BARF

BARF means Bones And Raw Food. It's the new diet my pets are on. All 5 of them.

We heard about BARF diet some time ago, investigated through and thought: why not?

BARF diet is about feeding your cats and dogs only raw food, including bones. It means feeding them raw chicken, raw beef, raw hearts and gizzards, raw fruits and vegs, raw eggs, raw fish and pretty much any raw meat you can come across. 

I know it might sound gross to some people but i mean, think about it for a minute. Your dog, before being a pet, before being a name, even before being a dog, is an ANIMAL. And a carnivorous one. What is natural for him/her to eat? Do you think if your dog was in the wild he'd eat cooked processed grinded canned food? Hell no he wouldnt. He would hunt some prey and eat it down the to the last bite.

Just like Lola did when one of the neighbor's chicken flew in my garden. Just like she did with a gigantic iguana, a crow and a rat. Just like my cats did with baby chickens, mice and even a pigeon. It's not gross, it's nature at work. 

Cats and dogs are MADE to eat smaller animals. They're predators. Their jaws can crush bones. Their body can process and digest them to. They're DESIGNED for it.

We've investigated quite a fair bit about it. When i ended up finding out what kibbles are made of, my stomach lurched. Sorry for the light hearted but if you have a pet, you might want to read the following. Factories that make pet food such as kibble, gather all the meat they can from anywhere they can. Which means it's the meat that is not suitable for men consumption, meat that has gone to waste, euthanized animals, sick animals and god only knows what else. In other words, your dog or cat eats dead or sick animals leftovers, along with all the lethal products that were used to kill them, along with the plastic bags they're dumped out with, the foam tray they come into and the collars or tags they wore when alive still. Then all that garbage is grinded, cooked to the point where the few nutrients left are gone and processed to become the dry disgusting food you feed your pet.

Would YOU eat this?

Damn right you wouldnt.

Then why would you make your pet eat that?

I now go to the butcher and to the fish merchant once a week. The food i'm feeding my pets costs me 3 times less than processed pet food. None of my 5 pets have had health issue over the transition to raw food. Even my cats are eating bones without any problem.

I'm not here to preach or try to convince you to change your ways. I'm just here to mention how much sense it makes to feed your beloved pets raw food if you think about it for 2 minutes. I'm also here to ask you one simple question:

What do you feed your pets with?

163 Litres

163 litres is the AVERAGE amount of Coke that an average Mexican drinks during a year. Which is, when you make the maths, about half a litre a day.

And i think that's scary.

It's scary in the sense that it's not only the Coke that's damaging of your health but everything you actually ingest with it: crisps, cookies, freid stuff, greasy stuff and a lot of wakala stuff.

But i'm not here to talk about this. Mexican people are generally fat and about (if they havent already) to surpass the American people for the sad record of obese people within the population. I've been living here 10 years and i'm not fat. Why? Because i exercise and dont drink soda over meals. There is no big secret. I also dont like greasy fried food (which helps too!!)

What i wanted to say, is that even though i havent been biking during 4 weeks, the second i started again, i bumped into the same people doing exercise in the morning (i bike through a pedestrian avenue where people go to run, bike, walk their dogs or just hang out). 

There is this young mother pushing her baby cart energically with weights on her ankle, this old lady walking super slowly but with that intense pain in her facial expression, this young dude who runs with a coat on and sweats like a pig, the housewives in their zumba classes, the girl with the pug wearing a cruz azul sweater (cruz azul that's a mexican soccer team), an old lady walking two gigantic dogs she can barely control, a show off dude doing push ups right in the middle of the path and a whole bunch of other people exercising that i see every single morning.

It just feels good to be back :)

It's Been A Month

During pretty much the entire month of December, i've been sick. My usual bronchitis/pneumonia/asthma crap that i tend to get every year around Christmas. But when you cough so hard and so much that you dont sleep anymore, you obviously dont let your better half sleep either, your entire body is like a gigantic pain and you have to get up at night to throw your gutts up, you know something is not right and that you need to get to the doc asap. 

And that's what i did. 

So i got my share of drugs, felt better after a week, worse 2 days after i stopped taking the drugs, went back to the doc, got another round of drugs to take, felt better again and then worse again. I was constantly feeling like i was drowning, i was out of breath, couldnt get up a 20 steps stairs without coughing my lungs out. I truly felt like a terminaly ill lung cancer patient.

So i decided it was high time to check it out with someone who's specialty is the lungs and i went to see my hot lung doctor. 

And he listened to what i told him and he told me one simple sentence: it's asthma. And i was like shit, then why the hell is my inhalor doesnt do its miraculous thing? 

I'll spare you the medical details but bottom line is, being an asthmatic, when i get a lung infection such as a cough, it triggers my asthma in a more or less intense way and that mini asthma attack can last up to 8 weeks. And no medicine but the asthma kind can so me any good. 

So here i am on steroids again and finally getting back on my bike to go to work. I had spent an entire 4 weeks going to work by bus cuz i couldnt even walk to the bus stop without coughing my lungs out, so there would have been no way i'd have make it to my office with a 25 minutes bike ride.

It felt so good breathing again normally that i actually RUN up the stairs with my bike on my shoulder. How bad ass is that??

 

Happy New 2012

January 29th, Happy New Year to you all. I'm a month late but there is not way the first post i'd write this year would be anything else but a happy new year one. So there, you have it.

And now, let's move on.