Dr. Judy Morgan 0:00
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Judy Morgan, and my guest today is Carol Smeja, and we are going to talk about time to rethink your pet's feeder. Is it helping or hurting your pet's health and well being? Dr. Carol pioneered the scientific study of the importance of how we feed our pets. She applied her extensive research and diagnostic training in understanding the eating behaviors of our dogs and cats by studying the natural and instinctive behaviors of their ancestral roots. She volunteers at zoos and works with wildlife professionals to pursue additional knowledge on pets' dietary needs and feeding behaviors. She enjoys speaking at professional events and organizations to educate pet parents on the importance of how you feed your pets to improve their health and well being. Thank you for being my guest today.
Carol Smeja 1:00
Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:06
So I don't know how long ago we got involved with this new way of feeding pets. I think it's been a couple of years now, and it's really it was kind of mind blowing for me at the beginning, and then after I learned about the science behind it, it makes perfect sense. And I have to say that all of my cats and dogs now eat this way. It's really fun. Well, it's really fun to watch how they eat differently and to really see the difference that it makes so we want to. I'm going to kind of let you run with this, and I may, I may jump in occasionally with a question, but let's talk about what you saw when you were studying how animals eat and how that evolved into a different way to feed them. And we're not talking about pet ingredients as much as we're talking about how we're feeding them.
Carol Smeja 2:03
right? And it's so interesting, because when you think about healthy eating, the one thing pet parents don't really think about is how you're serving them. And when you think that in the wild, they spent 95% of their time, hunting, tracking, foraging, looking for prey, and all of a sudden, we sort of consolidated that into what's become a minute, minute and a half of eating, if We're lucky, and we've taken away their whole lifestyle. And so if there's one thing I'd like to communicate today, it's before you even think about the food, before you even spoon anything out into a feeder. The first thing you have to think about is, what am I using to serve the food on? And if we can communicate that that would be great, because it does make a significant difference. It can impact whether they eat, okay, the finicky eaters, those who refuse it, can impact how they eat. So many pets eat fast, at a fast rate and a lot of volume, and that causes regurgitation, choking, food bloat, gdv. It can also impact nutrient absorption. Okay, are there enough enzymes to go at that food, to absorb those nutrients? And even their approach to eating? It's sort of like, Are they aggressive? Are they anxiety ridden? Are they fear driven? But all of these come into play because they all impact healthy eating. And like I was, I was so impressed that you said you have looked at how it's changed how your dogs are feeding, because it's one thing pet parents don't do. When I talk to different groups, I say spend five minutes watching your dog. Is he enjoying it? How is he moving around it? Is he engaging with the food? Is there interaction with the food? And all of these things are really important to get back to that natural eating dynamic.
Dr. Judy Morgan 4:24
absolutely. So a couple of things that I know from looking at feeding the way we're going to talk about versus feeding in a bowl. So cats don't like their whiskers to touch anything. So even cats are not big drinkers. So I've always said, make sure that you have a wide enough bowl that when they put their head in there to drink, their whiskers aren't hitting the side. There's actually a thing called whisker fatigue. But the other thing is, if I have a lot of very short faced dogs, so when their face. Is down in a bowl eating, they can't see who else is around them. And same with cats, like when their face is straight down in a bowl, they can't see and they get very concerned about who's going to come steal my food. And especially I have a clowder of cats and a pack of dogs, so some are more aggressive with their eating than others, and those who are a little more shy with their eating, they if they can't see who's coming to come get their food, they don't even eat because they're just like, I don't know who's coming after me because they can't see it. So the way that they're all fed now, they know exactly where everybody else is, and they're so funny, because I have a couple that dance all the way around. They're, they're, they're feeding... It's so cool. It is so cool to see how they eat. So, so I'm going to let you talk about what you noticed in the zoo animals, and how we're going to change how we're feeding.
Carol Smeja 6:01
Well, you know, I often tell people, if you want to see how wolves and wild cats truly eat in the wild, go to a carcass feeding at a zoo, you will be amazed at how much time there is in tearing apart the carcass, licking the bones, you know, going through the organ meat, it's a very intricate process, and so by putting things in a bowl, like you said, What are you basically doing? You're asking your dog to put their snouts into this food goes up their nostrils, and the mucous membrane in there dries out then because the food is stuck in there, and then they can't smell at all, which creates another problem altogether. So and with cats, the whisker fatigue. The whiskers are embedded three times deeper than fur is, and when anything hits into there, those vibrations go deep down into the cat's lower level, and those sensory elements sort of go on alert, and it literally can become painful to them. It's almost like an aversion. So again, understanding those elements become very, very important. And I think another element that I'd like to communicate is while we look at feeders from our perspective, the most important thing is to look at it from their perspective. Our dogs evolved from wolves. Their closest ancestor is the gray wolf. And domestic cats, their closest common relative is the North African southwest Asian wildcat, and all of them have similarity of DNA about 95%-96% so a lot of their physiology is very, very similar. And what we forget is, while wolves, wolves were in the wild, they did carcass feeding, that tearing apart, that interaction, that sort of intimate involvement with the feeding process. What happened as settlers came in, we then gave them scatter feeding, where they sort of drifted away from the carcass, and now they're in our homes with the bowl feeding, okay, which represents a whole different set of challenges, because we designed this from our point of view, and the same thing exists for wild cats. They came into our house basically when grain started to be stored. They needed cats to kill the rodents, to protect the grain. So again, we domesticated them, brought them in and got them feeding from a bowl. But when you look at carcass feeding, it is a very involved process, engaged in the food, interacting with the food, and everything about feeders is designed to consolidate to make it more convenient for us, as well as to make it more difficulty. So we have all these obstacles hitting into them, and that's not what their feeding environment, natural feeding environment was about at all. So when you look at their sensory circuit. Their sensory circuit was designed to not only protect their food, but also to assess it and to get involved in it, to select that food. And for example, just starting out basically Dogs and cats see with their noses. Their world is involved in that dogs have over 100 million scent sites, and it can go up to 300 million for hound dogs and like also cats, have over 100 million scent sites. So when you're feeding from a bowl, you're basically crushing all the food in there. They can't smell anything. And so it's sort of like saying, why bother? Just inhale this. There's no interaction whatsoever. And when you think about it, just just to help the audience understand, dogs can smell 10,000 times better than we can. They can literally smell a half a teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic sized pool. So honoring, honoring their nose becomes a very important part of who they are, and 40% of their brain is attributed to decoding scents. Okay, so that means that nose has to be involved in the food, and we can't consolidate it into a fast food container. Again, that's from our perspective. That's what I see a lot of this being about. Also, another sensory component is hearing. They can hear at much higher frequencies and hear much longer distances than us. And we actually have a wolf at the zoo who will start howling, and about six or seven minutes later, this particular siren goes by, and their ability to hear is so far superior to ours, we don't, we don't even know what they're hearing at all. It's unbelievable. And for cats, they actually have 32 muscles in each ear, and it acts it goes at 180 degrees. So they they have, like a radar for their hearing, where they can detect potential threats again while they're eating. There's a lot going on with their hearing that we don't even recognize, but it impacts the feeding experience.
Dr. Judy Morgan 12:34
Well, sure, because you know, you've always got to worry about who's who's going to come eat you while you're trying to eat, what you're eating. We need to take a quick we need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about how we're going to feed our pets differently.
PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT 12:49
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Dr. Judy Morgan 13:56
Welcome back. You're listening to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host. Dr, Judy Morgan, my guest today Dr Carol Smeja, is talking about how we feed our pets, not what we feed our pets, but how we feed our pets. So we've been talking about the evolution and the extraordinary sensory circuit of our pets in the feeding process, as far as their sense of smell being so incredibly much better than ours and hearing and so this definitely has an impact, how what, what vessel we feed them in, is going to impact all of their senses? So Carol will go back to you and you can carry on.
Carol Smeja 14:42
Okay, okay, well, we'll cover just a couple more senses before we go into really looking at feeders. Another thing is their vision. Their both dogs and cats are nearsighted, but they have more rods than cones, and the importance of this is that they have superior night sight ability as well as motion detection. So when you're asking them to stick their head into a container and that food is moving around and bouncing around, that can create a lot of fear as well. Just realize that the way we see and the way they see are entirely different again, and another important thing is taste and this is one thing that will probably surprise people. They have few taste buds. Okay, we have 9 million, dogs have 1700 taste buds. Cats have 470 so when you're talking about their food, they're not they don't taste it necessarily so much with their taste buds as they do with their sense of smell. And cats in particular, have very sensitive noses. They have 30 V1R receptors, and those receptors help them differentiate between different foods so they can smell and differentiate between what they're eating. Dogs only have nine, and we only have three. So again, that that, yeah, that sense of smell becomes very prominent, even for cats, which is like, which is why they like very aromatic foods, basically. So when you look at their sense of smell, how they hear things, their vision, their taste, it all creates a picture that we need to think about more carcass-like feeding, where we give them the ability to interact with their food and to use all of these components together for more relaxed, calm, eating environment, but also one where they can select the food and make decisions about food selection.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:14
Very cool. So, so what are we going to feed them on if we're not feeding in bowls?
Carol Smeja 17:22
Thank you for asking. That's a great one.
Carol Smeja 17:26
so basically, when you're talking about a bowl, the food is piled high. They can't sniff anything out. The sides are blocking their vision. They're hearing noises, but they have no peripheral vision that they can look to see what's going on, so it heightens anxiety, and this is why a lot of dogs refuse to eat out of the bowl, or they relocate their food, or just dump the food out of the bowl right where it is.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:55
You know, I never thought about that, because I used to have a lot of clients who would say, Well, my dog won't eat the food in the bowl. They take it out, they carry it into the other room, drop it on the carpet, and then they eat it. So that makes perfect sense now.
Carol Smeja 18:09
right? That's that's exactly why they do it, because there's heightened anxiety. Their peripheral vision is blocked, and especially, the worst place that you can feed your pet is in a corner. Okay? Because not only does the bowl block the peripheral vision, but the sides of the wall also block the peripheral vision, so the animal is sort of caged into this corner.
Dr. Judy Morgan 18:35
Interesting. and where does everybody put their bowls? the bowls are always in a corner or up against a wall because they have to be out of the way, or they're tucked under something, oh, oh, it makes perfect sense,
Carol Smeja 18:50
exactly, exactly. But also, I want to talk about the lick type mats that are out there as well. Again, it's created to slow animals down from our perspective, not from their perspective. And what happens when you have these projectiles that are hiding food in corners? What happens is the dog can smell the food, but they can't get to it because their tongues can't fit into those areas. So what happens is obsessive compulsive licking, which leads to great frustration, and that creates a really big problem then. So the most important thing to do is when your dog is eating off of those sorts of things, if there is obsessive compulsive licking, kind of pull back from that, because it can lead to aggressive behavior and problems with digestion as well. the nose knows and Don't Let food be hiding. Everything should be within the availability of the dog's tongue so they can get the food out of there. yeah, yeah. And, and the thing is, it's again, if people observe their cat or dog eating off of what they're serving now, these are the behaviors you'll sort of become aware of. Observation gives you great insight into your pet's behavior. So for slow feeders, one of the issues with those is the it all projects outward, and so when that happens, it hits into their noses, and their noses are very sensitive, and because they see with their noses, it's actually sort of a punitive way to feed your pet, because that constant pounding can swell the mucus glands, and that can create a more painful experience, where they don't want to engage in eating either. So when you start to look at feeding from a more natural perspective, that's why we basically developed the Pet Platter, and basically what it does is allows for carcass feeding. It allows 360 degree view and movement, and this allows the pet to see exactly what's going on, so it reduces any anxiety and fear that somebody's going to come in and swoop the food off the platter. Um, also, because the food is spread out across the platter, they're able to select to smell and sniff what they want to eat, first, second and third, much like they did in the wild, starting with the organ meat, the richest parts of the carcass and then the divots in here promote positive licking. Both the large and the small Pet Platters were designed so the pet's tongue could fit into these divots, as well as the bridge around it, so they can literally get every speck of food in there.
Dr. Judy Morgan 22:23
Mine will stand there for 20 minutes licking out every because I to slow them down, because they literally it would be gone in 10 seconds. I smear it into those little divots and into the bridge. And again, with the short faced dogs, it's a lot of work for them to get their tongue in there and lick out every one of those little divots, but it means that they're not gulping their food. So I'm not getting reflux and I'm not getting regurge, and it takes everybody so long to lick out their their platter that they're not worried about what the guy next to him is doing, because I have five they all eat. Well, four out of the five eat in the same area. The other guy is bigger and eats faster, so he's in his own room. But, you know, they all, they all are taking their time. And then the really funny thing is, after everybody finishes, I leave the platters on the floor, and they're in the middle of the room. I leave them on the floor. Everybody goes out to go potty when we open the door for them to come in. One of them just got injured the other day because everybody was trying to squeeze through at the same time. But they all run in. Everybody races, races back to the feeding room to go lick the platters some more, because that's just a cool game. And there might, there might just be that little, itty bitty, tiny piece of something that somebody left behind
Carol Smeja 23:49
that's great, but that's what we want them to do. It's it that's basically positive licking. It's relaxed, it's enjoyable, and the Pet Platter actually becomes a friend. The pet bonds with it, and they go to it during the day to say, Gee, did I leave anything there? Or did my, you know, Mom, leave anything extra on the Pet Platter? So it's, it's sort of a platter of solace when they're alone or need some, you know, good feeling. Go visit your platter and get that extra lick in.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:25
Oh, man, I picked their platters up, wash them and leave them in this, the drainer in the sink
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:32
I guess I should leave them down all day. Well, you know what? My bigger one? He's only a 30 pounder, but he steals everything. And I swear, if I leave them down, he's going to be carrying platters around the house.
Carol Smeja 24:51
I think I'm going to have to hire him.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:55
You know what? I'm going to try that. I'm going to try leaving them down and see if he's carrying. Them around the house, because he's always looking for something that he can steal. And I would like him to steal that because it's pretty indestructible.
Carol Smeja 25:06
Yeah. Well, and if you're going to leave during the day, feel free to put down food, and they'll come and visit it during the day and say, Wow, I didn't know this was here. So it almost becomes a game during the day. Is there anything that's going to be left? And if people are suffering from separation anxiety, if the pet just I had one vet who contacted me who got a rescue the dog would tear the apartment apart after she left, just such severe separation anxiety. So I told her, get a sort of friendly almond butter, pet friendly almond butter. Spread it across there, leave it in the middle of the room and see what happens. And lo and behold, she came back. The dog was sound asleep right by the platter, and the house wasn't destroyed. All that positive licking sort of relaxed and calmed the dog down, and she never had a problem again. So that positive licking is a real potent force if you have a dog with any sort of issues.
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:21
Very, very cool. I can't believe we just blew through our time like nobody's business. So I just want to put Carol you have a lot of information. We got to do this again. So Carol is available. Dr. Carol is available through [email protected] because she will do personal consultations, like she did for that veterinarian who was having problems with separation anxiety. So if you're having feeding issues, and also if you want to schedule her as a speaker, she loves to share knowledge. And the Pet Platters are available at several, many retail outlets, including DrJudyMorgan.com so if you want to click on them and see what they look like, or go to MinePetPlatter.com they are. They have made a big difference for my own animals. My clowder of cats love their platters. It's really cool to see them all gathered around. We there's usually seven cats that eat together. So we have like, two or three platters that we're spreading their food over, but everybody eats next to each other with no problems. And it would be very different if we were trying to put food in bowls and have people have pets fighting over the bowls. So So Carol, thanks for all you do. Thanks for the research. You know, it's I don't think Well, I know that most people don't think about how we feed their pets. We're also worried about getting the right nutrition in the feeding utensil that we you know, kind of forget about how we're feeding them. And I never thought about it, frankly, until I first met you and the Mine Pet Platter. So thank you very much for all that you do, and thank you for being my guest.
Carol Smeja 28:00
Thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure, and thank you for all you do as well.
Outro
Thanks for listening to another great Naturally Healthy Pets episode. Be sure to check out the show notes for some helpful links. And if you enjoy the show, please be sure to follow and listen for free on your favorite podcast app. We value your feedback and we'd love to hear from you on how we're doing. Visit DrJudyMorgan.com for healthy product recommendations, comprehensive courses, upcoming events and other fantastic resources. Until next time, keep giving your pet the vibrant life they deserve.
DISCLAIMER
The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. It is no substitute for professional care by a veterinarian, licensed nutritionist or other qualified professional. You're encouraged to do your own research and should not rely on this information as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Dr. Judy and her guests express their own views, experience and conclusions. Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets neither endorses or opposes any particular view discussed here.