I’m in two minds about this book. On the one hand it’s very fluffy, even overly fluffy, and then at the end it cautions against being too fluffy and completely disregarding veterinary science, saying how too much of either side isn’t a good idea. I’m also not sure what it actually wants to say. That traditional Chinese acupuncture is good? Okay, sure. But that seems to be what most of it says? It’s a collection of stories about how pets were miraculously healed by the clever use of alternative medicine, so at times I was wondering what the book was actually trying to tell me. Were there going to be any useful tools that I could take with me to help my cats?

There’s a bit about pet food, but it seems to assume that you’re currently feeding your pets a poor diet and the advice there is basically “feed them better food”. Okay, so if I’m already feeding them a high quality grain free diet we’re good? Is that the takeaway here? Because there is nothing else, other than a history of the pet food industry and that most of the brands are full of stuff that isn’t good for them. If you don’t know that then … now you do? But if you’re reading a book about a holistic approach to pet health, isn’t it reasonable to assume that you’re already aware of this? Or am I just projecting?

The “knowing what to do in times of health challenges” in the blurb appears to be “find a vet who does traditional Chinese acupuncture” and something about fixing energy levels in a higher dimension, which is difficult to do because we can’t access those because they’re “too high”. It doesn’t seem to be any way around that except – you guessed it – acupuncture. Which is perhaps good if you’re in the US, but I don’t even know where to start trying to find a qualified vet that offers that kind of services, or even if there is one here in Nottingham. What do I do if there isn’t one, and one of our cats has an issue that vet science can’t help, or can only help so far? Then all this book has done is offer us false hope.

On the plus side, it mentioned animal communication, and I liked that. And it’s good to know that there might be a backup option if all else fails – provided there actually is someone around here that does offer that kind of alternative. Maybe I should look into it, just so I know.

Whole-Pet Healing is interesting, and if it can give us ideas on how to help our companion animals live better, then I’m happy to have read it.

A compassionate vet discusses the human-animal bond, and how we can influence our animals' healing.