Bark and Stride

16/11/2024

What a splash!! 💦
(The aim is always to get as muddy as possible!)

16/11/2024

16/11/2024

A LITTLE BIT OF ACTION

As usual, lots of walks filled with fun, friends and some challenges. It’s great to ask the dogs to problem solve, work things out. It’s helps with cognitive function and enriches their lives, creating sparks in their brains leading to the creation of new neural pathways.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science, just some recall throughout the walk, a quick game of catch the treat, asking to go over a fallen branch, jumping on a bench with a paws up, asking for a sit and wait the list is endless. Most of all talk to them, it’s amazing how much language they pick up on. They are such clever creatures.

16/11/2024

16/11/2024

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

Just a perfect day, dry, sunny, blue, green. What more could we ask for.

I’ve noticed that like us, the dogs mood can change with the weather, they definitely prefer the dryer days and are happier in the crisp autumn leaves, as opposed to the squidgy wet slippery ones.

I love the diversity of this group, and how well they all get on, run, play and enjoy themselves. The space on the Downs is immense, uplifting and joyous. We’re making the most of these beautiful autumnal days, waiting to see what winter brings.

10/11/2024

HOPEFULLY NOT AN OVERLOAD

But just wanted you to see what our beautiful pups have been up to during the week.

It’s been great that the woods are drying out, but as you all know, some dogs love mud and water regardless of the dry and will seek it out and immerse themselves into it.

Some like to tiptoe around and never seem to get any mud on them. I expected our little Alfie (Shi Tzu) to be on tiptoes, but alas he’s yet another mud magnet 🤦‍♀️, when he finds mud he first dips in his whole face, then goes the body in, leaving one very mucky puppy!

Anyway here’s hoping we have another dry week 😊

09/11/2024

03/11/2024

SUNDAY MORNING WALK

With the magnificent Pointers and uncle Oscar our beautiful French Mastiff. This is quite a feat to get the 4 of them together and as you can see only 3 are sitting, but looking like model dogs.

It took several photos to get the 3 Pointers to sit and wait, they are in the woods, they are having a great time running and playing, no time to sit with all the other exciting things to do. Sometimes our expectations of what we want them to do and what they are capable of in certain situations don’t match. Can you imagine taking a child to a birthday party and asking them to sit quietly when everyone else is running around having fun?

I just think we have to be realistic, the only way we can truly get our dogs to behave is by understanding their capabilities, reading their body language, having insight to what’s going on for them. The main thing is maintaining a positive relationship with them. By this I don’t mean letting them have their own way all the time, we all need boundaries and we all have some days that are not as good as others.

When we start to understand why our dog behaves the way they do, we will know if our expectations are too high.

Dogs have a brain and they have free will, let’s help them to express themselves and not take away their
individual personalities.

I know they all drive me mad on an occasions but I wouldn’t be without our mad bunch or in any other job.

02/11/2024

OUR WEEK OF WALKS

Plenty of sniffing, running, jumping playing, making new friends and best of all, being in nature.

The science is here, the importance of spending time outdoors and experiencing the natural world. This applies to all species and dogs need it just as much as we do.

They gain so much from being able to run free, learning how to navigate, explore space, find out how their bodies work in space, know where their nose begins and there tail ends. Learn about the seasons and the other creatures that live in the wood.

It helps improve their mental health, improves vision, provides exercise which strengthens their muscular, skeletal, nervous, respiratory and endocrine systems. A winner in all ways as well as having fun, and plenty of social interaction. A win, win in every way ♥️

02/11/2024

LOVE THIS

Little Alfie, asking uncle Finn how he got to be so tall.

I love the way this little guy is not phased, at all, by the size of Finn, he just wants to make friends, as he learns about the world and group etiquette. Dogs are amazing creatures.

20/10/2024

WELCOME BACK

The wet and muddy season has come back with a vengeance. I must admit, it gets me down, but the dogs don’t seem to mind, the more water the better. What’s bizarre about dogs is they love running in streams, immersing themselves into the most disgusting puddles and don’t mind being out in the rain, but yet not keen on being bathed 😂. Anyway, I figured that if cold water therapy is good for humans, it must be good for all mammals, so don’t worry if your dog loves the streams and puddles 😊

06/10/2024

SORRY!
I’ve been a bit hopeless for posting recently, so here’s a bulk load of photos from last weeks walks of all the wonderful pups.

Glad to say we had a beautiful week, summer again on a couple of days, so lots of fun in the wilds of the woods.

05/10/2024

Alfie makes friends 😍

30/08/2024

Some highlights of the last couple of weeks. Everyday and every walk is different. I love the way the woods change daily, wet or dry, whatever the season, no 2 days are the same.

30/08/2024

Just to remind all my lovely customers that I’m on holidays for the next 2 weeks 😊

04/08/2024

NATURE

All the beautiful wild flowers we come across on our walks, so lovely to see nature break through to the once mowed fields. Gorgeous meadows that I haven’t seen since I was a young child. Re-wilding is incredible for attracting beautiful butterflies, moths, bees and wasps, dragonflies and lots of other insects, plenty of natural food for the birds and the bats 😊

04/08/2024

WAYS WE KEEP COOL IN THE HEAT

27/07/2024

An interesting article on faecal microbial transplantation.

FMT, Faecal Microbial Transplantation, is now the only probiotic I reach for.

This is my first in a series of posts on FMT I'm calling "Eat s**t and live" (that is literally the greatest tag line ever thought of, thank you Moddie Lambert!!!), largely as I'm having so much success with it I need to tell everyone.

Here's the short of it, and as I will highlight at Dr. Judy Morgan's forthcoming conference in Orlando in October, my journey with probiotics is something like a bell-shaped curve - "ooh what are these" at the start, "OH MY GOD THESE ARE AMAZING I'M GOING TO USE THESE EVERYWHERE" at my zenith and now tapering off to occasionally, the more knowledge I accumulate and the better solutions that are presented to me.

While yes, the data still suggests over-the-counter probiotics can and should be used to get you out of hole, in the fact of bad gut upset say, or maybe with antibiotics (though even then the longer term studies are now highlighting a few issues. One is the gut flora struggles to get back to normal when they are deployed, in that it takes it longer to do so).

But on reflection, and somewhat unsurprisingly, the gut biome is complicated. A 1000 different species of bacteria, oodles of yeasts, fungi and untold viruses and bacteriophages (and yes, maybe even a few parasites) all happily living together in an enormous (to them) hustling and bustling city.

Then you come along and move in a small handful of species made in a lab - we didn't want 100 plumbers, we needed 500 electricians, sort of thing.

So the biome is complex. This is where FMT comes in. In essence, they get gut flora from a very healthy dog and stick it in an unhealthy dog and boom the patient recovers.

As always, the method they've been using for 1000s of years works best.

FMT dodges the issues with over-the-counter probiotics. They include ALL the oxygen-loving bacteria (can't make a probiotics for the anaerobes, sadly). So it's all the good guys, a complete reset.

And the studies behind its usage, compared to antibiotics or probiotics, are highly impressive. Patients recover quicker from infection and gut flora returns to normal faster when compared to the other two. Moreover, it offers REAL resolution to patients with IBS, IBD, ulcerative colitis, all those sorts of issues, no joke. Have a Google and you'll find 100's of studies marking very large percentage gains for gut issues when using FMT over standard therapies.

But it's all the other little cool findings. Like you can take gut flora from an anxious mouse and put them in a calm mouse and make him anxious (and vice versa, heads up folk with dogs chronic anxiety), they can take the gut flora from fat mice and put them in skinny mice and they get fat (and vice versa...know a skinny friend?! Just ask them to poo in a cup...) and recently, they discovered that they can take gut flora from Alzheimers humans or mice and put them in mice destined to get the disease and BOOM it kicks (they cut the vagus nerve, linking the gut to the brain in some of the mice who then didn't develop the disease, to prove the link).

In summary, I love the idea of using food / prebiotics to grow the groups you want in there, that's top of my list for sure, not popping in probiotics on the blind. But if I have a dog in real need, just terribly inflamed, chronic IBS/IBD that's been going on ages, I now recommend first trying S.boulardii (a probiotic yeast) to see if that helps rest the gut flora but it's 50/50 if that will work in tricky cases. I'm really saying that to buy time until their Legacy Biome capsules arrive from the US.

The testimonials I'm now getting from some close-to-lost causes are unbelievable, and I'll share them with you and a few of the more exciting studies in future posts.

If you have a dog suffering chronic gut issues or IBD (or chronic skin issues that swabs show you are not yeast-related as, if yeast related, you can fix topical issues with ProPythium quicker and cheaper or, if internal yeast, with bits from the local health shop, see my new "yeast" article on dogsfirst. ie) or a dog suffering chronic anxiety or hard-to-explain fear reactions (IBS), one that you haven't been able to restore with good diet and some natural additions, I urge you to try FMT.

I used to recommend you get the gut flora checked in these dogs but increasingly I recommend they spend that money on the actual treatment, particularly when I'm sure there's a likely dysbiosis fuelling the issue.

See links below to the product I use with 15% discount.

Hope it works. When it does, please let us know.