in this episode you'll hear all about safe herbs for cats and dogs here's a clip from the interview so when you're switching a dog from processed foods to fresh foods one herb or some herb or class of herbs that is really helpful here it can be bitters they have the same effect on animals as they do on people so this will help get the normalize the stomach acids right so that they can digest better but it will take a little bit of time hello and welcome to the herbs with rosalie podcast a show exploring how herbs heal as medicine as food and through nature connection i'm your host rosalie de la forge i created this youtube channel to share trusted herbal wisdom so that you can get the best results when relying on herbs for your health i love offering up practical knowledge to help you dive deeper into the world of medicinal plants and seasonal living each episode of the herbs with roseley podcast is shared on youtube as well as your favorite podcast app transcripts and recipes for each episode can be found at herbswithrosalypodcast.com or through the link in the video description also in the video description you'll find other helpful resources for example to get my best herbal tips as well as fun bonuses be sure to sign up for my weekly herbal newsletter okay grab your cup of tea and let's dive in i am so thrilled to bring you this conversation with swanee simon this is a super important topic especially in regards to safe herbs for dogs and cats stay tuned to hear about what herbs are safe for dogs and what herbs are safe for cats as well as are there cautions to be aware of when using herbal medicine for cats and dogs i met swaney years ago and her depth of knowledge was immediately apparent our mutual friend christophe bernard says that swanny is one of the most generous and kind people he's ever met in his life and i wholeheartedly agree because i'm often asked about working with herbs and pets i decided to throw my usual condensed podcast formula out the window and instead leaned into swanny's expertise to hear her many insights on working safely with herbs for dogs and cats for those of you who don't already know swanny she's an animal herbalist and naturopath who was born in germany but lived in the united states for 30 years after her family moved to new york when she was just one years old she spent her youth in the suburbs of new york with frequent trips to europe followed by several years in greensboro north carolina to study later she lived in florida and texas and returned permanently to europe in 1992 living in both germany and france her love of animals and nature was apparent from a very young age and she has spent her life working with animals and learning everything she could about them influenced by juliet debaraki levy she went on to become an herbalist a tcvm practitioner and a naturopath for animals juliet de barclay levy went on to become a dear friend and lived at swany's farm in germany for several years swanee is highly specialized in the natural rearing and treatment of dogs and cats and is one of europe's most renowned authors teachers and herbalists she is credited with making the subject of raw diet for dogs and cats popular in europe and has written several best-selling books on the subject today swanny lives on a beautiful farm in the high forest region of germany with four dogs five cats two horses about 20 goats and a gang of chickens she splits her time between her farm in germany and her home in the beautiful provence region of southern france swaney has been teaching herbalism tcvm and dog and cat nutrition since 2005 and online classes in germany since 2014.

she's planning online classes in english starting in 2023. welcome to the podcast suani i'm absolutely thrilled to have you here it's good to be here well sony uh i've known you for wow it's been six or seven years now i think and um i got to know you during our intensive time in france where you came already like you could have taught the class and um became very knowledgeable and added so much and on so many levels and it's really just my pleasure to be here with you and to talk about a subject that i get asked about all the time which of course is herbs with animals and i'd love to just begin with you know who are you when when did you start falling in love with animals and and how did that you know how did you find yourself on this path okay so basically my uh my parents tell me ever since i could walk i was chasing after every animal i saw so that seems to have started very early and i could never have a dog until i was like 14.

So i i used to jump over fences i knew every animal in the neighborhood and people used to call me actually when their pets were sick when i was a kid you know and i'd say well you can do this or take it to the vet you know so then when i got a dog at 14 since i was a weird kid anyway and read a lot of books i was became a nutrition expert at 14 you know and was really interested in that subject and you know i used to work in dog kennels and i was responsible for feeding the dogs and i got onto this path of fresh foods for dogs pretty early and i used to fly to germany to buy german shepherds for breeders in the states so i think it was 1986 or something i had to fly to germany to a dog show i didn't have a book to read because back then you needed to have a book to read on the plane you know way back then and uh somebody had given me the herbal handbook for the dog and i'd thrown it in my shelf like ah herbs you know who cares about herbs and i never read it and i thought it's better than nothing so i took it with me on the flight and read it and a lot of it's about nutrition and i was fascinated you know i read it twice on that flight and then i was i thought you know there must be something to all this herb stuff and that got me kind of interested in in herbs you know and yeah from there on i just yeah i didn't have any money so i had to learn a lot by myself from books and stuff and uh yeah and then i moved to germany when i was 30.

and then i did a training to be what we call a tia high practical that means like a holistic practitioner so you're not a vet it's like a three-year training it's pretty intense you have to learn a lot and you can do all kinds of stuff and i'm very specialized in herbal medicine chinese medicine and do like acupuncture and of course nutrition nutrition is my what i'm known for most here in europe i kind of introduced the concept of raw diets to germany and europe so yeah and um later you went from like herbs to then becoming friends with juliet uh help me with her last name juliet the barclay levy juliet dubai rockley levy yeah yeah thank you well um i was so fascinated by her book because she wrote about vaccinations she wrote about a lot of things where i just thought wow you know these are like my thoughts right and i wanted to see if she was still alive somewhere i want to know more about her you know if i could track her down and i'm a little bit obsessive when i want to know something so i hunted her down and finally caught up to her i think she was in upstate new york somewhere i remember the first time i was going to have a phone call with her i was so excited i couldn't even see it i was just i was like freaking out you'd think she was a rock star oh [ __ ] yeah so we kind of hit it off and we talk on the phone a lot and then i kind of got from tish street and who did the film juliet of the herbs she's always kind of taken care of julia that um juliet needed a place to stay and i was like here so then she came to germany and stayed with me for a while and then she you know she'd come stay awhile and then she'd go somewhere else and so the last years of her life she spent quite a lot of time in fact she lived in here where i'm sitting right now oh wow and we had a we put in a wood stove because she liked to sit in front of the fire in her bedroom once that room over there and uh yeah i picked up one of her books in anticipation of our conversation just because i wanted to remember juliet and and the i'd open it up to different sections and and she was in one section she was really opposed to pasteur's germ theory which was you know becoming more and more accepted now but way ahead of her time in terms of that you know where a lot of people were really into just killing everything and not looking at the environment and and she's really she had some deep insights and she was way ahead of her time what's also fascinating is like today everybody's an expert you know you google like i can see when i ask my students tell me something about calendula you know they're all googling right and uh say don't google just tell me what you know but um when she was she wanted to be a vet first and went to veterinary school and then she uh she quit that because she didn't like it and uh and then she learned about herbs by traveling through the entire world that means like she would take a trip for like three months to afghanistan to learn about two herbs imagine acquiring your your knowledge like that that's just that's a completely and i think then you really have a completely different relationship and and uh knowledge about the herbs when you go to those countries and see how people use them there right it's really interesting so that's something that i've always been interested in and and it makes her story and plus she's a little tiny woman and she's very small and uh she was traveling as a woman alone in the in the 30s you know 20s and 30s and 40s 50s that's uh that takes a lot of hutzpah right [Music] yeah yeah i was struck i was i picked up the um handbook for farm and stables when i was reading and i was struck just like how encompassing it was how much information was in that and it i did think and she was not like double checking her facts on the computer you know this was all like her innate knowledge that they're not innate but at least her acquired knowledge she was typing on an old typewriter yeah yeah yeah it's really amazing yeah so she was quite a character too i mean she was just a hilarious person so yeah it's just quite always left an impression yeah so well so you've always loved animals and you came to herbs you went to intensive schooling and um and i know you you go like anything like i see you going to courses and doing that kind of the same thing like that you're saying that juliet did in a way you do that too i know you do going to take classes here and there wherever you can and you have your own particular way of you know working with animals and i'd love to hear about that like what is swani's philosophy well i would i think the word is eclectic you know i've learned all kinds of things i mean i don't even i can't even i've taken so many classes about so much stuff and i kind of take what makes sense to me and incorporate it into my practice so diagnostically i kind of do something that's tcm ish right with my own swanny um you know you you gain experiences and just see things that maybe just don't don't fit so neatly in that system and through the experience you have you just have your own ideas about things then too right so but what i do is basically um i look at the entire animal the energetics of the animal you know where is their tension where are the differences like i always tell my students to to touch both sides at the same time and see if the animal is warmer or stiffer if there's differences you know just like that to just actually feel it and see it you know i do tongue and pulse diagnosis diagnostic acupoints and stuff like that and then i do a whole history i need about an hour and a half for a patient so it takes a while plus you know with dogs i can't just say stick your tongue out or you know how do you feel today you kind of got to get a little bit of a feeling for it so like my students always say when swanny just looks at a dog and knows it's wrong but that's not actually true because i'm sure you with people some of you walk in the door and you'll be like ah kidney person right you can you learn to recognize this pretty quickly so it's not magic it's something you can actually learn and you just have to practice it so what i do is i i kind of do a uh an an amnesis of the dog or cat and then i try to match a formula or herbs to the animal and of course one of the biggest things is nutrition there's this you can't fix things with herbs if you're eating garbage basically right so you need to address that and processed pet foods are just not good you know no matter how high quality they claim to be it's just the whole idea of processed is unnatural so yeah yeah could you speak more about that you know i kind of i know that you that is your specialty and um i just want to know more about that like what is an ideal um diet for a dog i know that's kind of a big question there are different dogs different times of life but what is your philosophy there diet is one of the topics where where animal owners will really you know beat up themselves up in uh in an internet forum there's a lot of arguments about it and the best diet for an animal is is one that maintains its health and that the animal can eat and and do well on so there are dogs or cats you'll have to cook for you know and there are dogs and cats that can eat basically anything raw food and then once in a while you'll have a case with an animal that's so reactive and allergic that it can literally only eat one specific brand of processed foods if that's the situation you have then no matter how much i i hate that it's eating this food i'm gonna i'm not gonna change that you know i mean you have to you know the first most important thing is always my patient i want them to feel good and not my ideology and my ego but the patient has to feel good so that's the most important thing that you don't get caught up in this kind of only my way only this way in my opinion obviously i mean if if i was to talk about if we were talking about people now and i said well processed foods they're great you know mcdonald's hamburgers and stuff they got everything you need there's lettuce i mean come on i think i was an idiot right but when you talk about animals and you you suggest processed foods people are like yo you know and uh then it's it's scientifically formulated you know thing of science diet and things like that so what it a lot of it is just it's highly processed food and the quality of ingredients is generally pretty bad and it's just not something that will really maintain optimal health so the best thing you can do for a cat or a dog is fresh foods now if you want to cook them or not cook them you don't lose that many nutrients cooking depending on how you prepare the food you know that right so i mean you can you can supplement it a little bit but my dogs eat raw foods and they don't have any trouble with it but i've had dogs i've had to cook the food for because the digestion is just not up to it and processed dog foods are just really highly digestible you know the stomach doesn't have much to do and then you start getting issues where people say well i switched them to raw and he's throwing up well of course if i'm eating processed foods you know they they pass through the stomach pretty quickly so what happens the stomach isn't producing acid because it doesn't need to right so and and then normally a dog will have a ph in the stomach after eating of one or two i mean they're very strong stomach acid but it it um what do you call it it regresses with time if your eating processed foods so if you're if you're eating processed foods there's less mixture with acids because they digest really quickly in the stomach they kind of fall apart and the kindness comes in the duodenum and the ph is higher than it would normally be and then you know the pancreas does what the pancreas does enzymes bicarbonate water to neutralize the acid that isn't really there so the ph in the intestines goes higher which which is then an ideal environment for pathogenic bacteria and parasites so one thing leads to another and then you have these dogs that just can't get rid of a giardia infection because they're not eating right so when you're switching a dog from processed foods to fresh foods one herb or some herb a class of herbs that is really helpful here it can be bitters they have the same effect on animals as they do on people so this will help get the normalize the stomach acids right so that they can digest better but it will take a little bit of time so at the beginning it might make more sense to do you call it in english to uh to grind the meat and maybe even cook it because it's easy it's more digestible that way until the stomach starts returning to its normal function so i think it's just important not to get so caught up in this you know he's only going to get meat and bones you know a dog that's eaten processed food for six seven years is going to have trouble digesting bones [Music] i mean it's pretty obvious right yeah yeah so when would you recommend like if somebody wanted to move from a processed food to um raw but whole cooked foods would you recommend bitters would you also recommend like weaning them off you know it's like all of a sudden one day they just get you know meat and bones but maybe it's like they get an increase increasing amount of whole foods and decreasing amount of processed foods um you can do that but some dogs will have problems with that you know the process dry food especially tends to get gassy in the stomach it creates just more gas so that can be a problem but it can be helpful it can be helpful like to just start cooking and then reduce the cooking times over a period of like two or three months you know but really i kind of depend it depends on the dog like young animals puppies kittens you can switch them immediately right you know they're not destroyed yet but older dogs especially old dogs have to be very careful and they may never be able to eat bones you know they you just have to use something else so you know just a little common sense actually and so it can make sense to to gradually switch them but some dogs will have some problems with that so you just have to see yeah i i really appreciate your specific approach of common sense and also really listening to the patient uh and seeing what they really need rather than a dogmatic view you know this or that i wanted to mention or i wanted to see if you'd mentioned bitters in particular like are there bitters that you tend to use for this process oh well i have my favorite bitters well i tend to use herbs uh it's another one of my little things but i like to use herbs that that grow in my environment because i think they're you know they're in the same environment as me so i try to use things that grow here what i use a lot is a rumex burdock is the best dog plant so is that yellow is you use room x like yellow doc root and dark root yeah burdock root i use i like to use uh root herbs too like the liver herbs which are almost always bitter um for dogs with allergies too because i've just found that you know especially if you tincture them there's not a lot of allergic potential then you know you're you're not having any pollens underground so that can be helpful right so that can be helpful in in different ways because you know these these bitter herbs they're usually also liver herbs or if you have one like burdock is like the the best herb because it it's a it's a liver herb it's a kidney herb it's a lymph lymphatic herb you know and it's it's really i've never had anybody not uh tolerate it it's a super well tolerated herb it's very doggy you know when you when you look at the burdocks they're really annoying because what do they do they're sticking your animals first so they're right they're kind of like saying pick me right and so when you're giving the herbs to the dogs are you giving them like the fresh root chopped up or you know dried root cooked or how do you like to give it um all of the above basically for my patients um you know i'll go outside and say look that's burdock but i guess it's when you when you do something too long you sometimes lose the ability to see how difficult it is for somebody that is starting out to identify burdock like to me it's like screaming burdock right but um i guess people are just very unsure of of digging up the right plant which is you know if you're not 100 sure don't use it so we sell dried burdock in in my company you know dried burdock ground root and i use tinctures a lot with animals okay and i mean you could use a tea and you can also feed the the fresh roots obviously and even the leaves you know wonderful and the seeds you can use too but it's a very useful plant it is i feel like you know when i when i was in clinical practice all the time even now as a teacher i get questions like i have this problem what herb do i take for it and and i'm always like that wait hold on here you know it is looking about the whole person and so often these other things like you know diet or lifestyle really play a huge role in the healing process and herbs i always think of like i in my mind i think of a pie chart you know and like herbs might be like 30 which is a really important percentage in the healing process but we can't forget about sleep or diet etc you know all these different parts to make the whole so i'm getting that sense that that's you know it's not like not working with animals it's called holistic medicine because right oh so yeah yeah you can't just treat one aspect and ignore the rest you know if you've got a dog outside on a chain miserable you've got to treat that too if you've got an unemployed border collie he needs a job as well right so these things you have to treat and then of course you know diet lifestyle all these things play a huge role so yeah my my my patients always get supplements they get herbs they get um recommendations tips tricks and then they get uh dietary advice always right you know but you know they know they come here they kind of expect that with the nutritionist yeah i'm wondering about are there like general maintenance herbs that you love for dogs and also for cats like you mentioned that you love burdock a lot um but are there things like you know somebody you know lives with a dog or a cat or their herbs that maybe they could think about of like like i think of like nettle like i love nettle for myself it's not that i take it for a particular ailment to just i feel great when i am working with nettle regularly so is there something like some herbs like that you think of for dogs and cats sure and you know the great thing is especially dog owners they walk their dogs so they're basically out every day so i just encourage them to pick some dandelion leaf some nettle leaf some cleavers cleavers are great you know stuff has some burdock just to learn a few herbs that they can safely pick some chickweed you can all stick that in their food on a regular basis plus burdock um is i mean it's a it's a powerful herb but at the same time it's relatively mild it's very and then as a supplement i often uh recommend rose hips yeah i started selling rose hips like 20 years ago and now every last her place for pets in europe sells rose hips it's kind of funny and i just uh think that's a good way to to get some extra nutrients and vitamin c and stuff like that and then i have different herb mixtures uh that i make to sell which is different than what i do in practice because my preference is always to make a very specific mixture for for each animal but that's not realistic you know not everybody can come here and sit here for an hour and a half and mix their own herbs so we sell some mixes that are kind of and they have herbs like like burdock like um nettle seeds depending on what they're for they have some alfalfa some some kelp stuff like that right they're just kind of it's just to tonify different organs we have different mixtures so that's something you can do if you're going to pick herbs in the wild you have to be a hundred percent sure that you have the right plant you really need to and and also pick each one you know like some herbs you could have something poisonous growing between it so you don't just grab a handful you're gonna have to pick each one something like ramson's right where you could have you know people in europe every year some people die when they're picking ransoms because they eat i think crocus or something like that they pick something i don't know how you can confuse them but they do yeah so you want to be careful with things like that all right are there herbs that are generally safe for humans but just not okay for dogs and cats things that people need to keep in mind um with cats for sure cats are very sensitive to salicylates right how do you say it i think you said it right social lights salicylate so okay so like um willow um meadow suede things like that you won't use for a cat that's good and then also cats have have a have their liver functions different their enzymes are always active in the liver so um they're more susceptible to toxicity from essential oils and one thing i'm a little bit um concerned about is aromatherapy has become very popular and now it's everything that becomes popular with humans eventually comes into the animal world and um you know dogs and cats have an incredible sense of smell i've read that a dog can can still detect one drop of urine and 60 million drops of water so um just imagine going in a perfume store and when you walk in somebody pours a bucket of whatever over your head and you have to walk around like that for a week probably wouldn't feel very happy so i think we really need to be careful with essential oils with animals just because of the odor um it's it's quite an assault on their senses and with cats cats uh can react um well a lot of essential oils are very toxic for cats so there's lists in the internet like in my classes i have lists of there's a few that you can use but i always think why right you know some people will try to do flea and tick repellents with essential oils and i've read recommendations where they have 300 drops and 100 milliliters of pure alcohol and i'm like you cannot do that with a talk or a cat yeah that's just cruel so maybe be careful with that i think the best i've seen some people that use aromatherapy with animals where they let the animal come and sniff it that's a sensible way to use it but pouring these essential oils on on them where they can't escape from that odor i think is something that you should be careful with yeah it's a perspective hi tessa hi tessa um i think i skipped over if there's i know that cats are very different in their in terms of their diet and um everything but are there general herbs for cats that you find to be useful well i don't um i usually um don't supplement herbs just in without a reason for cats because you know normally i i think cats should be allowed to go outside and then you know they'll partake on their own like that um if you have a house cat i don't know what they call it in english we have like cat grass that they can nibble on um also there's some house plants that are quite toxic for cats so you'd want to be careful with that but you know upper poke cats as far as a raw diet a fresh food diet cats are obligate carnivores for cats it's even more important the main diseases cats get is kidney failure diabetes and and gingivitis tooth and gum disease which is directly my opinion related to diet so my cats all eat raw food they chew chicken wings they chew bones they have you know they're they're spectacularly healthy and uh yeah but dried because cats normally a cat would hunt several times a day so cats in nature would get almost all the water they need from their prey animals that they eat they that's in the nature of cats is that they don't drink much at all they're not thirsty dogs are different since they pant they need a lot of water so when they're eating dry food they'll make up for the missing moisture by drinking but cats won't so when cats are getting dry food they're just chronically dehydrated and you know that's not good for the kidneys or anything so that's something where a diet plays a huge role on the other hand it's extremely difficult to switch a cat's food yes very personal meditation yeah so best is to raise them that way my cats won't touch processed foods the kids yeah yeah i have a story i want to share about my cat um our our cat was uh given to us by another and we instantly fell in love with him and it's our first my first cat as an adult so i'm kind of like anxious like wanting to do everything right and make sure he's okay well this one time he got sick and he didn't eat for a day i was like that's weird they didn't eat for two days so i started looking on the internet and i read it's very important the cats eat and you don't want you know they can't go a long time without eating right so i took them to the vet because i didn't know what to do you know so i took them to the vet the vet was very thorough did a hands-on thing and they that said well it doesn't feel like the cat is constipated but that's probably my best guess and then she gave me a you know constipation medicine laxative and showed me the thing that was most helpful she showed me how to give the medicine to the cat you know holding him and had a little syringe to like put it back in his mouth and stuff and so i was like oh okay and i said how often do i need to give this to him she said oh every day and i said for how long she was probably for the rest of his life and i was immediately like whoa like we don't even know if that's the problem so i got home and like you know i started opening up my books on cats and trying to figure it out and i read about slippery elm being helpful in this situation so i didn't even touch the laxative and i made up the slippery elm and i don't know you know probably the slippery elm helped maybe the cat was just didn't want me to give him slippery elm anymore so he started eating again it's been fine ever since but i was so grateful to know about slippery elm and i was kind of honestly a little bit horrified that the recommendation was to give this laxative for the rest of his life because that just immediately was red you know red flags for me like that doesn't make sense i'm wondering what um are there other things that like herbs are just really remarkable for that maybe people are you know often turning to more drastic measures for oh yeah i mean i don't know how many examples do you want i am trying to work up to your recipe but you know let's hear some other examples and also well my recipe isn't really for dramatic problems but i have um i have different formulas for things like anaplasmosis lace lash maniosis lyme disease and then people buy it because we only sell it for animals and they buy it and give it to people but apparently it works there too so that's good to know but um one of them one of the big things is like giardia you know you'll see puppies with giardia and they go to the vet and they get uh warm medicine it's usually panicure or something like that for five days which doesn't really get rid of the giardia you know and so they'll test negative for giardia but then they get diarrhea and so they go back to the vet and then they get antibiotics right and all this makes no sense to me but this is what happens and then after the antibiotics then they have giardia again and i've seen dogs they're one year old and they've been through the cycle like six or seven times and they're really sick and only a year old their digestion is destroyed and giardia is is relatively easy to get rid of you know first of all diet you know they prefer carbohydrates so a raw fresh food diet without grains or potatoes is the best thing you can do and then the microbiome is like what a subject right probiotics is the next important thing so you starve the giardia you give the the intestines some good uh bacteria and that's usually enough to get rid of them and then if you wanted to you could use a herb like um hydrastis what is that goldenseal will work there uh colloidal silver will work uh msm will work you know simple you don't even need to really go to herbs but there's quite a few herbs that are effective there and that treatment it's you you'll never hear me say that a treatment works all the time except with this one with giardia it works always never had it not work and it has no side effects you don't destroy the digestion the dogs it takes you have to do this for eight to twelve weeks i have a protocol that i have them follow and they do it for eight to twelve weeks and then they're gone and they stay gone and that's something that that i find so what did albert einstein said he said the the definition of insanity is if you keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different result and this just seems insane to me like that you know just keep on giving this treatment even though it's obviously not working the animals sicker so that's one really good example right and then a lot of digestive issues um kidney issues um i mean this a lot of a lot of the patients like let's say 99 of the patients i get here they've been through everything they spend hundreds or thousands of euros on treatments they've been to all kinds of clinics nobody knows what's wrong because the blood panel's okay so the animal is healthy and then you have a a cat or a dog covered in sores you know like this and they say well it doesn't have anything because the blood panel's okay and you know that's kind of uh horrible [Music] you know and they sit here and cry the patients because they just they're just so done and it's horrible because they feel so helpless and a lot of these animals just by looking at the energetics i don't really like i won't treat disease patterns i don't need a name i don't care what it's called like if they come and say well it's ibd or ibs well it pretty much means they don't know what's wrong anyway so it doesn't really matter for me it's a it's a spleen key deficiency or you know something like that these are the kind of uh disease patterns and i try to you know i try to get it back you know this dog was supposed to be put down because she uh got run over in grease and uh her her hips really messed up all her bones were broken and she's almost 10 years old now and imagine this is the most incredible animal i've ever met hmm yeah she's like a little person yeah she is so sweet so you can you can do so much i've had so many hopeless cases here or or dogs that were supposed to be put down that were you know fine some of them you can get them back to almost perfect health and others you can always get an improvement but you know you can't fix everything obviously animals are like people like i'm tall i'm six foot one so guess what kind of problems i have right back pain flouching so you know different people tend to have different problems everybody has let's say one area in their body that's more sensitive and it's the same with animals you'll have um like my retriever he's uh he gets excited really really easily he's you know he's always afraid to do something wrong so he gets stressed out so he he'll have stomach problems if he's going to have a problem [Music] and tessa's a busy body so you know she has busy body problems and yeah every dog is and every cat is different so you get to recognize these types of animals too the liver types the the intestine types the stomach types the skin types you can just see them right i'm sure you can too right you know so well the recipe that you're sharing with us is one that i love because it's so practical and i know many people um will be able to to use with their furry friends and it's swani's paw sav yeah it's a it's a real simple recipe and i guess you could switch it up a little bit but i um i made it quite a few times and tried to get it so because with when you put on a dog's paw a salve you know they're walking around your house so you don't want it to be too oily right and you don't want them to slip and at the same time uh you it needs to be good enough so i can like draw into the pads of the feet so what you have in the winter i don't know if it's the same in these days but they spray a lot of salt everywhere for the ice and snow and then the dogs walk on that and if they have a little crack in their pads that's quite painful rubbing salt in the wound so you can put you can put the salve on there before you go out and also when you come back maybe rinse the feet and put the salvo on to kind of heal it up so that works quite well right yeah well thank you so much for sharing that recipe with us and for the listeners if you'd like to download your recipe card with the full recipe then you can visit the show notes at herbswithrosalypodcast.com and get that copy when i was at the ihs i i shared a recipe which i was sure everybody knew and and nobody knew it and i was quite surprised it's uh making like this thick carrot soup for diarrhea and in germany like everybody knows this but it seemed like in america nobody knows this so i'd love to give you that recipe it is one of the best treatments for diarrhea whether it's children or animals yeah and it's super simple you just boil carrots with a little bit of salt to death and then use one of these what do you call them immersion blenders thank you um and just make this thick soup and feed that a couple times it's the best diarrhea medicine there is oh awesome thank you for that yeah carrot soup carrot soup yeah you need to spread that around america because it's really so simple and it works great with kids too wonderful okay well i asked my friends on social media questions that they might have for you and one question that just kept getting repeated over and over was um advice for caring for both elderly dogs and for elderly cats okay so um elderly dogs and cats the age isn't really the problem it's just it's the same with old people the older you get the more illnesses you're gonna have you know your joints are hurt you get tired more easily your digestion is sluggish or you don't see as well you don't hear as well you know these kinds of problems and pets have the same problems so to just say in general for old pets there's a few things you should watch out for i have a good article in german but i'll have to translate it into english just it's basically common sense again just think of what happens when you get older like dogs don't hear a lot of dogs and cats one of the first senses they lose is their sense of hearing and what you'll notice with dogs for example is that they start barking more and barking earlier when at noises because they can't really identify them that doesn't mean they're being bad it may be that they just don't hear as well right especially with kidney disease any kind of kidney disease you're going to have ear issues chinese medicine right yeah i was going to say that's a really great chinese medicine well it's true though yeah yeah so if your dog is uh is uh losing its hearing you might or cat you might want to just give it nettle seeds they work fantastic for dogs and cats i mean really well to bring down the excellent stuff i've been using this for many years since the first time i read this thing from jonathan treasurer i thought i'll try that and it's it's incredible that's great wonderful to hear right so that's one thing and then you know they may be losing their eyesight usually their sense of smell remains relatively good until old age but when their sense of smell when they start losing that they may suddenly not want to eat stuff because they can't smell it so what can you do you can heat up the food it smells more like just picture a steak you've got a raw steak in your fridge can you smell it no when you start smelling the steak when it's in the frying pan or on the grill that's when you're like somebody's making steak so you can help old animals by cooking or heating their food to help them with the smell also they may have trouble chewing if they have tooth issues or digestive issues so you might need to switch them to ground meat lighter digestive foods not feed bones and stuff hard to digest things they may have problems a lot of animals if they have back problems when they squat to take a poo it hurts so they don't squat as often and then they get constipated more easily the longer the feces sits in the in the uh intestine the drier it gets right so uh you may want to just add some psyllium to their diet and make sure that they're having ease with bowel movements to see about joint pain if they're in pain there's lots of great supplements um also inflamma anti-inflammatory herbs that you can use there you know things just things like curcuma you know i was just going to ask about turmeric and if that's something that yeah right yeah yeah well um usually you make we call it the golden paste i have a recipe in german but i need to start translating more stuff okay um that works really well you know with dogs you can use the basically the same herb sets with people you can use willow and stuff like that but also nutritional supplements like new zealand green lip muscle omega-3 fatty acids are basically important with any kind of inflammation or pain you know they're just they really should be supplemented best is if there's a little bit of vitamin e with it then these chondroitin glucosamine supplements msm they're all really helpful for uh joint pain this kind of stuff and then there's some great tonics like we make a tonic mixture i call senior fit uh phyt like fido nobody gets it but [Laughter] and it just has different tonic herbs it has some tonic for the eyes for the ears for the digestion the liver the kidneys you know just a real gentle kind of tonifying and there's some there's some good chinese mixtures uh this uh what is it called the great tonifying decoction shikhwanda boo i think it's called yeah don't nail me on that i'm not sure if that's the right name i think it's um that are just great all around tonics uh you can like give them something for their immune system astragalus is really good for that with cats and dogs it kind of tells the immune system wake up pay attention you know so that's a good herb to take if you're coming into a season when illness comes a lot of times like in germany a lot of dogs in the in the spring the first warm days this kind of diarrhea goes around you know with people it's mostly in the fall the wet cold weather where you'd want to take astragalus to get your right now you probably want to take it all the time yeah i am pandemic yeah so yeah crazy times we're living in definitely oh my last question for you regarding animals is of a personal nature my dad he lives in the tropics in mexico and so it's you know pretty hot and humid there and his best friend is kiko and they are inseparable and kiko often gets hot spots and i i know that you don't do like oh take this herb for the hot spot um but you know somebody if a dog comes to you with hot spots like what are things you're considering thinking about you know the underlying causes well the the well i kind of look at a hot spot like this kind of volcanic eruption so you basically something hot is building in the body and can't find a way to exit it's usually just toxicity so it'll find a way out and then it creates this hot spot so that's kind of my picture to that uh what underlying is usually you want to treat the the digestive tract with with probiotics you know give them probiotics for a month some good mixture of probiotics um you want to clean the blood like liver herbs you know if you have skin problems just remember when you have skin problems treat the liver very simple it's a basic tenet right yeah it is there's always that like desire to just want to treat it topically but that's generally not going no i'll give you so you you want to treat the liver use alternatives liver herbs cooling herbs because hot spot so again like the bird could be a great great choice here and then you know usually a lot of these dogs are not on a great diet so that might be something he needs to change also good here are lymphatics levers calendula that kind of thing internally externally what works great on a hot spot is uh just a buy some cheap black tea bags in the supermarket the cheapest ones soak them a little in water and put it on the hot spot dries it up pretty quickly because there's stringency there that's strange it kind of draws out the gunk right so you could do that that you can always find everywhere in the world so that's pretty easy um other things you know drying things but it's not solving the problem he's gonna just gonna keep on getting hot spots i don't know if it's a long coated dog um it can be a reaction like if if it's a dog that's in the water every day and never really dries create a kind of bacterial infection on the skin that looks like a hot spot but usually you see that with dogs like huckleberry that are just always in the pool [Laughter] and yeah or reacting to some kind of spot-ons or or flea stuff but you know i have to know more about the dog where are the hot spots but basically you want to you want to detox a little bit clean up the microbiome and then topically uh you could put calendula on it too right and i wouldn't use a salve i would use uh a tincture you can dilute it because the cells just gonna you might get a secondary bacterial infection if you put fat over it so you want something drying a hot spot is always very moist very you know it's very smelly moist and hot yeah drying things those are great tips thank you so much and literally black bags work really well propolis you can try if the dog is or cat well cats i've really seen hot spots but uh propolis can be quite helpful nice and as a tincture again thank you all right well sony you keep mentioning all these resources that you have in german when are you gonna be producing things in english for us well i'm in germany i've been teaching for many years and i teach live classes so um that's kind of um uh it's kind of exhausting after a while i've had up to seven classes a week and so i'm this is i'm starting my last classes now so i'm doing one more herb class one more tcm class and one more nutrition class and then i'm finished and after that i'm going to stay in france for a while and translate everything into english and i'm going to pre-record everything so the idea is kind of have pre-recorded classes and then maybe do a q a session once a month [Music] my students love my ask me anything sessions anyway i can see why yeah because they have all kinds of questions so um uh yeah so that's the plan you know and then life happens and pandemics happen so it's taking longer than i would have liked but and i'm also hoping to finish fixing the house in france and maybe having like smaller groups there i think we will sleep like 14 people when it's done wonderful that'll be cool right yeah be so cool yeah well i know that i'm not the only one looking forward to your english offerings so um that will be something i will definitely let everybody know once they exist and you know have you back on too so yeah that would be great yeah promotion i'm not very good at that but yeah i'm i'm hoping that it's going to take a while because my scripts are really long too so it's like 500 pages so it's a lot of stuff wow that's just the nutrition class so um yeah well you are a gift to the herbal world to the animal world and i'm just so appreciative that you're here with us sharing your experience and practical wisdom thank you so much swany for for taking time you're with us you're most welcome thanks for having me so this is fun speaking english i have to get used to that right you do it so well so well you know i learned everything in english but the last 25 years i've basically been speaking german all the time except yeah yeah well may this be the first of many english offerings from you and we're looking forward to it me too okay thank you sonny thank you thanks for watching don't forget to click the link in the video description to get free access to the recipes swani is sharing with us including swanee's pasta and the german carrot soup also available are the complete show notes including the transcript you can also visit swani directly at 3-dogs night.com if you enjoyed this interview then before you go be sure to click the subscribe button so that you'll be the first to get my new videos including interviews like this i'd also love to hear your comments about this interview and working with herbs safely for dogs and cats i deeply believe that this world needs more herbalists gardeners and plant-centered folks like you i'm so glad that you're here and a part of this herbal community have a beautiful day

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