Bones for Behavioural Balance

Raw meat and bones offer more than physical health and longevity for our dogs, they offer amazing mental health and behavioural benefits too!

The answer to why lies in the gut, our dog’s most underrated organ.

The gut plays host to so many beneficial bacteria and chemicals that are essential for self-control, energy, balance of mood, happiness, motivation, trainability and contentment - this can affect a dog’s mood via the link between gut and brain rather than exclusively via the bloodstream.

Knowing that gut influences mood brings diet into the spotlight when it comes to behaviour therapy, highlighting the need for holistic behaviour practitioners. Gastroenterology (a branch of science devoted to this gut-brain link) describe this fabulous organ as ‘the second brain’.

If you ever get that ‘gut feeling’, ‘butterflies in your tummy’ or unease that begins in the ‘pit of your stomach’ then this has more basis in science than you may realise.

The form that a food takes dramatically influences mood, feelings and actions - behaviour itself!

Behaviour is a result of both internal and external factors, working together in harmony.

Hormones and neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that do all sorts or fabulous things inside our dog’s body. One of which is creating feelings.

Feelings result in mood, and mood results in behaviour, which feeds back information based on outcome and creates more chemical messengers. These chemicals create feelings and mood which feedback further information to the brain and result in further chemical release, which creates feelings, and mood and behaviour...well you get the idea.

Physical behaviours and emotions are part of a cycle that drive each other and are inextricably linked.

This process is known as biofeedback and is a natural way of creating balance, regulating stress and excitement, allowing a dog to respond appropriately to threats, promoting behaviour that offers a reward – internally or externally.

Biofeedback promotes survival based on environmental information on conflict, famine, threats, availability of prey or presence of predators through altering the inner state.

When addressing a dog’s behaviour, focusing on the result is just one small way of changing behaviour patterns… focusing on the physical action doesn’t address the emotion beneath directly.

The chemicals that influence mood.

Let’s examine the gut and what occurs beneath the fur - beyond the visible signs of aggression, restlessness, fear or phobia. Diet plays a huge part here and raw feeding is the gold standard. This natural diet promotes gut health and offers plenty of ‘storage space’ for the following chemicals, each with their own associated benefits.

• Opiates which are responsible for happiness

• Dopamine which motivates

• Acetyl chloride for memory and concentration

• Endogenous benzodiazepines are tranquilising

• GABA counters activity and relaxes

One superstar opiate-like substance found amply within the gut is serotonin.

Somewhere in the region of 90% of a dog’s serotonin - this is responsible for balance of mood amongst other things – is found hanging out in the epithelium of the gut.

Looking at this list of attributes it’s clear why a dog lacking these chemicals struggle with balance of mood, excitability, inability to settle, stress, depression, memory problems and focus.

These chemicals work together, along with others, to create an adaptable, trainable, calm, focussed, happy, relaxed and eager to please dog-at-his-best.

These important roles can only occur efficiently however if the epithelium is healthy, and this relies largely on beneficial bacteria and some cool little finger-like projections called villi.

The secret to supporting these friendly bacteria and villi is acidic conditions

Low digestive pH is the best way to wipe out harmful bacteria and set the friendly bacteria up for success.

If the pH of the gut is at the optimum low level, then healthy bacteria can flourish whilst villi regenerate and thrive.

This is bad news for damaging bacteria because their optimal pH is much higher. Acidic conditions are inhospitable to them, and the now extensive colony of super-hero friendly bacteria can crowd them out.

Meat and bone in their natural state promote optimal conditions

The domestic dog is of the order Carnivora and the dentition and jaw, as well as musculature is designed to tear, crunch and swallow. The gut is short and perfectly geared towards digesting meat at a low pH (acidic) and the saliva in the mouth contains no amylase essential for breaking down carbohydrate.

The dog’s body is perfectly geared towards tearing off huge pieces of meat and swallowing them whole without much mechanical action or breaking down of the food via enzymes in the mouth - this then leaves the stomach and gut to do the majority of the hard work playing a major active role in the digestive process.

This is a great design of nature because the action of digesting appropriate food has all sorts of benefits beyond accessing nutrients.

The stomach stretches with large quantities of high moisture meat and bone, it is forced to work hard to break down the food through grinding it up - releasing acid on an as-needed basis as it does so.

This acid release is thanks to the wrinkly gastric folds that line the stomach, these folds are known as rugae and allow the stomach to expand, grind, produce acid and digest raw foods.

This is how the magic happens!

How does kibble compare?

Kibble tends to include carbohydrates in large quantities, it is processed at high temperatures and comes in the form of cooked, dry, compact pieces – the exact opposite of what the dog is designed to digest.

Although adaptation towards scavenging has allowed our dogs to tolerate carbohydrate in times of deficit (think starvation and digging for roots!) this isn’t a great way to nourish the body – it’s a short-term emergency survival strategy at best! The biggest problems this food replacement poses are to the digestive system, and the second brain the dog relies on so heavily...

When we feed kibble, the gut becomes flaccid and lazy and presents as sensitive. Not only is kibble already cooked and simple to process – it is also comparatively smaller in volume due to a lack of moisture and as a result the stomach doesn’t fill and stretch as it is designed to do, its gastric folds don’t get a chance to do their thing!

As acid is now released inadequately thanks to the pre-processed food - the pH of the body rises and the gut becomes weak, the epithelium is damaged, may become leaky, and harmful bacteria runs amok.

But I feed a super-expensive high protein kibble this is OK right?

Nope! Certainly not from a behaviour perspective…

High protein processed diets can often exacerbate nervousness, fear, aggression and hyperactivity. This is perhaps in part due the mechanism of the essential amino acid tryptophan.

Forget gut serotonin for a minute and let’s look to brain serotonin. We know the best place to promote serotonin is in the gut, right? But if the gut is unhealthy due to processed foods what then?

Tryptophan is essential for making brain serotonin, so in times of deficit when a dog is forced to scavenge lower protein foods the brain steps up. If we offer high protein foods in the form of emergency rations however, tryptophan is forced to compete for access to the brain as other large amino acids shove it aside to gain priority access. In a high protein diet tryptophan is crowded out in the struggle for entry which can makes brain serotonin scarce.

We now have a dog that has a confused digestive system.

Is he digging for roots or is prey plentiful? The composition is that of an animal – high protein, but the mechanism to break it down is akin to emergency scavenging behaviour…

High protein processed diets are thought to exacerbate aggression, restlessness, territorial behaviour and general nervousness in dogs for this reason.

Interestingly, dogs with poor serotonin availability tend to be more of a challenge in the hours of darkness as the body just can’t cope when it’s tiny reserve of serotonin is sacrificed to make melatonin. Melatonin is produced from serotonin to promote onset of sleep when the sun goes down - so if your dog’s mood is unbalanced at this time the natural serotonin promotion is probably a major player in any programme designed to improve behaviour.

It’s no small coincidence that dominance aggression and idiopathic aggression are described as being more problematic at night.

Body and mind are two sides of the same coin!

There is no question that the body and mind are a double act, and the star of the show must be the dog’s amazing gut.

Much of the time we focus on visible behaviours and forget to address the emotional precursors that guide them, when we do, we are missing the larger picture.

In focusing only on the symptom, we can inadvertently work against our goals through punishing behaviours that the dog has little control over, stamping out those that represent a coping strategy designed to balance mood, or through rewarding a preferable physical behaviour whilst inadvertently generalising and encouraging the very feelings that drive the unwanted.

The solution to behaviour problems begins with laying the foundations of raw and fresh nutrition.

Feeding a natural diet ensures that the gut is actively involved, and that the body is healthy. Therefore, we see amazing success through implementing raw feeding or fresh feeding into a programme of modification.

If the body is healthy, nourished properly and free of pain and disease then we can reassure ourselves that no pain, discomfort or inflammation can affect mood and hamper training. Frustration and stress cannot develop as readily, and we can be certain that the chemicals required for positive change are present and ready for action.

Your dog not only needs to understand what you want, but he needs to be capable of doing it!

As with all holistic intervention raw feeding targets the root cause rather than the stand-alone symptoms, it offers so much more than the sum of the parts;

• Lower inflammation lessens pain. Pain and discomfort cause production of stress hormones that make a dog ‘ready for conflict’ which can factor into aggression problems. This is also picked up by other dogs and can make your dogs relationships suffer as a result.

• Increased energy is balanced by better focus, concentration, memory and self-control - and therefore we see better trainability

• Endorphin production is boosted through the mechanical action of chewing bones. Bones also contain the minerals to support a stressed dog, of which bioavailable magnesium is a key player.

• Better organ health, less endocrine imbalance throughout the body and lower instance of behavioural issues as a result.

• Higher muscle mass increases confidence hormones, often vital for neutered dogs in stabilising mood (as well as joints!)

• Improved immune function, no atopy, stress or illness means a happy relaxed dog

• Healthy scent glands which are essential for social communication

So, if your dog’s behaviour is getting you down consider this;

Is his gut healthy enough to enable him to do what you’re asking of him, or are you working against your goals by feeding a diet that sets him up to fail before he’s even begun?

Julia Langlands ACFBA