10 holistic pet care tips you can trust

By Christie Keith, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, June 10, 2008

For more than 22 years, I’ve been raising and caring for my pets using alternative and complementary methods. In that time, I’ve seen dozens of supplements, herbs and nutritional theories hailed as the one true way to pet health, and then fall by the wayside.

After interviewing dozens of holistic vets, following a lot of tips that sounded promising and undergoing a great deal of trial and error with my own animals in the past two decades, I’ve come up with a list of 10 tried-and-true holistic tips that have worked for my pets as well as many others.

One caution, and it’s a big one: Talk to your veterinarian before trying to treat your pet at home. It’s one thing to give a gingersnap to see if it helps a healthy puppy’s mild carsickness; it’s another to think you can treat a pet’s violent or chronic diarrhea at home. There is nothing “holistic” about treating conditions without a diagnosis.

1. Peppermint and catnip
Peppermint (Mentha piperita) and catnip (Nepeta cataria) are wonderful remedies for nausea and car sickness. Peppermint also regulates peristalsis, so it can help with irritable bowel syndrome, and even with symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease.

Catnip has similar effects on digestive upsets while being more palatable for felines. Even if your cat doesn’t experience a euphoric reaction to the herb — and 20 percent of cats don’t — it still has digestive benefits and can also serve as a mild appetite stimulant to both dogs and cats. It may help with some forms of vomiting in cats, but it’s important first to have your veterinarian determine the cause of the vomiting.

If your cat is attracted to catnip, you can just put some of the dried, crushed herb on the ground for the cat to roll around in. If not, you can add the dried herb to their food at the rate of around half a teaspoon per pound of food. You can also give cats or dogs a glycerin-based tincture (available at some health food stores), half a milliliter for every 20 pounds of body weight.

Glycerin-based peppermint tinctures are widely sold in health food stores for use by children. Dogs can be given these products dosed by body weight according to the guidelines on the label; those that also contain ginger are especially helpful for car sickness. (And yes, a gingersnap will also often do the trick.)

Because dogs tend to like the taste, they will usually drink a weak peppermint tea given in a bowl instead of water. It should be offered lukewarm or at room temperature rather than very hot or chilled.

Peppermint is contraindicated for pets with reflux, as it relaxes the esophageal sphincter.

2. Medical grade honey
When one of my dogs developed a drug-resistant staph infection, I spent weeks and hundreds of dollars on antibiotics, only to have the infection come back again and again. I finally banished it, hopefully forever, with the aid of an FDA-approved bandage containing medical grade honey.

This honey contains an enzyme that is believed to prevent bacterial growth. It comes from bees that feed on the flowers of the Manuka plant in New Zealand. It’s being used in both human and veterinary medicine to treat and prevent resistant bacterial infections. The product I used is called Medihoney.
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