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The best in health, wellness, and positive training from America’s leading dog experts

Home Care Natural Remedies & Holistic Care

Natural Remedies & Holistic Care

golden retriever licking feet

Why Do Dogs Smell Like Fritos?

If your dog’s feet have a slight eau de corn chip, don’t worry. This smell is just from the normal bacteria that end up on dog feet throughout daily life.
senior dog receiving acupuncture

Acupuncture for Dogs

Whether the veterinary acupuncturist practices Traditional Chinese Medicine or Western medical acupuncture, the treatment helps, especially for dogs with arthritis or neurological problems.
honey for dogs to increase energy

5 Reasons to Feed Raw Honey to Your Dog

Most dogs love the sweet taste of honey. Honey for dogs has many health properties as well! Raw honey fights allergies and heals wounds, soothes coughs, and eases canine stomachs.
apple cider vinegar for dogs

Apple Cider Vinegar for Dogs

a gooey bit of beneficial bacteria-rich debris from fermentation. This can be added to food, and diluted with water and used for cleaning canine ears, soaking paws, and as a skin-soothing rinse.üAfter shampooing and rinsing your dog, try giving him a final rinse with a solution of half water and half apple cider vinegar for a shiny, soft coat.

Raw Honey for Dogs

Feed your dog raw honey rather than processed honey so that your dog receives all the nutritional benefits it has to offer. Raw honey is known to improve allergies in dogs, soothe kennel cough, help dogs' digestive systems and more! Raw honey is strained to remove debris, but that's it. It's otherwise as natural as you can get. Shop at the farmer's market or do an Internet search for local beekeepers. Processed honey, on the other hand, is manufactured with heat, which thins it and destroys many of its beneficial attributes.

Top 20 Essential Oils for Dogs

Carrot Seed (Daucus carota). Skin care, first aid, healing, scarring,skin conditions. Super gentle.Cedarwood, Atlas (Cedrus atlantica). Improves circulation,helps deter fleas. Skin care.Chamomile, German (Matricaria recutita). Also called bluechamomile. Skin-soothing anti-inflammatory. Burns, allergicreactions, skin irritations.Chamomile, Roman (Anthemis nobilis). Intensely calming andantispasmodic. Wound care, teething pain.Clary sage (Salvia sclarea). Different from common garden sage.Gentle, sedating, calming

Aromatherapy for Your Dog’s Arthritis Treatment

Each essential oil has a chemical category that may have several different effects. Aromatherapy is a modern healing art, and the therapeutic quality of essential oils is still being discovered. In other words, aromatherapy is a complex subject that deserves careful study and expert guidance. There are many ways to deliver essential oils into your dog's environment. Essential oils – the volatile substances of aromatic plants – are collected, usually by steam distillation, from leaves, blossoms, fruit, stems, roots, bark, or seeds. The water that accompanies an essential oil during distillation is called a hydrosol or flower water. Hydrosols contain trace amounts of essential oil and are themselves therapeutic.

Herbal Remedies for Your Dog’s Arthritis Pain

While it’s true that some herbs recommended for use with canine arthritis have drug-like actions, including contraindications and potentially adverse side effects, the plants mentioned here are easily acquired from reputable sources, widely used, and safe for most dogs. The descriptions that follow include safety notes as applicable.

Cayenne for Canines: They’re Not Too Hot!

Since 1985, the International Herb Association has announced its Herb of the Year during National Herb Week, which this year is May 1 through 7. The IHA has just published Capsicum: Herb of the Year 2016, a book that reviews chili peppers and their growing conditions and uses, and the organization helps garden centers and herb farms promote its featured plant.

Help Heal Your Dog with Common Herbs

All I could hear was the buzz of a thousand bees as I parted my way through a deep thicket of Heracleum lanatum, a tall, broad-leaved member of the parsley family commonly known as cow parsnip." The big

Apple Cider Vinegar Tinctures & Liniments

Tinctures are liquid extracts that preserve the medicinal properties of the fresh or dried herbs they contain. Alcohol is the most widely used tincture solvent because it extracts fats, resins, waxes, most alkaloids, some volatile oils, and other plant components, which it preserves indefinitely. Vegetable glycerin, a sweet, syrupy liquid, dissolves mucilage, vitamins, and minerals but does not dissolve resinous or oily plant constituents. Apple cider vinegar does not break down plant constituents as effectively…

Using Herbs for Dogs

Increasing research proves that animals, including domestic dogs and cats, understand what it means to have an ailment, and can in fact self-medicate with remedies found in nature. Ever catch a dog eating grass, and immediately try to stop them? This is mysterious behavior, since we know grass makes dogs vomit 8 out of 10 times. But what if that's the whole point? As savvy pet owners, we ought to utilize more natural remedies for our pets because they are good for them, effective, and on some level, our pets actually seem to know them better than we do.

Latest Blog

Assessing Frailty in Dogs

If we’re lucky, our dogs live a long, healthy life and, when their bodies wear out, they close their eyes and make that journey to the bottom of the Rainbow Bridge. Unfortunately, a simple death like that is rarely the case leaving owners judging quality of life.