Tollden Farms

How do animals in the wild keep themselves healthy? They seek out and eat plants with medicinal properties. They seek out foods for a nutritionally balanced diet.

When laboratory scientists started to explore how animals select their diets, they quickly found that rats that are presented with a range of foods “cafeteria style” will select a nutritionally balanced diet. This ability is termed “nutritional wisdom” and can be loosely applied to the way in which wild animals manage to meet their nutritional needs from foods that are often changing in composition, availability and location.

Animals clearly eat food that both prevents and cures ills. They are able to find substances that protect against future illness and seek out unusual substances that remedy ill health.

Most scientists describe this sort of behavior as self-regulation or homeostatic behavior as the substances involved are normally considered nutrients.

While the physical structure of a dog's teeth, jaws, and intestinal system tell us they are natural carnivores, they also require some plant matter in their diet. Canine and feline species in the wild ingest the stomach and intestines of their plant-eating prey. In doing so, they consume partly digested plant matter, which helps in digestion of the flesh and bone they feed upon.

In her book, The Complete Herbal Handbook For The Dog And Cat, author, herbalist and long-time dog breeder Juliette de Bairacli Levy writes: "I am always amazed at the way my Afghan Hounds have selected their medicinal plants, shrubs and trees, and know where to find them and how to use them.”

The concept of the Botanical Blend came about after years of research into what these “food items” were providing for dog. When we got to thinking about it, the prey animals we are trying to mimic in a biologically appropriate diet wouldn’t have been eating sweet potato or even lettuce for that matter. They’d have ingested grasses, roots, some seeds, and surely some dirt.

As a result of our research, we developed our Botanical Blend which has a mixture of ground seeds, roots and grasses, that rotate on a regular basis.

Subsequent to our feeding trials of this type of formulation and in feeding thousands of animals over the past decade, we’ve found some dogs and cats do better with this type of blend. Dogs with chronic allergies, dermatitis, yeast infections and various immune system challenges do well on this type of blend, as so dogs and cats with irritable bowel diseases, colitis, and inflammation of the intestinal tract.