My guests today are Leslie May and Johann The Dog, authors of the Raise a Green Dog blog and website. This very popular blog began in November 2007 and has grown over the years into a complete website, with educational pages, tips, tricks and product information to help dog lovers learn more about being green and helping their dog live a healthier, happier life. We’ll be talking about toxic chemicals your dog may be exposed to in typical dog products and how to choose and find safer alternatives. Leslie grew up in a green and organic family, before being green was popular. After adopting Johann as a puppy from a no-kill animal shelter in the Indianapolis area in September of 2004, she wanted to be sure that he was not only safe from the environmental dangers that he may encounter in his life, she also wanted eco-friendly, healthy and safe products for him to eat, play with, sleep in, and be and live around, inside and out. Fortunately knowing how to live an eco-friendly, healthy and organic lifestyle gave her a ‘leg up’ in helping find information, tips and products that would keep Johann the happiest and healthiest dog he could be. She quickly discovered that healthy and green information and products were not easy to find for other dog lovers. That’s when Raise A Green Dog was born….with one goal in mind: to bring valuable, green lifestyle information to dog lovers, so they can enjoy a long and happy life with their dogs, and help the environment at the same time. In her spare time, Leslie enjoys life in the mountains of NE Georgia with her dogs, Johann (YoYo) and Gracie, and her kitties, Wolfie and Wiggy; and enjoys competing in dog agility and hiking the many mountain trails with Johann and Gracie. http://debralynndadd.com/category/debras-list/raise-a-green-dog and blog.raiseagreendog.com.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Caring for Your Dog Toxic-Free
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Leslie May & Johann, the Dog
Date of Broadcast: October 14, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio—where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And we need to do that because there are so many toxic chemicals out there. They’re in the food we eat, the water we drink.
They’re in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, even in our bodies from past exposures.
But there’s something we can do about all these toxic chemicals. If you’re being exposed to something, or you have chemicals in your body that you want to remove, it can all be done, that we know how to eliminate toxic chemicals from most of the environment now. It’s just a matter of learning it and actually deciding to do it.
So what’s this show is about.
We’re talking about where the toxic chemicals are, but also, what are the safer solution, and who’s doing what to make this world a safer place.
It is Monday, October 14th. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we are going to be talking about how to have a toxic-free dog.
Now, animals have bodies just like we, humans, have bodies, and they are affected by toxic chemicals as well, except that they are much smaller. And so all the toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to in our daily lives, our pets are being exposed to as well, except that they’re being exposed to—depending on the size of your dog, they’re being exposed to 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 10 times the amount of toxic chemicals that we are just because they’re being exposed to those same amounts, but their bodies are smaller.
And so we have pets now all of kinds, having all kinds of illnesses that pets didn’t use to have before—that they have thyroid problems, they get cancer, all kinds of things.
And so another reason to have a toxic-free home is to protect your pet and have a healthy pet.
So my guest today is Leslie May, and Johann the Dog, who are authors of Raise a Green Dog Blog.
Hi, Leslie.
LESLIE MAY: Hi. How are you? Thank you for having me today.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. And is Johann there too?
LESLIE MAY: Oh, we might hear him bark a little. He’s a Sheltie. He’ll do that.
DEBRA: Good. I just thought he might want to say hello.
LESLIE MAY: I had to keep him out of the cat litter box though, so he’s in a little confined area.
DEBRA: Anytime he’d like to chime in, he’s perfectly welcome.
LESLIE MAY: Well, thank you. He appreciates that.
DEBRA: So tell us how you got interested in having a green dog.
LESLIE MAY: Well, I was raised green. I was raised eco-friendly. I was raised organic. My mother really didn’t know any other way. You know how when you’re raised a certain way, you don’t know there’s another way.
But she was very forward-thinking. She grew up on the campus of IU in Bloomington, and was exposed to a lot of different cultures and ideas, which was amazing, in my education as well.
And she picked up on the importance of living a simpler life, a whole life, a fresh life in a lot of different aspects. And it is a decision she made to how she wanted to have her life be.
And so, of course, being her daughter, that is the life that I led as well. And she had an organic garden. She cleaned with water and vinegar. I didn’t even know what a lawn chemical was until I built my own house and saw my neighbors spreading things.
So when I had cats—I still have my Woolfie and Wiggy. Eveybody’s named after composers, by the way. They’re 17 and 18 years old now. Wiggy is short for Ludwig, by the way. And they’re 17 and 18. And when I started working from home, I just couldn’t wait to adopt a dog. I felt it was time. I had the time to devote.
Dogs are exposed outside a lot more than cats are. I have indoor cats.
I obviously transferred my life to my cats’ lives, to my dog’s life as well, as far as eating and being inside. But I had some things to learn about being outside. We learned a lot of things. My dog has a blog. And people found out that we were green, eco-friendly and organic. And they started e-mailing him and asking a lot of questions—things from, “What kind of lotion does your mom put on her legs because I know you lick her legs, that’s safe for you?”
DEBRA: How cute.
LESLIE MAY: All kinds of little things like that. And the questions became so prolific that I couldn’t even answer them all. I’m like, “People are hungry. They’re hungry for information, they’re hungry for information, I’m just going to show what I do.”
And that’s what Raise a Green Dog is, and how it started.
I adopted Johann in 2004 from a no-kill shelter. And I started the blog in 2007.
DEBRA: Well, very good. So you have a lot to tell us today.
LESLIE MAY: I suppose…
DEBRA: You should probably say that Johann is probably Johann Sebastian Bach the Dog? Is that right?
LESLIE MAY: That’s exactly right. He is named after Bach, and I knew people would make fun of me for calling him Johann.
But his first agility class—we did agility for fun, he got the nickname Yoyo. And it’s his nickname. That’s what we really call him.
DEBRA: I love that. And the cat must be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
LESLIE MAY: Yes, Woolfie, he was the first of the four that I have now; Wiggy and [Woodbag].
DEBRA: And then, what’s the fourth?
LESLIE MAY: And I have Gracie. It’s hard to find a girl’s name. There weren’t a lot of classical composers with women’s name, but Grace Williams, she has written amazing arias. I think she died in the 70’s. But she was actually pretty famous in the opera world.
DEBRA: Well, good. I come from a classical music background, so I appreciate what you’re doing.
So where should we start? We have a few minutes before the break, and I usually want to talk about what are the toxic chemical exposures that might be occurring to start off the show, and then we’ll talk about the less toxic solutions.
So tell us about some of the places where a dog might be exposed to toxic chemicals. Just start with anything.
LESLIE MAY: Yes, and it’s really broad, obviously, because they go pretty much everywhere we do.
So I like to look at a dog’s life as inside life and outside life. And they can be exposed to chemicals within the home if we use toxic cleaning products, how we clean our floor. My dogs lick things off the floor, so that’s how they ingest it more strongly than we would ever.
What they eat—they can be exposed to toxic chemicals through what they eat, GMOs as well, fragrances, sprays, anything inside. They can also be exposed to things outside—lawn chemicals are a big issue with dogs. They spend a lot of time in our lawns.
They can drink in streams that may be contaminated with giardia. Actually, Gracie has gotten that before. And other toxic run-off chemicals, especially in the corn [boat] or through fracking.
We go to agility competitions and the horse arenas where they actually have a lot of chemicals in the dirt, it’s just amazing if you look at what your dog encounters every day that they can probably come into hundreds of toxic chemicals just in one day on a nice outing day—inside and outside.
So it’s broad. It’s very broad.
DEBRA: Have you noticed any particular illnesses amongst animals, your own animals, or other animals that are pets that you know of?
LESLIE MAY: I do believe—there have been statistics and studies done. For example, lawn chemicals, there are some wonderful researches of these, including Purdue Veterinary Teaching Hospital, doing studies on lawn chemicals and their effects on dogs. And they are finding that dogs that aren’t more exposed to conventional lawn chemicals I’m speaking of have more instances of canine lymphoma, as well as some breeds have more instances of bladder cancer.
So there are really wonderful people doing amazing studies that can really help determine the information about this.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leslie May and Johann the Dog might come and make a special appearance as well. And we’re talking about how to protect your dogs, your pets, from toxic chemicals. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Leslie May and Johann the Dog, from Johann Sebastian Bach. And they write Raise a Green Dog Blog, and have a website. You can go to Blog. RaiseAGreenDog.com, or just also go to RaiseAGreenDog.com, and you’ll find lots of information.
I’m looking at your blog page, Leslie, and I see that you have a list of various articles that you’ve written. Some of them are about very specific toxic dangers. So I want to ask you about some of those. Let’s start with—is your dog’s stainless steel bowl radioactive?
LESLIE MAY: That’s quite a headline, isn’t it?
DEBRA: Yes. Let me just tell you how I think as a consumer advocate on somebody who has worked in this field of toxic chemicals for more than 30 years. When I see a statement like, “Is your dog’s stainless steel bowl radioactive?” I immediately think, “Wait a minute. If the dog’s stainless steel bowl is radioactive, what about other stainless steel?”
So let’s talk about stainless steel being radioactive.
LESLIE MAY: Yes. It seemed at first when this was announced back in July of last year that it was a very shocking and unusual thing. But actually, it’s a common thin. There were some stainless steel bowls that was spot checked from Petco, and found to be radioactive.
They came from stainless steel, which is really scrap. Stainless steel is made from scrap, recycled metals. A lot of times these scrap things are thrown in that may come from hospitals that are radioactive x-ray machines, or whatever they may be.
And what they found was that these bowls were made from scrap that contained radioactive material.
And it’s actually a very common thing. How did these bowls become radioactive? I had a gut feeling of how it happened, but I did my research and wanted to really dig in deep, and find out how that could happen.
And some people thought, “Well, these are probably stainless steel bowls from China” because everything from China is dangerous, some people believe, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be from China. It could actually be scrap from the United
States as well.
DEBRA: Here’s the thing about stainless steel, as you said, it’s made from scrap. And it’s a good thing to be recycling steel.
That’s a good thing for the environment. But what ends up happening, as you said, is that there could be all kinds of things that are in the stuff that’s being recycled.
And they’re not necessarily filtered out or it’s not necessarily cleansed. It’s just—this is what’s there in the scrap. And unfortunately, that’s a downside to buying recycled materials because there could be toxic chemicals in it. There could be toxic chemicals in recycled paper from the inks that are in the paper that have been printed on the other paper that’s been recycled, et cetera.
So it could be any stainless steel anywhere.
LESLIE MAY: Not everything is checked. Things are spot-checked, but not everything is checked.
I was communicating with Steve Dale, who writes the Chicago Dog Blog, and he’s like, “How are going to find out which one’s already affected?” I’m like, “Get a Geiger calendar.”
I guess that’s really the only solution.
DEBRA: Or just not use stainless steel. I’ve been writing about not using stainless steel for years because it also will leech on all kinds of heavy metals, and other things. It’s not just that it’s radioactive. And it’s unfortunate because there are so many stainless steel products, and stainless steel has good qualities to it, about being able to wash it, and all those other things.
But this is just another toxic chemical now in stainless steel.
So what do you recommend for a pet bowl?
LESLIE MAY: I actually do use stainless steel. I researched a very high quality stainless steel, a dog bowl company. The reason I don’t use plastic is because it has the potential to leech BPA, an endocrine disrupter. I don’t use ceramic because of the potential of the lead […]
It’s all about weighting risk. And where am I seeing risk in your life, and in your dog’s life. And I determined from my own decision-making that stainless steel was the least risky for my dogs. And I’ve actually had my bowls for 10 years now.
So it’s probably leeched all out by now.
But I think that my bowl is probably the safest material. That’s the decisions that I made. And I still really recommend that on my blog. I think they’re all bamboo. They’re all bamboo bowls that I’ve actually thought about. And they do have BPA-free travel bowls that are—they’re rubber, but they’re BPA-free. They’re like […] or whatever. And that’s for travel.
If you dent them, denting them, and scratching them heavily, that just increases risks. So I keep […] And I use BPA-free travel bowls for travel.
DEBRA: Well, when I had my cats, I don’t have cats anymore, but when I had my cats, I would use ceramic bowls, and I would test them to make sure that they had lead-free glazes on them. Unless it says lead-free specifically, then you still don’t know.
And I think that there are a lot of stores now that are aware of this. And so they’re maybe choosing lead-free. But it’s pretty easy to get. For about $25 at Home Depot, you can get a lead test kit. And so if I have anything ceramic, I just test it, and I find out.
So we need take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May, and we’re talking about toxic chemicals that your dog might be exposed to, and how you can minimize their risk.
And we’ll back in just a moment.
No, we won’t. We’re not going off for until another 10 seconds.
Sorry.
Sometimes I look at this clock on my computer, and I read the seconds instead of reading the minutes. So now, we’re going to break.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May and her dog, Johann. There he is.
LESLIE MAY: Excuse me. Well, I hope he doesn’t speak too long. Sorry about that.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. I was hoping he’d come in and say hello. Is that okay now?
LESLIE MAY: Yes, I’m here. It’s still quiet in the moment. He is in the other room.
DEBRA: It’s totally fine. I’m not worried about it because I can hear you. So again, I’m looking at your list of articles here, very interesting, lots of information about toxic chemical exposures for dogs, and also, how to do things in a safe, toxic-free way. Also, there’s a lot of green natural toxic-free products listed on this website.
I’m at RaiseAGreenDog.com, and there’s a page. It’s RaiseAGreenDog.com/LearnHowToHelpYourDogBeGreen. I’m sure you’ll find it if you go to the website.
LESLIE MAY: There’s a link at the top, Learn to be Green. They’re […] blog post section.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s what you want to click on, it’s Learn to be Green. And again, that’s RaiseAGreenDog.com. And then click on Learn to be Green.
So you have some information on here about fluoride. Let’s talk about water. What kind of water do you give to your pets because there are a lot of toxic chemicals in water?
LESLIE MAY: Well, that’s a very interesting subject right now for us, to tell you the honest truth. Right now, we’re living in the mountains in Georgia, and we have a well. In the summer, our well became contaminated with bacteria, and it took a while—it affected me. It didn’t affect them. And then it just was a happenstance thing, I got poison ivy, which made my hands open, and washing my hands with the water created a constant re-infection in my hands.
And that’s how I found out the well was contaminated.
We actually installed a UV filter, a whole house UV filter in the cabin. That’s how we did that. So we are completely bacteria-free, and we also have a filter that filters—we don’t have to worry about fluoride here. I can mention that. Excessive minerals are common in the mountains, so we have a [pure] filter that gets out the excessive minerals—not all of the good ones, but the excessive ones.
We do want to have water that has minerals and vitamins in it.
Until I got the filter, however, I boiled the water for all of us. And I put a filter—I had to change the filter very often because it would become contaminated with bacteria itself, for showering and cleaning. But for drinking, cooking, we boil it for them. It felt like I was living in a third world country for about three weeks.
But for a city, there are wonderful filters that you can get that will filter out chlorines and fluoride. When we lived in the city, on the city water system, we did use filter like that for virtually everything—cooking, drinking, and even you can get showerheads as well. And we have one of those as well.
DEBRA: I really think it’s necessary.
LESLIE MAY: I think the water is the basic of a dog’s life.
DEBRA: It is.
LESLIE MAY: It’s really, really important.
DEBRA: Yes, I think it’s important for every home to have a water filter considering that the state of water nowadays, and it’s important for humans, and it’s important for pets. And I have one that I like very much that’s very inexpensive—well, not very inexpensive, but what I would call affordable for what it does because it removes everything that you want to have removed, including fluoride and chloramines, and all those things.
And if you want to know more about that water filter, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and go over on the right-hand column, and scroll down, and you’ll see a picture of it. Take a look at that, especially if you have pets because remember that your pets, because of their size, they’re being exposed to the same chemicals that you’re being exposed to except in much greater amounts because of the small size of their bodies.
So earlier, you were talking about the studies about how lawn chemicals are affecting dogs now. I see here that on this page we’ve been discussing, the Learn to be Green page, you have a complete checklist for healthier, safer law for your dog. So tell us about some of the things that people can do with their lawns.
LESLIE MAY: I think that people are overwhelmed by organic lawn care in gardening. It’s really not. The whole charm—it makes you think, “Oh, my gosh. It sounds so difficult.” But it’s not. If you go to a source, and there are simple steps, it really is simple.
When I built my home, the first thing that people started doing was starting the stuff on the lawn. And I didn’t know what they were doing because I wasn’t raised that way. And I asked them, “What are you doing?”
“Well, we’re putting the four-step program on.”
I’m like, “What’s that?”
And they told me, and I said, “That’s not healthy.”
Instinctively, my alarm went off. And so the land that the […] had been sitting for 25 years with nothing happening on it, but it used to be farmland. So it’s pretty much stripped of nutrients at that point.
So of course, we did have to feed our lawns to get them to grow correctly, and we were in a […] situation, so you can’t have the dandelion in your front yard.
We had to really have an effort in growing this lawn organically. I tried different things. I would use corn gluten in the spring to keep the weeds down. I would oversee it regularly. I used fish emulsion because I did find some pellet-based, organic, wonderful fertilizers, but I didn’t care what it was. If it was down there, Gracie would want to eat it. So we switched to a spray, fish emulsion, which we could actually use almost six, seven times a year, very safely, and feed the lawn on a really regular basis.
I used nematodes for grubs because the Japanese beetles were horrific up there in the beginning. And they subsided over time. I had rubber birches which they love. But they subsided over time. Nematodes were amazing. I never had a flea. I pulled dandelions in the spring, in the fall.
It worked out very, very well. It wasn’t difficult. I had one of the best lawns in the neighborhood, and people would complain regularly that their lawn care company killed their lawn.
DEBRA: Yes, I totally understand. So we’re going to take another break. And when we come back, you mentioned fleas, so I want to hear about what you do in a non-toxic and natural way to control fleas with both your dogs and cats.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Leslie May and her dog Johann from RaiseAGreenDog.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Leslie May from Raise a Green Dog. She has a blog and a website, so you just go to RaiseAGreenDog.com. And we’ve been talking about a whole page full of articles that she has from her blog.
When you go to RaiseAGreenDog.com, you just click on “learn to be green” and you’ll find all these articles that tell you not only where the toxic chemicals are, but what you can do to avoid them.
Leslie, it’s coming up on Christmas soon, even though it’s mid-October, as we’re having this live show. And this show will be in the archives, so all the shows are recorded, and you can always listen to any show over again, or listen to shows that you’d missed. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
But we’re coming up on Christmas. I know people are starting to think about those, and you have an article about which kind of Christmas tree is healthier for your dog and the environment. So tell us about that.
LESLIE MAY: I guess that was last year, I wrote that. I haven’t thought about Christmas trees, so wow. We live in the mountains, and we have pine trees everywhere in all shapes and sizes.
And cutting down one pine tree that’s two inches from another one is actually going to be good for the forest. So that’s what we do because it bends out a little bit […] more efficiently and effectively.
So we actually cut down our own little Charlie Brown Christmas tree. But I know that everybody has thought about where they’re going to get their tree this year. And there are so many different options. You can go buy a live tree, which is amazing. And I have a lot of friends that actually do that that live in the city.
Once they’ve used it, and they go and plant it in their yard. And I think that’s a wonderful idea.
Other alternatives are buying from one of the tree-cutting places on the side of the road, or at your local grocery store. I’m not a big fan of that idea. I think there’s a lot of environmentally, I think, wrong with that.
DEBRA: Yes, I do too. To think that I’ve ended up doing that I like the most was going to a local Christmas tree farm. And that way, we could just cut the tree fresh that they’ve been growing there, but we could also check out what kind of pesticides and things that they’ve been using or not.
LESLIE MAY: And the nice thing is that there are organic farms now, tree farms—organic tree farms. And of course, look at [treecycling] options after, either doing it yourself, or having it done as a commercial community project.
And of course, there are artificial trees as well.
DEBRA: Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello? Todd, we don’t have Leslie. Hello? Hello? Hello?
While we’re fixing this and trying to get Leslie back, I’ll tell you more about her website, and hopefully, we’ll get her back.
So let’s see. She talks about growing an organic vegetable garden for your dog so that you can feed your dog organic food.
We were going to talk about fleas and I’m hoping that—our technician is working on getting Leslie back and hopefully, we can talk about fleas.
In the meantime, I’ll start telling you what she has to say about fleas.
I’ve had experiences of fleas as well. And you really have to keep ahead of them. Let’s see. Getting to know fleas—there’s well over 2000 different types of fleas in the world, but it’s the cat flea and the dog flea that are the most problematic for the dogs.
Now, this is very cute because—she’s back. Leslie, are you back?
LESLIE MAY: Yes, I am. I don’t know what happened.
DEBRA: I don’t know what happened, but this is live radio, so anything could happen technically. So we’re talking about fleas. And I was just starting to read from your ultimate guide for fleas.
So why don’t you pick up and continue, and tell us what to do about fleas without toxic pesticides.
LESLIE MAY: Fleas are really easy. I know that once you get them, you don’t think they are, because I’ve been there. Trust me. But I think there are a lot of really very healthy, very environmental-friendly ways that can deal with fleas.
In my yard, I spray garlic spray. To keep the fleas out of the year, I do it a couple of times a year starting right at flea season.
And then inside, I put some diatomaceous herbs, which I think is an amazing product, in my carpet, around the baseboards.
It keeps all the [rag bugs] out.
Also, when you go out and about with your dog, that’s when they’re most likely to actually pick up a flea. There are lots of wonderful herbal sprays on the market that are very healthy, very friendly. We’ve got some on our website in the flea and tick section. And they just repel it because fleas don’t like them.
They just don’t even hop on your dog.
And that’s really what you want.
Fleas don’t really stay on a dog that’s healthy. So feeding them a really good, high-quality diet, organic diet if you can, fleas don’t really like them.
Now, I have brought a flea back on my dog from agility trials. Now, they didn’t stay on the dog, but they’ve gotten on the cats who are 17 and 18. They’re older. They have compromised immune systems all the time now. It just happens when you get older.
So we do get fleas. And there is a wonderful website called GreenPaws.org and there are links in that article, free article in my blog, they have tested every single flea and tick products on the market for danger, or less danger, or no danger.
It’s from the Natural Resource Defense Council. We’ve interviewed their chemist before when they were doing this test. And they kept it up to date. They’re amazing.
But spot-ons have really dangerous chemicals in them. And you really don’t need them. You don’t need them. If you do need stronger products—because I have been there, I live in the mountains in an area where there was a major tick infestation, very dangerous for my dogs.
Actually, one of my dogs got Rocky Mountain, and that is a killer. It can kill your dog. But we were very aware of the symptoms prior, so I knew exactly what it was the minute she collapsed.
So, for ticks, neem—anything with neem in it is a really great repellant. Keep them off your dog, they won’t bite your dog.
And that’s what we’re using in a really high tick-infested area. And then Green Paws has also tested some products that are over-the-counter, and yes, they are stronger, and yes, they are chemicals, but sometimes when you have a really big problem, you need something a little stronger.
We’ve realized that’s reality. It’s either a major life-threatening disease or a little chemical. You have to pick the choices with the rest.
DEBRA: I completely agree. And I think that there are times when we do need to choose the chemical even if it’s toxic in order to solve a problem. And this is why it’s important to be thinking about what are the problems in advance, so that it doesn’t get to that state.
But even I have used the toxic chemical if there is not a natural way to do it, if something has gotten to that degree where it’s needed.
LESLIE MAY: I do give my dogs heartworm pills and there are a lot of people that say, “I can’t believe you do that, Leslie.”
But heartworm is very dangerous. And I don’t want them to ever get it. And if that’s the only chemical that they ingest, one of the very, very, very few—
DEBRA: That’s right. That’s the point. The point is that just because you might need to use something like your heartworm pills, if you eliminate as many other toxic exposures as you can, then it becomes less dangerous to do that.
And so it’s looking at—
LESLIE MAY: And Green Paws have—
DEBRA: —the more you reduce your risk. The more you reduce the toxic chemicals, the more you reduce your risk.
LESLIE MAY: Exactly. That’s when Gracie got rocky mountain. She was very sick, and it’s a neurological problem, as well as a high fever. She had to take antibiotics. There was no other way. But they worked on her because I don’t think she’s had—one other time in her entire life.
And I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had them. I’m old now. There you go. I’m older. So five times in my life when I’m this age, it’s amazing.
DEBRA: Well, it’s been a pleasure to have you, Leslie. We just have less than a minute left on the show, and thank you so much for being with us. And thank you for bringing all this information to people and presenting it in such a delightful and interesting way.
I could give you about 10 seconds to say whatever else you’d like to say.
LESLIE MAY: I just want to tell people that living a green, healthy, organic lifestyle seems like a very overwhelming thing to tackle, but really, if you just go to the […] section at RaiseAGreenDog.com, pick one thing. Make one little change today, one little change tomorrow or next week, and before you know it, your dog will be healthier, happier and live a much longer life.
DEBRA: And thank you for being with us. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
