RMF is a new way of feeding dogs that takes their anatomy, physiology and biological history fully into account. It incorporates what we KNOW to be true about the needs of dogs, and disregards the self-serving pseudo-science that the commercial pet food industry has invented in order to sell its products. The best, most effective way to feed a dog is not to try and replicate a can of dog food! The pet food industry has been so successful at marketing themselves that people think copying them is the only thing that works! And the mistakes don’t end there. These can have devastating consequences on a dog’s health, just as commercial dog food does.

It is precisely because all dog and cat practitioners and health educators are so misguided and misdirecting that RMF came into being. If holistic and allopathic vets were already telling dog and cat owners how to REMOVE THE CAUSES of their animals’ diseases, there would have been no reason to develop RMF. RMF seeks to empower dog and cat owners with the independence to tweak and refine their dogs’ diets until the desired outcome is achieved. People who have this power find they have very little need for vets. Year after year, decade after decade even, dogs and cats just DON’T GET SICK when they are fed properly. RMF seeks to introduce dog and cat owners to a whole new way of approaching disease that cooperates with nature and sees her as an ally, not an enemy to be vanquished.

A dog’s body is made up of trillions of cells, each of which has a life cycle. They are born, live and die just like the organism itself. When old cells die and new ones are created, there is no place for the body to get building materials except from the food that comes in. If the food is sub-normal in any way, dysfunctional cells will be made. If the food aligns with what the organism has eaten throughout its biological history, healthy and normal cells will be made. That means the body as a whole will function as it is supposed to.

Those parts of the cell which cannot be recycled accumulate and need to be eliminated. This internally generated pollution is called “endogenous”. The type of waste that comes from the outside, primarily from food, is called “exogenous”. Dogs are easily able to handle normal endogenous waste in addition to that which is made up of the indigestible parts of the foods that are normal to them. However, their capacity for eliminating waste is easily exceeded when they are fed foods that are not efficiently and entirely digested. So wastes accumulate and are stored in fatty tissues, get eliminated through secondary avenues like the skin and ears (which causes symptoms), and constantly re-circulate throughout the body via the bloodstream, which accelerates cellular death, producing even more internal pollution.

The overall consequence is a condition known as “toxemia”, which is the root cause of all sickness. Disease is not an external entity that “attacks”, it is an internal process that the body initiates (via symptoms) in order to remain functional. It is the predictable and logical consequence of the failure of dog owners to put healthful conditions in place for their dogs, including, most importantly, the foods they are fed. Feeding mistakes are far and away the #1 cause of disease in dogs.

Domestication itself is responsible for a good deal of the confusion. For one thing, even though we know with a great deal of certainty what wild dogs eat, some of this information is simply not applicable to our dogs. But the good news is we still have more than enough information to guide us to a way of feeding that will allow our dogs to enjoy very high levels of health. Certainly higher even than what is typically experienced by many dogs currently, even raw fed dogs.

Domestic dogs are wolves on the inside, no matter how different they look on the outside. We didn’t create a new species when we domesticated dogs. Their ancestors have inhabited various parts of the earth for some 37 million years. During that time, they developed certain nutritional and biological requirements that suited both them and their environment symbiotically. These requirements are mostly still in place for our domestic dogs, and the parts that aren’t can be accommodated. For example, small dogs can’t eat the bones of large ungulates, but they can eat the bones of small animals like game hens and quail, and/or bones that are ground. Certainly, it behooves us and our dogs to apply as much of this information as we possibly can.

There is no basis for the argument that domestic dogs have “adapted” to the way they are fed today. Although wolf diets are exceedingly diverse and dogs have proven themselves to be supremely adaptable, normal anatomical and physiological adaptation to changes in a species’ food supply require hundreds of thousands of years, minimally. There simply hasn’t been enough time for dogs to adapt to the way they are fed today.

The vast epidemic of dog disease being suffered in the world today is sufficient proof of that.

Misfeeding causes both constructive sickness (like puppy diseases) and chronic, degenerative illness. Typically, disease first shows up when puppies are weaned onto inappropriate foods. Dogs that survive into adulthood eventually develop a tolerance for the unhealthy foods they are fed but tolerance always exacts a high price. That’s why they typically only enjoy a few sickness-free years before nature’s invoice arrives and degenerative problems begin, much like humans who eat junk food without major issues through their teens and 20s. For dogs and humans alike, midlife is the time when internal pollution finally accumulates to a level that manifests in organ dysfunction and/or failure.

To properly answer this question, it is helpful to consider the limitations of the veterinary industry. Veterinary medicine is a business. Its job is to make money for its practitioners, not to teach owners how to keep their dogs healthy. In fact, this kind of information is not even discussed in vet school. Rather, what vets learn are the methodologies that involve suppressing and covering up symptoms with drugs and herbs.

The harm of this kind of approach is never recognized or acknowledged, even by “holistic” vets. When a body is expressing a symptom, one of two things is happening – either the body is attempting to eliminate wastes via secondary channels OR organs have been compromised because of constant irritation from wastes and toxins in the bloodstream. In both cases, the underlying cause of the problem is too much WASTE in the body. That means adding a new toxin in the form of a “remedy” will only increase the level of waste, even if the remedy is “natural” or herbal.

It is the toxic substances in herbs that cause the body to cease its symptomatic expression in favor of eliminating the “remedy”. The original problem (underlying toxemia) will obviously be exacerbated, even though the original symptom itself might change or go away. Sometimes the additional harm is significant, if the chosen remedy happens to be particularly injurious to cellular life.

The palliation approach to disease is very popular. Not only does it fool dog owners into thinking their dogs’ problems have been “cured”, it is extremely profitable. How much money would vets make if they only concerned themselves with treating traumatic injury and teaching owners about the biological conditions that create health in dogs and cats? This would result in roughly 90% of their business evaporating. Selling disease as an inevitable fact of life that can’t be avoided or reversed and instead must only be “managed” creates lots of job security – for vets, pharmaceutical researchers, herb manufacturers, and many others.

Every time we dog owners choose to suppress a symptom rather than address its causes, the sick dog industry is empowered and disease is made worse. Since symptoms are only the result of complex chemical processes in the body, all it takes to get them to stop or change is to introduce a new chemical. The pharmaceutical and herbal industries have been hard at work for hundreds of years finding substances that create such an emergency in the body that it must divert its resources away from symptomatic expression.

The new symptoms that drugs and herbal remedies cause are euphemistically called “side effects”, like they are somehow a fair trade-off for the cessation of the original symptom. But the burden has only been shifted to another area of the body. It’s a big shell game. Just because the body has been chemically prevented from expressing the original symptom doesn’t mean disease has been resolved or “cured”. This is why symptoms always come back, in one form or another.

Thanks to the lure and profitability of the harmful palliation ideology, the veterinary and medical industries have amassed a great deal of power. That’s why their message is all we hear, not only from the practitioners themselves but also from virtually all other information and media outlets. Meanwhile, the truth about how and why disease really happens is available, if one knows where to look. And, as of this writing, it is still within our power to put this incredibly valuable and life preserving knowledge to work for us (although where human disease is concerned, medicine and government have partnered up to relieve us of our choices to an ever-increasing degree).

Inappropriate FOODS are the #1 source of uneliminated waste in a dog’s body. Once the source of extraordinary waste is stopped, the healing that is achievable can be truly miraculous. When you have a cut on your hand, nothing except time and giving it the proper conditions causes it to heal, assuming the factors which caused the injury have been discontinued. The same kind of healing happens inside the body when the causes of disease are removed, and there is NO drug or remedy which hastens this process.

It serves the interests of the dog disease industry to have us thinking that the health problems our dogs suffer are “incurable”. The truth is, there are actually very few illnesses that aren’t reversible through removal of cause. There are rare instances of disease where there is no other choice but to manage symptoms for the life of the dog. But this should be a last resort. Until a dog owner has removed absolutely every possible causal factor in the way the dog is fed and cared for, and then allowed sufficient time for healing to occur, s/he cannot conclude that the dog’s disease is not reversible.

Generally, young dogs recover quicker and more completely from disease once causes are removed, but it varies so widely that it’s impossible to predict how much healing your dog will experience or how long it will take. Even if a dog’s condition is not reversible, which is rare, it will not get worse if you remove the cause. The odds are much more in favor of major health improvements. There is no risk in trying!

I recommend a new program I call “Rotational Monofeeding“. It involves feeding different types of foods on different days. In their biological history, dogs have never had the opportunity to mix different types of foods before consuming them. Their stomachs have only one chamber, and therefore only one chemical environment can be created at a time. If foods requiring different digestive chemistries are eaten together, digestive fluids are neutralized and a greater percentage of the food becomes waste instead of nourishment.

Since dogs have traditionally had access to a wide range of foods, however, it’s not right to limit their consumption to only one type of food, like prey. Prey foods are the primary sustenance of dogs but the foods that have sustained them during their long prey droughts, and which they eat readily when these are seasonably available, are important as well. Rotating foods of different types allows digestive rest, increases digestive efficiency and replicates the natural ebb and flow of food availability in the pristine environment where dogs developed as a species.

The benefits for novice raw or home feeders is that this way of feeding takes the mystery and intimidation out of proper feeding. Commercial raw food manufacturers have attempted the same thing by producing foods that are convenient and involve no learning curve for owners. But there are many problems with these foods, not the least of which is their COST. Rotational monofeeding not only prevents and reverses degenerative illness but it is cheap, convenient, and easy to learn.