Why the sentence “If your animal has a such and such a problem it is BAD GENETICS” drives me crazy…
Okay…seeing this on a LOT of other groups and posts…and can’t say I really blame them because it seems like everyone was taught that if something can’t be fixed easily it must be a genetic flaw therefore un-fixable. Whether it be bad hips or teeth on a dog, poor conformation on a horse or bad behavior of any animal…it must be in their DNA! Well I have some wonderful news for you…GENES PLAY A SMALL ROLE…DIET AND ENVIRONMENT PLAY A HUGE ONE!
Here’s how it works. Even if your cat, dog or horse was born with not the greatest of genes (and I’m not talking about some poor animal that has been in-bred and over-bred to the nines) it still has a chance to lead a healthy life! Why? Because gene expression can be turned on or off like a light switch. What turns bad genes on? Poor nutrient deficient foods, chemicals, stress etc. turn all the bad genes on like a christmas tree.
Good food, as clean an environment our pets live in as we can muster and calm peaceful home mean the opposite will happen.
Several studies have been done on twins that share the SAME DNA…one was a smoker, ate poorly and under a lot of stress…the other ate well, exercised and had less stresses in her life…guess what happened? The one with the poor life-style went on to develop health problems and CANCER. The other healthy twin didn’t get Cancer and was in good health…so SAME GENES…different results.
Animals are no different. There are dog breeders that have NO hip problems in their animals when they feed raw and add in missing nutrients back in…NONE! Poor teeth non-existent in dogs and cats that get their nutritional needs met and have low toxin levels.
The problem is that people often like to say – that animal just has bad genes because it takes the responsibility off…because most believe there’s nothing one can do after that sentence. Well there’s lots that can be done especially if breeders fed their animals whole specie appropriate foods and minimized the drugs and vaccines…we’d have so many less sick animals in the world and we wouldn’t have to shrug our shoulders and think it must be just bad genes!
What we put into our pets is significantly more important than what genes they were born with…