Non-peer-reviewed tick update: Soy sauce edition
By Gina Spadafori
July 23, 2008
Ticks do not like soy sauce. In fact, it appears to be lethal to them. More lethal, apparently, than Frontline, which doesn’t seem to be much bothering this season’s eight-legged nasties.
How do I know this about soy sauce?
I just pulled another damn tick off McKutie, and I was standing there with the vile thing and no earthly idea where I put the rubbing alcohol. There was a little to-go thingy of soy sauce at hand, so I poured the liquid on the tick, who appeared to expire in rapid order.
Then I put a paper towel over the tick, hit it with a hammer, dropped in it the running garbage disposal and ran hot water down the drain after its salt-poisoned, smashed and shredded body.
I think the tick is dead now. But I cannot say for sure.
***
Harkening back to Christie’s “Poop in Food: What’s up With That?” post, this piece from Medical News Today (thanks, Nadine) about pet food seminars at the AVMA conference, which just wrapped up in New Orleans.
Seems the pet-food industry experts were again busy warning veterinarians that the biggest threat to pet health isn’t problems with the nation’s food supply, but rather pet-owners who educate themselves and take the feeding of their animals into their own hands, preparing meals from scratch.
Sorry, but I no more accept the pet-food industry’s take on home-prepared meals than I accept the raw-food advocates’ characterization of the pet-food industry’s products as responsible for every illness under the sun. On either side, there’s more than slight conflict of interest and a buy-in of near-religious levels.
Christie’s point with regard to an earlier veterinary conference stands:
[The presenter] didn’t really have a problem with raw diets, either, except for the fact that they’re dangerous.
[...]
[T]his vet said that even when you wash the dishes used to prepare your dog’s raw dinner in a dishwasher set on sanitize, even if you wash them in bleach and hot, soapy water, they still have measurable levels of bacterial contamination on them after washing. Even the glass or stainless steel dishes.
So I was listening to this, and watching the hundreds of vets in attendance nodding their heads and taking notes, and I wanted to stand up and say, “Does the dish somehow know that raw meat is destined for my dog’s stomach and not my oven? Because what about the bowl I used to mix my meatloaf? What about whipping up eggs in a bowl before I scramble them? What about marinating chicken breasts? How am I supposed to make my own dinner, if what you’re saying is true?”
And then I thought a little more, and wanted to additionally ask, “If this is true, then tell me, oh room full of veterinarians: Why aren’t you all getting up out of your folding chairs and marching down the hall to the large animal veterinary seminars and asking your colleagues in agriculture exactly why this nation’s meat supply is full of feces?”
We still don’t have an answer to that one, do we? FDA? USDA? Hello?
I know many, many people who have fed generations of healthy pets on commercial diets, including most veterinarians. I also know more than a few people who have fed home-prepared and raw diets for a couple of decades, with equally satisfactory results. I am tired of the mud-slinging on both sides. A properly prepared, properly handled home diet is not going to kill your pet, and is no more likely to give you salmonella than your weekend barbecue is.
Nor does it require a Ph.D. in nutrition to prepare a pet’s food at home. You manage to feed yourself and your kids without a staff nutritionist, don’t you? Some basic guidelines and you’re fine.
I wish the pet-food industry would quit insulting my intelligence and drop the scare tactics. I wish more veterinarians would ask the kinds of questions we do here. My advice to the pet-food-industry: Concentrate on making your products the best they can be, and make the case for your products on the merits alone.
“Ticks do not like soy sauce. In fact, it appears to be lethal to them. More lethal, apparently, than Frontline, which doesn’t seem to be much bothering this season’s eight-legged nasties”
Quick! Patent it! You’ll be rich, I tell you! RICH!!!!!
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 24, 2008 @ 5:26 am
I’m still shocked at how many of my clients are surprised when I suggest they throw out the milkbones and start feeding fruits and vegetables as snacks, instead.
How is it possible to believe that a “Puperoni” is actually better than a carrot nibbler?
Testament, clearly, to the marketing machine’s lasting [deleterious] effect on our collective national psyche.
Comment by Dr Patty Khuly — July 24, 2008 @ 5:30 am
I’ve never got on to the raw thing, mostly because I’m not convinced it’s any better than what I feed (high end commercial with an assortment of tidbits, leftovers and yes, raw carrots, turnips, romaine ends, etc for snacks, along with the despised Milk Bones). I often cook them a stew of meat, peas, rice/ oatmeal and carrots and add stuff to it. They like salt-free canned salmon.
They eat all my asparagus in the spring, move on to the strawberries and raspberries and then it’s tomato time! I’ve fooled them this year though, I think, by growing my tomatoes in huge pots that are too high for them to climb. We’ll see, my little monkeys are resourceful and determined LOL
Sometimes they just get the kibble ‘straight’, moistened. Depends.
You are so right. Instead of trying to scare people into using commercial, tell us what’s great about it. Convenience? Yup. Balance? Yup. Consistency? Yup, although I’m not sure the latter isn’t a bug, rather than a feature.
It’s kind of funny that dogs seemed to live for millennia on scraps and that when on their own, they’ll eat pretty much anything. Sort of like people :>)
Comment by Caveat — July 24, 2008 @ 6:05 am
If you ever want to be “convinced” of how great a raw diet is, just join some raw e-mail lists. You’ll “learn” for example that raw fed dogs do not get intestinal parasites. Per the raw feeding Vet. And that if they get cancer, that’s due to genetics, and the raw diet actually extends the life they do have. Sometimes the raw feeding Vet can actually tell the owner specifically how much additional time they bought the dog by feeding raw. It’s such incredibly edumacational stuff. And it’s all true because they absolutely know it fer sure.
Comment by slt — July 24, 2008 @ 6:31 am
I feed a little of everything including commercial dehydrated and commercial raw … and a lot of whole, fresh and locally sourced foods — meat, dairy and veggies. (And my own backyard eggs, of course!) The variety and the focus on local, known sources is for me, too, of course.
For me, it’s not the “raw” part that’s important for the pets. It’s knowing what’s in the mix and where it came from. And how the food animals were treated, since I will not buy the product of factory farms.
My pets are healthy, but then, so was my wonderful old Sheltie Andy, who lived a healthy, happy life until the day before he died, a couple months shy of his 16th birthday. Andy ate nothing but high-quality kibble, supplemented by the occasional stolen tomato.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 6:51 am
The industry is using scare tactics because they are scared.
Case in point: A year or two ago, I had a hard time finding stuff like chicken necks, because the meat guys (butchers, the wholesalers in Pittsburgh’s strip, etc.) didn’t know how to get them in. They were gobsmacked when I told them that I was feeding them raw to dogs. Must be some strange cult.
Now I have a hard time finding stuff like chicken necks because demand is so high, the wholesalers often can’t get them! And the price is way up — more so than everything else’s prices.
Yesterday I went to the very same meat wholesaler that gave me a blank stare a year or two ago, and asked about chicken necks. He said he had only backs, lots of cases of backs in stock all the time now, but could get me chicken necks with a day’s notice, but I had to come get them on time because the staff and volunteers at the nearby shelter always wanted more. (I’m guessing they all raw feed their own animals now.) And he had cases of frozen turkey necks for a higher price, did I want some of those? I did! (And as an aside, they are HUGE. Every year we buy the biggest turkey we can get for Thanksgiving, and it never has a neck half the size of the ones I bought yesterday. Turkzilla walks the earth, or at least, did until recently. I released a lot of aggression last night whacking them up into servings with my cleaver.)
So — home feeding has grown legs, and the industry is peeing itself it’s so scared, and they are ramping up the propaganda machine with veterinarians.
Why vets? Because they don’t want to inadvertently put ideas into people’s heads with direct propaganda to consumers who may not have considered/heard of homemade. And vets are a “trusted proxy” — most people are skeptical enough of propaganda that obviously comes from the guy who is selling you something, but the vet, he’s a doctor, he wears a white coat, he loves Max and Tiger, he wants what’s best for them, and he went to a lot of school, right?
Know who one of the most supportive-of-home-diets professionals I know is? The manager of a local pet-supply place (local chain). The guy who literally has something to sell me. We talk nutrition all the time. He knows that bad news for the big manufacturers means good news for his bottom line (premium brands not stocked by the big boxes), and that us home-feeders buy whatever commercial we do use from him. I also send clients to him for advice and to buy food now, since I’m not as current on brands as I once was.
Oh, and the tick? Crawling back up your drain pipe like the Terminator. You forgot the wooden stake and the garlic in its mouth.
Comment by H. Houlahan — July 24, 2008 @ 7:30 am
“Andy ate nothing but high-quality kibble”
What brand(s)? Do tell! Keeping a dog alive for that long is something to cheer about.
Comment by slt — July 24, 2008 @ 7:34 am
slt — Honestly, I don’t remember. He has been gone for nearly a decade, and I know he ate different premium brand throughout his life.
When he was elderly, I switched the two then-young retrievers (Heather, and the late Ben) to the regimen I’m feeding now. But I didn’t want to mess with Andy since he was doing well, so he continued with whatever he was on at the time.
hh — thanks SO MUCH for the thoughts on the tick. I finally was able to stop imagining that it was crawling up my leg, and now I can feel it again. ugh.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 7:40 am
Considering WHICH plumbing it’s crawling back up, I don’t think it’s your LEG you oughta’ be worried about!
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 24, 2008 @ 8:43 am
Woops! Cancel that!
I mis-remembered that you’d flushed it.
Even so, I’d be looking REALLY closely at those black specks on any tomatoes you’re rinsing off . . . . .
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 24, 2008 @ 8:44 am
I hate ticks.
Hate.
Hate.
Hate.
Unfortunately, I do not ever remember a season when there have been more of them at the river, and when they have been so resistant to any measure to get rid of them except picking them off one by one.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 8:56 am
I’m wondering what other condiments might serve as Frontline replacers. Try horseradish next time. Keep a log.
Comment by slt — July 24, 2008 @ 8:59 am
I’m thinking wasabi.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 9:08 am
I am preparing to bury one of my kids three guinea pigs.
In a moment of weakness I bought cheap ass guinea pig food at a local big box store on Monday night. Fed it to them on Tues and by weds at midnight Pumpkin was sick and died during the night. The other two are not eating it….
I called the company and they requested a sample for testing and I have to say they were very nice. My question is, what are the odds that i will ever know what their results were and how do i test the food myself? They want two cups and that leaves me with another 8 pounds or so.Of course it may be unrelated…but it does seem a bit odd.
I will not feed it to them and never again will I buy cheap ass pet food for any animal. sigh. One would think I would think I would have learned that lesson that year. (Kicks self in head).
Comment by nancy freedman-smith — July 24, 2008 @ 11:05 am
I’m very sorry about the little guy …
But you know, we have NEVER made the pet-food recalls about “you should make all your pet’s food at home.”
That is not the point.
The point is, and we’ve said it many, many times, that no matter what you buy, what you pay or where you buy it, the minimum standard for a pet food is that you should be able to expect that it not kill your pet.
That should not even be something that you should have to worry about!
Of course, the feeding of the new food may have just been a coincidence, or not. But you still should not have to worry, any more than you should stress out if one of your kids eats some generic corn flakes.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 11:25 am
Well said Gina! I like the analogy to gereric kids cereal. Bottom line is…there is a difference and you get what you pay for. Actaully I think it is more expensive to feed the cavvies than the dogs. They get lots of fresh food and I can’t buy their food in 40 pound bags. Plus they are always hungry, except of coures when it comes to the big bag of cheapo food I just bought.
Comment by nancy freedman-smith — July 24, 2008 @ 11:36 am
So sorry about your GP. I hope it wasn’t Kay-tee, that’s what I feed my two little twerps.
Gina: I ever tell you about my first date with my boyfriend? Tick crawling up (down?) my cleavage was pointed out over dinner.
N.B. Even vet boyfriends don’t like ticks. It’s amazing we ever dated again after that fiasco.
Comment by Dr Patty Khuly — July 24, 2008 @ 12:36 pm
LOVE the tick story. I will say that even though we seem to be having a bad summer here in Sacramento, tick-wise, I have never seen the entire load of bugs so bad as when I lived in Florida.
I liked North Florida, very much, but I could not live there forever. There is not enough DEET in the world …
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 24, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
Dr. Patty- Kaytee is okay stuff, but oh, Oxbow smells so tasty and fresh in comparison… nom nom nom (says my bunny).
Comment by Megan — July 24, 2008 @ 1:50 pm
“how do i test the food myself?”
Find your state’s Dept of Ag here:
http://www.aafco.org/SummaryOf.....fault.aspx
Other possibilities for testing:
http://www.expertox.com/pg_poison.html
http://www.microbac.com/servic.....lamine.php
Comment by slt — July 24, 2008 @ 1:59 pm
no it wasn’t oxbow or kay-tee. Not a major brand….
Comment by nancy freedman-smith — July 24, 2008 @ 2:01 pm
Blech, ticks! I came in from feeding our gigantic potbelly lookalike (potbelly/american domestic cross) and sat down at the computer. I looked down at my arm and eek! tick. This brought on the “tick dance” whereby the tick was launched and I could not find it.
So I sat at the computer figuring it would find me again. Within 2 minutes it was on my foot.
Tick (flattened) now sleeps with da fishes or whatever is equivilant in our septic tank.
Comment by JenniferJ — July 24, 2008 @ 6:45 pm
As for food, my guys are currently getting kibble, which I have shipped in from a small company in Colorado, mixed with whatever is fresh and affordable at the local co-op.
Coats are great, skin issues few. We did lose a seven year old to liver cancer this year but most of the bulldogs have beaten the expected 8-9 year life span by 3-4 years so knock on wood, we seem to be in good shape. Cloud’s cancer was the first run in with the big C in 15 years and no family history of liver cancer.
So sorry to hear about the GP. They are fabulous little animals. It is so very easy for mishandling or storage of foods or ingredients
to cause real problems and heartbreak to pets and owners. When my kids get older and want their “own” pet, cavies will be high on the list because I am fully aware that as mom, any pet my kids get will be mine too!
Comment by JenniferJ — July 24, 2008 @ 6:57 pm
About the tick - you forgot to microwave it before you smashed and flushed it.
Comment by Cate — July 25, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
:::slapping forehead:::
You’re SO right!!
WHAT was I thinking??!!! I forgot to nuke it!!
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 25, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
Soy sauce - love it!
I wonder if osmotic shock was the kicker?
Someday I may need to blog on 101 ways to kill a tick. Will be sure to link to this ;-)
Comment by Janeen — August 7, 2008 @ 6:15 pm