Vets Naturally

07/06/2026

Scary huh??

The Mars pet care empire. Friend or foe?

M&M’s, Snickers, Milky Way… Mars is one of the world’s largest and most famous confectionary companies. But the same privately held corporation, run by one of America’s wealthiest families, is also one of the most world’s most powerful pet food and pet care corporations. And, if this doesn’t worry you, it should!

It all started innocently enough when Frank C Mars started making and selling buttercream candy (aka chocolate to us Brits) in his kitchen in 1911. But it was his estranged son, Forrest, who really built the business into the $50 billion a year empire it is today. Forrest moved to Europe in the 1930s and started his own Mars company there, but after his father’s death returned to the US and in 1964 merged all the operations under his personal control.

The company started making pet food in the 1930s – buying inexpensive ingredients and turning it into dog and cat food. It moved into veterinary care and medical diagnostics in the 1990s. Today it owns over 50 pet food brands including Pedigree, Whiskas, Royal Canin, Cesar, Iams, and Sheba. In veterinary care, it operates Banfield Pet Hospital (more than 1,000 practices in the US), BluePearl, VCA, and the European groups AniCura and Linnaeus — totalling nearly 3,000 veterinary hospitals worldwide. In diagnostic laboratories (the services vets use to test your dog’s blood) Mars Petcare has acquired five veterinary diagnostics businesses in the past seven years. According to a KPMG report, by the way, Mars owns nearly 45% of all corporate-owned veterinary clinics.

In November 2024, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote directly to Mars to raise formal concerns. Their letter, addressed to Mars CEO Poul Weihrauch, is a fascinating document. The senators expressed concern that Mars’s vertical integration in the pet care industry may enable it to charge higher prices for essential veterinary care, and that its significant market power in veterinary diagnostics may allow it to give preference to its own diagnostics laboratories at its own clinics. They also raised the possibility that Mars’s consolidation of pet food companies leaves customers vulnerable to predatory pet food pricing.

The structure Mars has built creates a conflict of interest that no one seems to have formally resolved. If your dog falls ill from a Mars-branded pet food and is taken to a Mars-owned veterinary practice, where the blood tests are processed by a Mars-owned diagnostic laboratory — is that a system designed to serve your dog, or one designed to protect Mars?

None of this would matter quite so much if the food Mars makes were genuinely good for dogs. It isn’t. Mars’s core pet food brands – Pedigree, Whiskas, Iams, Sheba – are quintessential ultra-processed products. Most commercial dry dog foods use a processing technique known as extrusion, where ingredients are mixed, cooked, extruded, and heated again to remove moisture – a process that destroys heat-sensitive nutrients including vitamins, enzymes, and phytonutrients. In May 2025, by the way, a lawsuit was filed against Mars Petcare after Consumer Reports found that Pedigree Complete Nutrition contained more than four times the allowed level of vitamin D.

Mars has enormous control over much of what your dog eats, who treats it when it’s sick, and possibly even what the diagnostic results say. That is a remarkable concentration of power over the lives of animals. The question animal lovers need to ask themselves. Is Mars a friend or a foe?

07/06/2026

17/04/2026

Flynn is now 4 1/2 years old. It’s really important to worm puppies regularly until about six months old. This is because puppies can actually be born with a burden of round worms, they can also get infected and reinfected via their mum‘s milk as well as their other littermates.
Puppy worming generally only treats the stage of the life cycle that’s in the gut so they need a very comprehensive repeat program when they’re young.
Flynn has had regular worm counts from six months of age onwards, and has only once had a very low positive count for roundworms . This was incidentally just after we got a new puppy in the household.!!!
So over four years that’s almost 50 months of what would’ve been completely unnecessary worm treatments had I followed the monthly treatment protocol that is often suggested.
To minimise giving your dog unnecessary chemicals you can worm test regularly, it’s a simple process. Check out our website shop for worm count kits, or contact wormcount.com
Flynn also donates poo to a lovely dog that’s on a feacal transplant program so he is also tested for Giardia regularly.

15/04/2026

Upset or irritated guts are a very frequent occurrence. Although not usually life-threatening, they can be quite upsetting for you and your pet, as well as being very inconvenient!
Good support can minimise the length and effects of a gut and or stomach disturbance.
Chronic conditions can be managed well with a good support plan.
We have several products to help support your pet, and also to keep something on hand for any unexpected incidences. 😳😳
Take a look at our website shop to see what is available.

13/04/2026

13/04/2026

Do raw-fed dogs live longer? Is there science to prove it? The short answer to both questions is ‘yes’.

The most compelling study comes from Belgium. In 2003, researchers Lippert and Sapy, writing for the Prince Laurent Foundation (a non-profit organisation for animal welfare) followed 522 dogs over five years and set out to identify the factors that most determined lifespan. They examined breed, size, s*x, housing conditions, sterilisation status and, crucially, diet. Their conclusion was unambiguous: diet was the single most powerful external factor in determining how long a dog lives. Dogs fed a homemade, fresh food diet reached an average age of 13.1 years. Those fed on industrially processed commercial food died at an average age of 10.4 years. That is a difference of nearly three years… 32 months of additional life, simply from the quality of food in the bowl.

The researchers were careful to acknowledge that this was an observational study, meaning it could not fully account for every variable. Perhaps owners who feed fresh food are also more attentive to veterinary care in general. That is a fair caveat. But the magnitude of the difference, sustained across a large population of real household dogs over five years, is difficult to dismiss.

Supporting evidence comes from the 14-year Purina Labrador study, one of the most controlled canine feeding experiments ever conducted, published in the 'British Journal of Nutrition' (Lawler et al., 2008). Dogs kept lean – fed 25% fewer calories than their ad libitum pair-mates – lived a median of 1.8 years longer and had significantly delayed onset of chronic diseases. This matters because raw-fed dogs naturally tend to be lean: without the carbohydrate-dense fillers found in processed food, they maintain a healthier body composition. Every gram of excess fat is pro-inflammatory. Inflammation is the engine of chronic disease.

The Dog Aging Project — a large-scale longitudinal study funded by the US National Institutes of Health — has been tracking tens of thousands of companion dogs to understand what influences their health. One finding, published in 'GeroScience' in 2022, is that once-daily feeding was associated with significantly better health compared to multiple daily meals. This mirrors the natural feeding pattern of wolves and wild canids (i.e. a ‘feast or famine’ rhythm, and suggests that how often a dog eats, not just what it eats, has measurable biological consequences.

Nobody has yet conducted a large-scale, long-term controlled trial directly comparing raw-fed dogs to kibble-fed dogs over their lifetimes. The commercial pet food industry has never commissioned one for obvious reasons, and the academic sector has shown little interest in funding it. What we have is the Belgian study — observational but substantial — and a growing body of research indicating that lean body condition, fresh food and natural feeding patterns all independently support longevity.

In the meantime, the parallel with human nutrition is instructive. Health authorities worldwide tell us to eat fresh, whole, minimally processed foods and to limit ultra-processed products. There is no scientific or logical reason why this principle would not apply to our dogs.

10/04/2026

Elevated liver enzymes? Or just more chemical exposure this time of year?

The liver is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now.

The active compound in the herb milk thistle (Silybum marianum) has been shown to support liver function in both healthy dogs and those with liver challenges. Studies show improvements in key liver enzymes like ALT, AST, and GGT, along with reduced inflammatory burden.

What’s especially exciting is how well it works with the body’s own detox systems—supporting glutathione pathways and pairing synergistically with nutrients like NAC to help the liver do what it was designed to do.

: Strategic nutraceutical support helps buffer oxidative damage, replenish glutathione, and support phase I and phase II detoxification—giving the liver what it needs to keep doing its job efficiently. Here’s what I’m giving to my pets: www.liverliftdetox.com