Parkouri Burmese

26/01/2024

26/01/24
More photos of Citrine's kittens (born early on 23/01/24)

26/01/2024

Our little blue boy - born at 77 grams, now 98. He is alongside his brown brother, " yellow collar" ( collar already removed now, due to being outgrown) whom is the kitten from the "terrible photo"...
The blue boy isn't out of the woods yet, but is doing well and and hopefully has all the will to survive that he will need 😻

26/01/2024

I've just been kicked out of a Burmese group, seemingly for posting a photo of a kitten born with it's organs external to the abdomen... (It was a British Burmese group that I had joined to observe type and learn of great breeders, as I do dream of importing new bloodlines some day ...)

In case anyone here also had concern about a photo on my post "Citrine update" - I can assure you that no kitten was born with a deformity, never mind such an awful and terminal one... I would not have been taking photos and posting - I would have been doing what a breeder must and then quietly grieving such a sad outcome - however, thankfully nothing of this sort has occurred ❣️

Our littlest born kitten, the blue boy (not the kitten in the photo) - 77 grams at birth, has been struggling to stay with us but has such a strong spirit. He lost weight the first day and is having extra feeds, given via feeding tube and is now now 98 grams ( I will post about him separately). The kitten in the photo is "yellow collar", one of the two brown boys - he was 140 grams at today's weigh in and is thriving.

Breeding can be tough but some people can be tougher to cope with 😬and blurry eyes after a sleepless night, mixed with the joy of new babies, are perhaps not the best combination to be picking photos to share 😹

I sincerely hope that nobody else was worried or offended 💗

"Can you tell me why amongst the kittens you have recently bred, there is one that appears to ne open to the internal organs of the gut?"

24/01/2024

Sharing some photos of a Parkouri son that I was sent today - the ever so handsome Prada (Parkouri Prada Chose Me). He is a full 'little brother' of Citrine's (mum Ch Parkouri Ametrine Dream, dad Charob Yarzar).
Prada really did choose his humum,, Louise 😸 - can't argue with destiny 💗
Thank you for letting me share Prada's day job, Louise 😊

24/01/2024

Day 2

24/01/2024

Oh yes 😹

23/01/2024

Ametrine (Citrine's mum)

23/01/2024

💗 Citrine update ❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️

Citrine birthed her (5) babies this morning, between 2:45 and 6:15am.
A beautiful rainbow litter and mostly boys, from initial looks. A couple are needing a bit of help with extra feeds but a couple of others are eating enough for two each (funny that 😸).

Citrine is being a wonderful mum 💗 She's trying to come out and sit with me for a break now and then and the look on her face, when the little ones cry out so quickly... bless her 🥰 (I'm sure many of us know what she's feeling)

Send your love and strength to them all please 💗

19/01/2024

Who remembers trying to get back up over your full term baby bump 😹😊

19/01/2024

19/01/2024

Forgive the Citrine spamming... she's just being sooo adorable 😻

18/01/2024

"Babies? Did you say babies??
I mean... I know I've been really enjoying my food the last couple of months"

Our beautiful Parkouri Citrine Dream is expecting the pitter patter (scrabble.... bang 😹) of her first little paws very soon 💗

Feeling very excited and nervous for her, my sweet girl. We've just moved house too, but she wasn't fazed, especially as all "da Birds" came too 😸

13/01/2024

Sweet Cello

13/01/2024

Cello and Birdy 😻😻

31/12/2023

HAPPY NEW YEAR 🎉

15/11/2023

Yarzar on a 'late afternoon stroll' today

06/10/2023

03/10/2023

19/01/24 - The adorable, gorgeous and ever so affectionate Buddy is looking for his very own loving home and lap of an adoring slave or two ... No other cats (or possibly a playful and non dominant female - or adding a kitten later on) - he's an early morning boy and definitely wants access to a secure garden or cat run, or perhaps an acreage such as a farm or horse property - and most importantly, someone to dote on him and enjoy all the love and smooching (and lots of play) he has to offer💗. NO small children but cat safe dogs are no issue. If this might be you, please contact me through messenger or email, to discuss whether Buddy might be a great match with you ❣️

The buff and beautiful Buddy - he is Thelma's half brother - their mum is the tiny (but rather stocky these days) Ursula.

03/10/2023

The beautiful, regal Eedie - loving her life with Shannon

01/10/2023

A lot of relevance to feline diets in this piece too

DID YOUR VET TELL YOU YOUR DOG "NEEDED" GRAIN FOR HEART HEALTH?!...VITAL POST FOR ANYONE STILL CONFUSED OVER DCM IN DOGS...

Got your morning coffee in hand?! Good. I put my rant pants on for this one.

A post two days ago highlighted a strange uttering that has been heard in vet clinics across the land for the last few years.

Apparently dogs, an animal that doesn't eat grain and won't choose it in food trials, NEED grain for the health of their hearts.

Does that seem right to you?

No, me and you both. So, where the hell did this one come from?!

Dogs have has ZERO physiological need for carbs. Even the pet food "regulators" AAFCO/FEDIAF agree with us there. They also have zero physiological need of the near impossible-to-digest protein that comes with it (wheat and corn gluten) let alone the anti-nutrient compounds therein (phytic acid sure but also tannins, saponins, gossypol, lectins, protease and amylase inhibitors and goitrogens!).

I wonder what magic compound is in grain that isn't in their normal diet (normal being meat, organ, bone, bit of veg maybe). .

Answers on a postcard.

At this point, if you think hard, you might come up with "heart healthy" plant oils, which is yet another harmful nutritional myth stubbornly perpetuated by health and heart organisations alike.

Aside large doses of omega 6 throwing out the crucial omega 3:6 ratio resulting in inflammation, something that most of us are now familiar with, we're pretty clear that plant oils are not the saviours we thought they were, in fact, they're more dangerous than sugar. If you or your doctor are under any illusions there, please check out "Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism" on Youtube. Everyone NEEDS to watch that video and needs to remove all products containing refined plant oils from your life, certainly if cancer and heart health are your concern.

So when your vet says dogs NEED the grain, what are they talking about?! Honestly, ask them to elaborate. What exactly were they missing?!!

Because here's what they're talking about - for the last 6 years the FDA and pet food producers (the ones that use grain, which was most until recently) COLLUDED to repress the growth of the "natural" pet food market. They began by attempting to slow the growth of "grain-free" pet food.

Now, we can't have a product going around boasting about NOT containing our most profitable junk food ingredient, so they contrived a plan to slow them down and came up with 600 cases (in a population of 90mil US dogs...) of POSSIBLE Dilated Cardio Myopathy (DCM) that MAY have been linked to a handful of grain-free pet food companies which the FDA dutifully named straight away so the public could be alerted and AVOID the POSSIBLE suspects.

They then did their thing, getting on their microphones to alert the public via the usual outlets - in this case The New York Times and the Washington Post, who dutifully picked up on the ‘link’ and spread the concern to worried dog owners throughout the nation. Very quickly, a Facebook group ‘Taurine Deficient (Nutritional) Dilated Cardiomyopathy’ popped up and had more than 60,000 members.

It was another terrifying pandemic being fought by the worlds most trusted regulator...after just 600 unverified cases.

It was just strange the way it happened. I mean, compare this to the melamine scandal just a decade earlier (still going on, btw) where GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS were killing tens of thousands and the FDA wouldn't name a single manufacturer even when it became clear they KNEW WHO WHICH BRANDS WERE AT FAULT and congress had to step in.

There was another scandal most are forgetting about. Back in the 1970's tens of thousands of dogs but mainly cats started dying from DCM as GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS stopped putting meat (and therefore taurine) in pet food. This was where the "cats need taurine" bit came from. They do but they actually need MEAT, meat being the best source of taurine (ta**us is the latin for bull).

This was the start of the NRC / AAFCO - they were brought in to get pet food off the floor so this may never happen again.

So how are they doing, if just on the DCM front?

Well, today there are still between 500,000 and a million cases of DCM in the US (90mil dogs) EVERY year.

[I can't bog down this already-lengthy piece with studies, all this has been covered in my book, Feeding Dogs The Science Behind the Dry V Raw Pet Food Debate, available from many independents and Amazon].

But the FDA are particularly concerned about just these 600 here.

6 years on, what have we learned. To summarise,

- no such issues popped up in EU grain-free-kibble-fed dogs
- no manufacturers found an issue, no recalls occurred
- despite heavy media advertisement, no more than 600 cases were found

Many issues in kibble can cause DCM in pets, including a lack of taurine but also methionine and cysteine (taurines' precursors / building blocks) as well too much plant fibre (think "light" pet food) which perturbs both digestion and reabsorption of bile (and thus taurine) from the intestines.

For that reason, there's no reason grain-free pet food, being high carb, low protein, ultra-processed and full of plant fibre, would be any better or worse than cereal-based pet food for causing DCM in dogs. They are a tiny step better in that they don't include wheat or barley and thus gluten, but few are better where it matters for DCM (meat).

Back to this case, the FDA charged that the new fillers being used in pet food (potatoes, peas etc) were "ingredients of concern" and highlighted two previous works that appeared to highlight such a link, neither were published and today, both "studies" are in the bin, disproven by the likes of Mansilla et al. 2019 who clearly showed neither study addressed the lack of taurine, methionine, cystine or excess fibre in their test foods.

Lack of supporting evidence aside, this tiny handful of DCM cases was enough to prompt a group of American veterinary nutrition specialists from major research universities - Dr Lisa Freeman, Dr Josh Stern and Dr Darcy Adin - to put together a piece entitled “Diet- Associated Dilated Cardiomyopathy in Dogs: What Do We KNOW?”. In fairness to them, they all declared interests to the big 3 cereal-based pet food producers (Hills. Royal Canin, Purina). Their piece remains today the seminal work linking DCM in dogs to grain-free pet food. It is certainly the most popular. Published in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association, it has been downloaded more than fifty times more often than the Mansilla et al. (2019) showing no correlation. With more than 80,000 downloads in just six months (Dec 2018 to July 2019), it had three times that of any article published around the same time in that journal. In fact, with those sort of numbers, it is likely the most widely read canine nutritional science article ever written, which is quite a remarkable feat for Freeman who ALSO HAPPENED author JAVMA’s other most popularly downloaded articles, this time a piece on raw dog food in 2013, titled “Current Knowledge About The Risks And Benefits Of Raw Meat-Based Diets For Dogs And Cats” which today lies in ruins, revealed for the industry-loaded, heavily biased nonsense that it was. But my, my it was effective.

Like their 2013 hatchet job on real food, this piece too is replete with errors. Again in point form for brevity:

- it states ‘over the past few years, an increasing number of DCM cases involving dogs appear to have been related to diet’ although they provide no evidence of this.
- they repeatedly implicate ‘BEG diets’ (essentially grain-free pet foods) with DCM in dogs without using a single reference
- they rely heavily on the two unpublished studies (by them) that made no such association. In fact, the Adin study was caught with its pants down when they found it had been published previously and their findings were not nearly as dramatic as their new findings reported the issue to be.
- the article was not peer-reviewed (hence they could get away with such vagary...despite saying "what do we KNOW" in the title, but it would be enough to slip it past the worlds vets who are too busy to get into the details).

Long story short, the whole debacle is being hammered out in the courts as grain-free pet food companies were not happy. They said it was bad for sales (which was the objective). While "natural" pet foods were now 50% of the market, in 2019, Statista confirmed a significant drop in their sales in the US. Where previous years, it had enjoyed year-on-year growth of nearly 10%, in 2019 sales had fallen to just 0.3%.

If by this stage you are wondering why the US government appears so willing to step in and assist the plight of the poor, suffering cereal-based pet food sector, then consider the fact that US pet food, now wiser and "naturally driven" are no longer happy feeding hazardous food waste to their pets.

Cereal-based pet food is historically a profitable endpoint for the waste of the human food industry. It is an outlet for poor-quality grain, as well as indigestible leftovers from the likes of the beet, corn and grape industries. Most importantly, it is the dumping ground for the meat industry.

Today, Americans are eating a LOT of animal protein in the form of meat, eggs, cheese and milk. The problem is this sector produces a lot of hazardous waste. Typically, less than half of a slaughtered cow is consumed by humans. The rest, much of the head, brain, carcass, much of the organs, innards, feet and tail, is waste, as far as the human market is concerned. Nor is it just the good stuff. They also have copious amounts of 4D meat (dead, diseased, dying, disabled) stuff (which has to be cremated here in the EU), along with road kill, euthanised cats and dogs (honestly) and truly toxic ingredients like left over restaurant grease.

Now, in the US, producers have two options available to them at this point – sell their waste to rendering plants which will stew it with all other meat waste and sell it to big pet food and other animal feed groups...or dump it.

Here are some throw away figures on that latter option, to give us some context: the US produces more than 50 million tonnes of meat each year (beef, chicken, turkey and pork, combined, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures). That is potentially 50 million tonnes of animal waste running along side it each year (or 50 billion kilos). If we estimate that the producer asks for just $0.10 per kilo of their product (in Ireland, chicken and duck carcass is worth €0.30/kg when bought by the tonne, beef organs €0.70/kg), that’s a market value of $500 billion.

This shifts our focus immediately. No longer are we talking about a $30 billion US pet food market. Now we are talking figures of half a trillion. In fact, we could easily double that figure, considering now we are asking the meat industry to adapt its supply lines and storage facilities and start paying to dump what was once a profitable commodity. Maybe a trillion dollars? That is 3 times the size of the US entire prescription drug market, and we all now know how the FDA "regulates" those guys.

So, either the producers pay or the home of unchecked capitalism, currently $33 trillion in debt (to who?!!!), will be picking up the tab to manage it for them.

They could insist meat prices increase significantly but this would result in less US meat being consumed, which is equally bad news for the economy and heavily lobbied governments as a whole.

There is simply no profitable way out of this, so they dig in and continue to relentlessly drive consumption by any means necessary.

There is one more sting in the tail. The FDA continued their completely unsupported and repressive line of inquiry until Dec 2022. Why did they stop then? Mars acquired Orijen, the worlds largest and most successful grain-free pet food company the month before. Bet they got it a significantly better price.

DCM from grain-free pet food is now no longer mentioned.

Talk about a conspiracy!

So there you have it. Your vet is still parroting the same confused, utterly unsupported and today completely disproven nonsense invented by Big Pet Food, fuelled by the FDA, supported by morally bankrupt (albeit highly effective) whitecoats like Freeman et al. and shat out repeatedly by your ever-caring mainstream media.

That's how effective this sort of nonsense is - years later, with zero evidence in support, our vets still believe it is GRAIN-FREE pet food that causes DCM in dogs so therefore the GRAIN must have been protective to heart health in dogs...despite it historically being a cereal-based pet food issue.

A shocking endictment of the state of nutritional nouse deployed by the industry today.

Now, I'm off to change my pants before I have a heart attack.

01/10/2023

Thelma ❤️

01/10/2023

We have retirees available

If you are looking for a Burmese and would consider an adult, please message me. A single cat home is preferred but open to discuss and see if a suitable match is possible with another cat.

I will post them individually over the next week or two but first is our beautiful, cheeky Thelma (Ch Parkouri Catwings Thelma) who is two and a half years old. She loves to play and is quite active - best suited to a home with plenty of people to keep her entertained - older children (teenagers would be perfect) but not youngsters. Thelma has huge, beautiful eyes and though only a little cat, has an enormous personality too❣️
Photos from today and as a kitten, including as a newborn with her gorgeous mum Ursula

16/09/2023

Sharing for a sweetheart "Burmese cousin" who was dealt a bad hand by his former owners

19/07/2023

Equally relevant to cats

THIS ONE GETS 3 OUT OF 3 ON THE BRADY POOPOMETER™...
This study is STILL doing the rounds in vet circles. That's how effective industry nonsense is. So I'll give it another bit of balance on here today...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771422000027.

The title is very explicit: drug-resistant E.coli in puppies is associated with raw-feeding.

Those words "IS associated" are key. Correlation versus causation, and all that.

They state in their abstract that dangerous bacteria from raw-fed dogs ARE shared to humans. To make such a link they need to test both the sick humans and the raw dog food in their fridge to make sure the pathogens match perfectly and yet this study didn't test either! This was, of course, another "survey", the lowest grade evidence you can produce and the refuge of the kibble scoundrel.

Know what they did? They said if anyone suffered a urinary infection within a 50kmX50km radius of a puppy and that puppy eating raw dog food, then the dog and food caused it.

Honestly.

The authors are apoarently very concerned for pups housing antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Fair enough. We mustn't be complacent about such things.

When you look at the very first line of the very first table they present in their methods we see they found a whopping 32 of 43 raw-fed pups carried E.coli that was resistant to at least one antibiotic. On this basis, the study concludes:

"Accordingly, we conclude that raw feeding is associated with carriage of ABR E. coli in dogs even at 16 weeks of age."

But right under the above raw dog food data is a second line, this one about non-raw-fed dogs.

How did they fare Conor?!.

Well, 76 of 180 of them (that's 42%) were resistant to at least one antibiotic also!

And yet these dogs didn't get a mention?!!! Yep, I guess these dogs DEFINITELY DO NOT share said issue with humans!

Trust the science, folks, but whatever you do don't read it.

There are a number of other glaring questions with this work - such as the tiny number of raw-fed dogs used, the fact they felt the need to recruit an additional 59 dogs locally from vet clinics. How did they randomly select these? What percentage of these were raw fed dogs (all, I bet) and how many were gut sick?!

Answers on a post card as they're not responding (obvs).

Another issue was that the authors concluded the urinary infections in the affected humans was because they were near an infected (raw-fed) puppy whilst ignoring all the other potential causes they may have been near that they themselves were investigating in the study (such as were any of these pups "near a farm"?! As they note, a very likely cause of ABR bacteria, they being the source of the problem initially!!!).

Also carelessly not mentioned by the authors are the facts:

1) Leonard et al. assessed the antimicrobial resistance patterns of Salmonella and E. coli recovered from pet dogs (n=132) in Ontario between 2005–2006. They found 96% were shedding antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in their faeces. Unless every owner in Ontario was raw feeding back in 2005, it’s more than clear that commercial diets are not innocent in this drama.
https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/67/1/174/727070

2) Unlike raw dog food, authors have isolated the same species of drug-resistant Campylobacter jejuni from a dog fed a commercial dry diet as detected in a girl infected with the same species. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC356901/.

3) Tests of dry pet food reveal repeated failures for nasty pathogens - eg the pet food analysis by Susan Thixton who ordered 12 popular dry/canned pet foods online and sent them straight to a lab "9 of the 12 products contained bacteria the FDA terms as ‘qualifying pathogens’. Included were Streptococcus (of strep throat fame, seven of the 12 ultra-processed pet foods tested), Staphylococcus (common cause of food poisoning in humans, 10 of the twelve of the ultra-processed pet foods tested), Bacillus spp. (common cause of food poisoning, 10 of the 12 ultra-processed pet foods tested).
https://truthaboutpetfood.com/the-pet-food-test-results/

4) According to the available literature on pet food causing human infections via a test of said product AND the human infection, show us more humans have been ACTUALLY infected with hazardous microbiology by dry food (half them toddlers under two years of age), When you add in the two ENORMOUS safety studies conducted into raw feeding that found food poisoning from raw to human was EXTREMELY RARE (no such studies exist for dry), statistically we can say, for what we know currently, fresh/raw is safer.

Its crazy how often such works miss this crucial bit of balance! It's almost like they needed raw dog food to be the sole issue...

This work was funded by the Antimicrobial Resistance Cross Council Initiative, an industry-funded group that really, really, really cares for your health and well-being.

Overall, because their work is nowhere even CLOSE to proving that raw feeding harms humans, as they very much misleadingly suggest, it gets 3 out of 3 (utter crap) on the Brady Poopometer.

That these are the sorts of studies consumed manically by the vet industry and not the above nor all the studies proving real food is beneficial to health when compared to dry (never the other way around), you can only weep at the state of the "science" used by the veterinary industry.

15/07/2023

Online source for Meat Mates, Ziwi Peak etc

I just want to give a shout out to PeekAPaw Pet Supplies who have an online shop. They are an independent pet store at Hornsby NSW. PeekAPaw have the best specials on products like Ziwi Peak Air Dried - I have been able to purchase 1kg bags for $60.52 (instead of the usual $89.00 rrp at most suppliers!) several times since I lucked upon them when hunting for Meat Mates freeze dried. When out of stock, they usually have an option to pre-order with supply in a few days. If not, check the listing again in a couple of days :)
Quite a few products are free delivery Australia wide for orders over $200 and more products included in free delivery in metro areas (orders over $200).
They also have new stock of Meat Mates f/d Lamb Dinner - rumour is that this will probably be the last supply of this wonderful and affordable freeze dried complete meal into Australia, so get it whilst you can. They currently have it for $23.79 and ubd is 2024-07-25.
I have placed many orders with PeekAPaw now and had zero problems. Fast delivery. Very informative, easy to use website. I have no connection other than as a very happy (and relieved) customer and just want to support them by letting others know.

peekapaw.com.au

PeekAPaw Pet Supplies is a Sydney based business that aims to serve nationwide pet lovers by offering quality products, competitive prices and good services.

13/07/2023

No cats - just pure, gorgeous chaps☺️ and a beautiful lady 🤗

06/04/2022

Australia's best pet food & supplies online shop. We deliver all premium pet food brands, medications, toys, accessories and treats to help you Pet Better