also have a world of other amazing NATURAL chemicals in them that support the bone, cartilage health and the liquid between the bones.
If you are interested in natural dog joint care support before hooking your bank balance to your vet each month for life, please consider these articles:
Shark cartilage for dog joint support
Green lipped mussels for dog joint support
Functional treats for dog Skin and hair health
Many breeds of dogs can have congenital skin allergy issues. I own a poodle cross and he has had it from birth.
The reasons that they put Omega 6 into commercial dog food, is that its required by law if they are to call it ‘complete and balanced’. The problem is that Omega 3 isn’t required by aafco law, and its a vital catalyst for your dog to utilise the Omega 6.
Omega 3 from flax seed is low value in dogs, they only use a small percentage of it, so you need a fish source (or kangaroo) of Omega 3.
They don’t put fish source Omega 3 in dog food pellet bags very often because along with all that wheat they would need a truck load of preservative to stop it going rancid.
The shine you see on your dog’s coat is often from something like Sunflower Oil. This is a fine source of Omega 6 (about 60% of it is Omega 6 Oil) but you need proper Omega 3. You need an animal source of Omega 3. that is why we always recommend Our treats …
CONCLUSION
Joint care support of a dog at any age is vital to keep mobility and reduce the likelihood of future issues. Digestion is not only important to ensure that your dog is using the nutrients it eats, but also for bowel health and reduction of flatulence in the family home.
Their are infinite reasons why healthy meat based functional dog treats are vital to the health of your dog, and most commercial and convenience reasons why people buy supermarket treats full of grain and additives.
THIS is all your choice, now that you know the reason behind “functional dog treats”.