Viva Pets, the pet food store that cares.

The ad campaigns can make it look so easy: you take out your pet’s food and you see their ears perk up. You place it in the bowl and set it down lovingly in front of your animal as they sit in polite anticipation. They immediately begin to feast as you stand back with a smile… life is so easy! While some of us luck out with food-motivated animals who would take a bowl of food over the oxygen they breathe, things don’t always go that smoothly. Feeding a picky dog or cat can feel defeating at times. You wish they could comprehend just how much time, money and effort you spend on their diet, only to have them look back at you, somehow offended by your offering in front of them. Three considerations can really improve this dynamic and make meal time more enjoyable for everyone involved: what you feed, when you feed, and how you feed. First off is always going to be what you feed. A rotational raw food diet will pique your pet’s interest more than any bag of dry food. The same food day after day is boring enough for us; now just imagine having an even better sense of smell and taste, only to be let down with bland, ultra-processed kibble. Not only is it more nutritious, but when your pet eats raw it’s extremely easy to rotate brands, proteins, and textures before they get picky. Every day they will be excited to see what’s in their bowl this time. You can make use of various toppers to increase palatability such as freeze-dried tripe from K9 Natural, bone broth (like from Nature’s Logic and Primal), powdered goat milk with various extras from Happy Days, and functional flavour shakers from Crumps and Northwest Naturals. Great around-the-house options include adding some warm water to their wet or dry food (more moisture is always good), or adding a raw chicken, duck or quail egg (the shell too, if you can smash it up a bit). Our quail eggs from Big Country Raw are a hot seller. Secondly, when do you feed your pet? I don’t just mean the time on the clock, but what activities are happening around mealtime? If you’re in a hurry to get out the door to work as you put down their dish, they might be more interested in what the commotion is than eating their food. Hunting instincts run deep in their DNA. They are wired to track, chase, kill, and ultimately feast. By this logic, you might find success in taking your dog for a walk, followed up with a little chase or tug. This will emulate the actions of hunting for prey and making a kill, and will naturally stimulate the desire to feast. And finally, how do you feed your pet? Setting the dish down unceremoniously might leave your dog or cat feeling uninspired to dig in. You want there to be a feeling of motivation or energy so they can’t wait to start eating. A little anticipation will get the digestive juices flowing. Another option is to make meal time a game and have them find their food. Hide their dish in the yard, behind a door, or up on a scratch tower or other pet-friendly surface. Using their senses to find it will make it feel extremely rewarding when they finally find the jackpot. Snuffle mats and slow-feeder bowls (like ours from Outward Hound) will also encourage creativity and help slow down fast eaters. For my dogs, I make them sit and stay before I even put their dishes down. Then we go through 3-4 random tricks back and forth. Finally they maintain eye contact with me until I give them the “release” command so they can start eating. And if you can train your cat to do this too, please let us know how! Give these suggestions a shot with your picky eaters, and just remember to keep it interesting and have some fun with it. You can do it! Much love, Jordan and Xaler Jordan has over six years of experience in the pet nutrition retail industry, and over ten years of experience raw feeding his rescue dogs. His dogs Kai and Xaler are never happier than when they’re running in deep snow or splashing in the North Saskatchewan River.

We here at Viva Pets take the responsibility of choosing a healthy diet for your dog or cat seriously. And if you're reading this, you're likely of the same mindset! Our pets cannot read the labels and make informed decisions for themselves, so it's up to us to make the best choices we can on their behalf. So how do you identify a good frozen raw food? Ingredients are a great place to start. Whether you're feeding a frozen/freeze-dried raw diet, a dry kibble, or anything in between, a high meat content is extremely important. A well-balanced raw food should have about 5% liver and another 5-10% other organs (think heart, kidneys, lung, spleen, and pancreas). Ground bone content should be around 10% of the meal, or supplemented with eggshell, calcium carbonate, or citrate if using a bone-free diet. A well-balanced raw diet should have about 10-15% fruits and vegetables for dogs, but only about 2-3% for cats. Some of the best you will see might include blueberries, cranberries, apples, broccoli, kale, leafy greens, and kelp. These inclusions will add a variety of fibre to the diet (which helps to move food through the GI tract, in addition to acting as prebiotics that feed the probiotics in their gut). Fruits and vegetables will also offer important vitamins and minerals that will round out the nutrient profile of the main meat protein. Lastly, to really be considered a balanced diet, try to include a steady supply of omega fatty acids from either fish diets or toppers (think salmon, sardines, or mackerel), or add fish oil added to the meal (salmon, pollock or algae oil).

Green tripe. If you have had a conversation with one of us here at the store, there is a good chance we have brought it up in one way or another. Kibble feeder? Feed tripe. Picky eater? Feed tripe. Having GI issues (diarrhea or constipation)? Feed tripe. Kidney disease? Feed tripe. We are even starting to learn about how beneficial it is to growing animals in the prevention of the dreaded ruptured ACL. How can this one ingredient be so beneficial in so many different situations? We will get into that below, but first lets make sure we are all clear on what green tripe is. Green tripe comes from ruminating animals; these are animals that graze, such as cows, sheep, bison and venison. These animals have more than one stomach, to aid in digestion. Green tripe is the stomach and the contents of the stomach from those animals. The most common one you will find in both pet specialty stores and in grocery stores is beef tripe. However, they are very different from one another. Tripe for human consumption has been washed, bleached and scalded; all of the benefits have been destroyed. “Green” tripe does not typically refer to the color, as it is usually brownish but instead to the state we feed it; untouched, uncleaned, raw and as fresh as possible. It still has all of the roughage (grasses & feed) that the cow had ingested before being sent to slaughter. All of the digestive enzymes and stomach juices that were present to aid the cow in its own digestion are still present. When it comes to green tripe, you want to feed it as fresh as possible, to retain all of the nutritional benefits. In store for example, we have a variety of frozen green tripe options, some ground up finely, some left whole but cubed into convenient feeding portions. We also have freeze-dried tripe, which can be sprinkled on top of food dry as a meal topper, or rehydrated. There is canned tripe, and some of the kibble options we carry even have tripe in the ingredients. Adding tripe to your pet’s meal is great, but not all tripe is equal. All forms of tripe make your pets food more palatable. All forms of tripe can be used as a source of fiber. But that is where the similarities end. Tripe that has been cooked, dehydrated or freeze-dried is lacking many of the important nutrients we want to feed, the digestive enzymes, not to mention the moisture. The benefits : Green tripe contributes beneficial prebiotics to your animal's gut, which helps to establish a healthy microbiome. The probiotics that should be present in your pet’s gut require constant nourishment to stay healthy and thriving, which is what we want. The higher an animal's probiotic count in their gut is the less likely that harmful bacteria, such as e. Coli and Salmonella are to move in and cause damage. It is literally dripping with digestive enzymes; our animals, for one of many reasons, may require the addition of digestive enzymes to aid in their gut health. These enzymes are proteins that help an animal to properly break down food in their stomach, so that all of the nutrients from that meal can be extracted and used by your pet's body. Our pet’s can become enzyme deficient over time, due to their diet being cooked or processed. Their bodies use up their store of these enzymes and then they are not replenished with enzyme rich food sources, so less and less are available to aid your pet in digestion. If your pet is dealing with chronic pancreatitis, or EPI or another similar digestive disease, they would benefit from the addition of green tripe to their diet. It can aid in preventing environmental allergies. As ruminating animals are often fed a variety of different grasses, these allergens are being introduced in a semi-digested manner to our pet’s. This behaves similarly to us getting an allergy shot; little by little, over an extended period of time we are introduced to allergens, until we stop reacting to them. Feeding tripe on a regular basis will introduce very small amounts of pollen to your pet’s system, which in time will help their body to regulate its response when it comes into contact with pollen in the environment. Fiber; you know it, I know it, the doctor has probably brought it up to many of us at least once before. Our pet’s (mostly dogs, as cats are obligate carnivores, though they benefit from fiber in their senior years) require fiber for the same reason we do: to keep everything moving nicely down there. When we are introduced to an animal with food intolerances, we almost always recommend they go on a raw elimination diet that consists exclusively of meat, bone and organ from one protein source. This means that the pet parent needs to add in their own fiber. You can do that by adding pureed pumpkin (but not if your animal has had yeast issues in the past), steamed green vegetables or our favorite, green tripe. You will find all of the pre-digested fiber your pet needs in green tripe. It is a great source of fiber if you are trying to avoid starchy fruits and vegetables, like carrots, apples and pears. It is considered to be a white meat, as it has a lower concentration of myoglobin. That makes it more tolerable to pets with red meat sensitivities. It is high in a variety of vitamins and minerals, one of which is manganese. This mineral and the lack of natural sources in our animals diet is one of the main contributing factors to ACL injuries. Manganese is crucial in the development and maintenance of collagen, which in turn supports soft tissue, which supports joints. Manganese has many other functions, which we will touch on in later posts. It can be fed to pets in renal (kidney) failure; as our animal's kidneys begin to decline, we have to be cautious about what they are eating as the kidneys struggle to keep up their job of filtering, and certain minerals, such as phosphorus, are extra hard to process. This leads to inflammation and pain. Many of us know, an animal in pain is an animal that is not interested in eating. Green tripe has a perfect 1:1 ratio of calcium to phosphorus, and this low content of phosphorus is extra gentle on an animal's digestive tract. Plus, it can trigger the appetite of almost any animal, whether they are feeling well or not. Raw green tripe that hasn’t been ground is one of nature's best sources of dental floss; give your pet a chunk of tripe and you have given them mental stimulation combined with all that stringy matter to gnaw on, that will help increase blood flow to the gums and remove leftover food from between the teeth. The cons: You should start slow when introducing green tripe to your pet. Too much at once could lead to diarrhea. It is recommended to start with anything from a teaspoon to a tablespoon per meal, depending on the size of your pet. Once you know that a certain amount agrees with their digestion, you can then increase that amount. A pet parent can feed tripe daily, a couple times a week or as a treat a few times a month. The only note to make is that it is not a fully balanced diet. Never feed your pet exclusively green tripe, as they will likely become deficient in other ways over time. It’s stinky. There is no way to beat around the bush with this one. It smells pretty foul to us humans. However, once pet parents start feeding green tripe to their animals and they get to see first hand all the benefits, most are willing to put up with the smell. After all, don’t we owe it to them to do whatever we can to keep our pets happy and healthy?