In our age of modern medicine, when illnesses are treated in high-tech hospitals with laser surgery and powerful prescription drugs, it is easy to forget that until the 20th century, plants were the medicines that kept people and their companion animals well. In fact, most of the prescription drugs in use today were derived and synthesized from plants, and outside of Canada and the United States, plants remain the world’s primary healing agents.

How do you judge an herb’s quality?

The best dried herbs are fragrant, flavorful, colorful and pungent. They don’t look like shredded hay or smell like cardboard. These plants are dried at low temperature with lively air circulation and stored away from heat, light and humidity, the enemies of all dried herbs. The best herbs for medicinal use are grown organically or wildcrafted from pollution-free sources, then handled with care at every step of their drying and storage. By their look, smell and taste you can recognize these plants – the peppermint is obviously peppermint and the chamomile is obviously chamomile.

Here are simple rules to keep in mind as you evaluate dried herbs. The larger the piece, the longer it lasts. Powdered herbs begin to lose their flavor as soon as they are ground. The more a leaf is exposed to heat, light, the open air and humidity, the faster it loses its healing properties as well as its taste.

This information will help you answer a commonly asked question: “How long can a dried herb be kept before it loses ifs effectiveness?” The answer is, “It depends.” While most herbs should probably be replaced after a year, the most sensible rule is to look, smell, touch and taste. Roots and bark hold their fragrance, color and taste longer than delicate flowers, yet even blossoms and leaves can retain their herbal identity for much longer periods if properly stored.

From long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care, this 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

The notion that every meal an animal eats should be completely balanced is a recent invention resulting from the use of packaged foods. If you were restricted to the same food in the same amount every day for the rest of your life, each identical meal would have to be nutritionally balanced because you would have no other source of nutrients. But you don’t eat this way, you don’t feed your children that way and animals in the wild don’t eat that way. It’s completely unnatural. What matters is not whether tonight’s dinner contains 100 percent of every nutrient your body requires but whether all of the combined foods you eat today or this week provide them.

From long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care, this 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

In our age of modern medicine, when illnesses are treated in high-tech hospitals with laser surgery and powerful prescription drugs, it is easy to forget that until the 20th century, plants were the medicines that kept people and their companion animals well. In fact, most of the prescription drugs in use today were derived and synthesized from plants, and outside of Canada and the United States, plants remain the world’s primary healing agents.

The surgical techniques and pharmaceutical drugs that define Western medicine work well in acute or crisis conditions, but they are far less successful in the treatment of chronic illnesses. This is because Western medicine as practiced by physicians and veterinarians is allopathic, which means that its focus is the alleviation of physical symptoms, not finding and treating the cause. Chronic conditions like arthritis, skin and coat problems, gingivitis, ear infections, asthma and allergies may improve temporarily when symptoms are masked, but they usually recur and, over time, grow worse. For this reason, conventional or orthodox medicine considers these conditions irreversible and incurable. In addition, drugs and surgery carry hidden costs in adverse side effects that range from negligible to fatal.

The advantage of natural remedies is that they often work as well as or better than conventional treatments, have fewer side effects and address the cause of a condition, resulting in its improvement or cure. It is because of allopathic medicine’s limitations that so many Americans have begun to explore more natural approaches to health and healing. This is not to say that natural therapies are successful in treating every condition in every person or pet, but they offer a first line of defense in the prevention of problems and, when an illness is well-established, they can help speed healing.

By far, the world’s most widely used natural therapy is herbal medicine. Every culture on every continent has experimented with local plants and developed a tradition of diagnosis and use, a repertoire based on experience and observation.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

The purity of your pet’s drinking water is a serious consideration. In his book Pet Allergies, Alfred Plechner lists contaminated drinking water as a common cause of health problems. The simple act of replacing tap water with distilled, bottled or filtered water can bring surprising, dramatic improvements.

Water is the only thing to which your pet should have unlimited access. Animals know when they’re thirsty and they should have free access to clean containers of pure, healthy water.

Municipal water contamination has become a national concern now that chemical pesticides, fertilizers, industrial solvents, road salt, bacteria, parasites and heavy metals have found their way into kitchen faucets. Whatever you can do to improve your drinking water is worth the effort. Your own health as well as your pet’s health will improve.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.

Pet food manufacturers and the veterinarians courted by their sales representatives have convinced most Americans that because commercial pet foods are designed in laboratories by people with academic credentials and because their labels contain long lists of nutrients and claims of being “scientifically balanced” and “nutritionally complete,” they are superior to anything an animal might otherwise consumer. Table scraps, raw food, “people food” and any supplements that might disrupt the commercial food’s precisely controlled distribution of vitamins and minerals are particularly frowned upon.

There is no doubt that commercial pet foods sustain life. Dogs, cats and other animals live for years on foods that come out of bags, can and boxes. But do these foods promote health? If they did, our companion animals would enjoy long, happy lives free of arthritis, hip dysplasia, eye problems, ear problems, fleas and other parasites, gum disease, lick granulomas, thyroid imbalances, skin and coat problems, personality disorders, birth defects, breeding problems, diabetes, cancer and other major and minor illnesses.

Before World War II, most Americans fed their pets raw bones and table scraps. Today, everyone uses convenience foods, and pet food companies are industry giants. Diet isn’t the only thing that has changed. So has life expectancy, with the life span of many breeds now less that half what it was two or three decades ago. Skin and coat problems are so common that we accept them as unavoidable, and today’s veterinarians routinely treat conditions that used to be unusual or even rare.

Of course, more has changed in the last 50 years than our pet’s diets. Environmental pollution, toxic chemicals and stress take their toll on companion animals as much as they do people. But a growing number of experts attribute the epidemics of modern animal illnesses in large part to diet.

Excerpted from long-time Whole Dog Journal contributor CJ Puotinen’s incredible resource, The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care. This 500+ page volume is everything you need to know to ensure good health and long life for your dog. You can purchase it right now from Whole Dog Journal.