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American pet parents spent nearly $39 billion on their pets in 2024, with around 31% of that going toward vet bills. With this kind of investment, you’d think American dogs would enjoy excellent health well into their later years.
Unfortunately, the opposite is more often true, with the vast majority of dogs over seven suffering from at least one chronic health condition.
The idea that dropping money at the vet will make your dog healthier is a common misconception. In reality, the more you can invest in your dog’s health outside the vet clinic, the less you’ll spend on vet bills and the healthier your dog will be.
In this article, we take a hard look at what it means to actually invest in your dog’s health, why relying on your vet to keep your dog healthy may be doing more harm than good, and how consistent investment in the right areas can save you money over the course of your dog’s life.
Why Do Animals Get Less Healthy as They Age?
As the owner of two senior dogs—a fourteen-year-old Dalmatian mix and a sixteen-year-old Chihuahua—this is a question I have been pondering a lot lately. Luckily, both of my dogs are still in relatively good health. Just last week, they joined me on a four-mile hike through mud and snow and had no trouble keeping up. But many of my friends’ and neighbors’ dogs are not so lucky.
Surprisingly, the aging process in animals, including humans, is not completely understood. The closest scientists have come to answering the question of why we get less healthy as we age is that cells begin to decline over time due to the influence of genetics and a myriad of internal and external factors.
While we pet parents may not be able to do much about our dog’s genetics (at least, beyond researching breeders before getting a dog), we do have quite a bit of control over those “internal and external factors.”
Throughout our dogs’ lives, we have a lot of control over what goes into their bodies—medications, vaccines, food, water, treats—and what they are exposed to externally—chemicals in our homes, topical medications, grooming products, exercise, stimulation, etc.
When we look at these factors as opportunities to invest in our pets, we open the door for better health, a longer life, and fewer vet bills.
What Does Investing in Your Dog’s Long-Term Health Look Like?
Helping your dog thrive starts with thinking critically about what impacts their health on a cellular level.
By far, the most well-understood cell destroyers are free radicals. These reactive compounds are a natural byproduct of cellular respiration, but can also occur when toxins and inflammatory substances interact with cells. When free radicals in the body outnumber antioxidants (which neutralize these compounds), oxidative stress occurs, resulting in cell damage that can lead to chronic inflammation, immune dysregulation, cancer, premature aging, and other diseases.
When it comes to protecting our dog’s cellular health, we need to do everything we can to reduce oxidative stress. We do this by investing in quality nutrition, prioritizing holistic care and wellness, and treating causes not symptoms.
Quality Nutrition
The food we feed our dogs has a double impact on their odds of experiencing oxidative stress.
Antioxidants, the superheroes that fight the evil free radicals in our bodies, are obtained largely through diet. This means that the type and quality of the food you feed your dog is incredibly important.
These superheroes are fragile things. They break down with exposure to light, heat, certain enzymes, and oxygen. If you feed your dog kibble, which has been heat processed and exposed to oxygen during drying, they are very unlikely to be getting enough antioxidants. On the other hand, if you feed raw or fresh food that has undergone minimal processing and has been carefully stored to reduce light and air exposure, your dog will get all the antioxidants they need and more.
At the same time, feeding a quality diet greatly reduces the amount of free radicals your dog’s body produces. This is because low-quality food, especially if it is not species-appropriate, causes inflammation in the body.
Foods that are difficult for dogs to digest damage their gut, which leads to free radicals being created. An inflamed gut is more prone to leaky gut syndrome, which allows large particles to escape into the bloodstream. These particles are targeted by immune cells that use inflammatory pathways to neutralize them the same way they would a pathogen. This inflammation, as you might guess, causes more free radicals to be released.
This inflammatory loop can cause chronic inflammation and lead to allergies and sensitivities that cause even more inflammation in the form of hives, atopic dermatitis, and ear infections.
Pair this inflammatory storm with a diet that does not provide enough antioxidants to fight even a normal amount of free radicals, and you end up with a dog that is sick with chronic disease and aging issues long before their time.
So, how do you avoid diet-induced inflammation and provide enough antioxidants to help your dog overcome naturally occurring free radicals? Feed high-quality raw or fresh food containing only ingredients your dog can easily digest: muscle meat, organ meat, bone meal/marrow, eggs, fish, and low-starch fruits and vegetables.
Whether this means preparing your dog’s diet at home, choosing a low-processed commercial option, or supplementing a high-quality kibble diet will depend on your situation. But the more you can do to minimize diet-related oxidative stress, the healthier your dog will be.
A Note on Water
While the vast majority of American homes utilize drinking water filters, very few pet owners share filtered water with their animals. This is a shame, considering how many toxins are found in tap water.
According to a Guardian study, 35% of tap water sampled contained toxic “forever chemicals,” while 8% contained highly toxic arsenic. And almost every water sample they tested came back positive for lead.
Providing filtered water for your dog reduces their chances of being exposed to heavy metals, microplastics, and other toxins that increase free radicals and inflammation while taxing the liver and potentially causing disease.
Plenty of Activity
A quality diet isn’t the only way to reduce the effects of oxidative stress. Your dog’s body, just like your own, makes its own antioxidants. These “endogenic” antioxidants help fight free radicals and keep cells healthy just like their “exogenic” friends.
Luckily, there are things you can do to help your dog make more of these internal antioxidants.
To start with, make sure your dog is getting consistent, adequate exercise. Studies into human exercise benefits prove that regular exercise can upregulate the body’s endogenous antioxidant system. This means that people who exercise regularly naturally make more antioxidants, and therefore suffer from less oxidative stress than people who don’t exercise.
Additionally, physical activity in older dogs helps offset age-associated lean body tissue loss, which helps seniors maintain a normal basal metabolic rate and healthy weight.
The importance of activity also stretches into the realm of mental exercise. Dogs who are bored or understimulated become stressed. When stressed, mammals release cortisol, which in turn causes the release of more free radicals. To make things worse, chronic stress suppresses antioxidant creation, compounding the damage already caused by cortisol.
To keep your dog happy and stress-free, invest in toys, healthy chews, and puzzle feeders, and regularly take time to play with your dog and let them play with other dogs if they enjoy it.
Holistic Preventive Care
While all those external and internal antioxidants will help your dog maintain oxidative balance, there will be times when they need a little more help.
When this is the case, it is best to act preemptively, rather than waiting for the issue to throw their body out of whack.
One place most dogs need a little extra support is in their gut.
The billions of microbes in your dog’s intestines play a vital role in breaking down toxins, regulating antioxidants, and reducing inflammation. Any kink in this system can have a negative effect on the whole body. And since our domestic dogs spend a lot less time eating dirt, chewing on old bones, and drinking out of streams than their wild cousins, their biomes are often not as robust as they should be.
Using a quality probiotic supplement can help them maintain gut balance throughout their domestic lives. If your dog needs antibiotics at any point, probiotics become even more vital, especially S. boulardii. This yeast probiotic is unaffected by antibiotics and can help prevent bad bacteria overgrowth during antibiotic treatment.
Probiotics are especially important for senior dogs, whose digestive tracts typically contain fewer probiotic strains and show marked differences in microbe makeup compared to young dogs.
In addition to probiotics, you may also consider using digestive enzymes, functional mushrooms, omega-fatty acids, and superfood supplements as part of your preventive care routine. Research into these compounds has shown they provide additional support against free radicals while helping to balance the body and optimize digestion.
While all dogs can benefit from quality supplements, they can be especially helpful for dogs overcoming illness, switching to a higher quality diet, and those who have already entered into their golden years.
A Note on Environmental Toxins
Holistic thinking doesn’t just mean paying attention to what your dog consumes. It also means being more mindful about the products you use on and around your dog.
Synthetic and chemical fragrances, detergents, solvents, preservatives, surfactants, and dyes are all around us. They are in many commercial cleaning products, including carpet cleaners, laundry detergents, and room sprays. They are also in most dog grooming products.
Various forms of these chemicals have been found to make their way into our dogs’ bodies, either through the skin or through ingestion, often after your dog licks themselves or surfaces. Once inside, these toxins wreak havoc on various systems, overwhelming the liver and kidneys, disrupting hormones, and damaging cells—which can lead to increased levels of free radicals, inflammation, and, in some cases, cancer.
To keep your dog safe, consider the products you use in your home. Whenever possible, choose all-natural alternatives and those verified by the EWG. For grooming products, especially, it is important to look for options that contain only natural ingredients that work with the body to support skin, coat, and overall health.
How to Invest in Your Dog’s Health at the Vet
With a holistic approach to health, vet visits quickly become less frequent. Dogs on a proper diet who receive regular exercise and all the support they need to battle free radicals are much less likely to suffer from atopic dermatitis, ear infections, hot spots, arthritis, periodontal disease, upset stomach, diarrhea, urinary tract issues, and anal gland issues. In other words, following our recommendations above can prevent eight of the top ten reasons dog owners visit the vet.
Of course, avoiding the vet completely is neither possible nor the best route for any dog. When you do need to visit the vet, either for a medical condition or a checkup, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Unless you use a holistic veterinarian, your vet will likely be working from a Western medicine mindset. While Western medicine has accomplished some amazing things, this approach is sorely lacking in the realm of preventative and whole-body care. By understanding the shortcomings of Western veterinary medicine before you visit the vet, you can do more to protect your dog’s long-term health.
Understand That Medicating Symptoms Is Not a Solution
Too often, veterinarians make their treatment recommendations based on the symptoms presented without taking into account the cause of those symptoms.
Atopic dermatitis is a great example of a symptom that can be treated with dozens of medications—none of which address the root cause of the issue. Atopica, Cytopoint, Zenrelia, and Apoquel are all commonly prescribed to dogs with itchy, inflamed skin. This condition is almost always a symptom of chronic inflammation and immune dysregulation caused by poor diet, leaky gut syndrome, or uncontrolled allergies.
In most dogs, switching to a fresh, biologically appropriate diet that includes an elimination trial to remove allergens, paired with natural treatments to reduce inflammation and heal the gut, is enough to relieve atopic dermatitis. Yet, most vets don’t even mention a diet change before prescribing one of the above medications.
Not only does this not treat the cause of the problem, but it compounds the issue by introducing more toxins into the system that, in turn, create more free radicals and more inflammation. Not to mention that all of these drugs come with side effects, including digestive upset, seizures, cancer, and even death.
Another common reason dog owners visit the vet is for digestive problems, specifically diarrhea and vomiting. Again, these are issues directly linked to diet and gut health. Yet most vets reach straight for antibiotics before considering the cause of the bacterial overgrowth—or that inflammation, not bacteria, could be the cause.
Antibiotics may work to relieve symptoms at first, but they only make things worse in the long run because they kill beneficial bacteria just as readily as bad bacteria. This causes your dog’s gut biome to become even more out of balance, leading to additional issues with digestive upset, leaky gut, and immune overreactivity.
For symptoms that are caused by chronic inflammation and allergies, it is best to work with a holistic vet or dog nutritionist to change your dog’s diet and reduce inflammation naturally. For gut issues caused by pathogens, ask your vet to do a culture before prescribing antibiotics. Not only will this confirm that antibiotics are necessary (or not), but it also allows the vet to pick species-specific antibiotics that are less likely to wipe out your dog’s gut biome.
Be Familiar with the Dangers of Profilactics
Even when your dog has no health problems, vets love to hand out medications. Flea and tick preventatives, dewormers, and heartworm meds are some of the most common prophylactic drug treatments puppies and dogs are subjected to.
In some cases, these drugs are warranted, such as with dogs in high-risk areas for heartworm infection or hunting dogs that work where dangerous tick-borne illnesses are common. But even in these cases there are often effective natural preventatives available or, at the very least, a safer option for administering the drugs. For example, heartworm meds and tick treatments can be given less frequently than prescribed and still remain effective.
For many dogs, the risk of infection is way too low to justify the risks the drugs themselves pose. If your dog has a low chance of encountering fleas, ticks, intestinal worms, and/or heartworms, you probably don’t need to pretreat them for these issues. At least, not with drugs.
Most dogs eating a healthy, antioxidant-rich diet are less prone to these types of infestations than the average dog. Overusing prophylactics can throw their system out of balance and actually make them more prone to these kinds of issues, especially if you decide to stop treatment after you’ve started.
Know That Over-Vaccination Can Do More Harm Than Good
Vaccinations have done some amazing things—like practically eradicating rabies from the domestic dog population. But these treatments don’t come without a cost.
Vaccines, by their very nature, are designed to elicit an immune response. This is facilitated by introducing a piece of the target pathogen, a killed pathogen, or a weakened live pathogen into your dog’s system. Adjuvant products—substances that enhance immune response—are usually also included, along with compounds to help stabilize and preserve the mixture.
All of these substances have the potential to cause excess immune response, inflammation, and free radicals. Occasionally, these vaccine risks for dogs can lead to severe side effects, including anaphylaxis, encephalitis, and autoimmune disorders such as immune-mediated hemolytic anemia, immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, polyneuritis, and polyarthritis.
But these types of reactions are rare. The greater threat of vaccinations is a cumulative one. The more often your dog is exposed to these types of substances, the more often their immune system is triggered, which causes inflammation and free radical release. This can lead to immune dysregulations, allergies, and chronic inflammation over time.
To support your dog’s health and keep them thriving well into old age, it is best to reduce vaccine exposure as much as possible.
The easiest way to do this is to avoid vaccines your dog doesn’t need. Just like prophylactic treatments for pathogens, only vaccinate your dog for diseases your dog is actually at risk of getting—either due to their environment or because there aren’t any effective natural preventatives.
Also, consider the risk of the disease itself. Kennel cough is highly contagious and all dogs who socialize with other dogs are at risk. But the disease itself is typically very minor, especially in healthy dogs. So, getting the Bordetella shot may not be worth the long term risk for most dogs.
Other vaccines are not so easy to forgo. All US states, except Hawaii, require rabies vaccines, and most regions have strict laws about how often this shot needs to be given. This is true despite evidence that most dogs retain immunity for over seven years after their first adult dose. It’s possible in some states to get a vet letter to extend the time between rabies shots (usually with a titer test) or forgo subsequent shots completely. For dogs at an increased risk for vaccine reactions, this may be worth pursuing.
While not typically required by the state, distemper, and parvo, shots are also vaccines you don’t want to skip. At least, not initially. These are highly contagious diseases that can kill, especially younger dogs. Vaccines protect puppies and the larger population. But just like with rabies, these vaccines last much longer than the recommended shot schedule would have you believe. Titer testing for dogs allows you to test your dog’s immunity so you can revaccinate only when needed. This can reduce the number of necessary vaccines your dog receives in their lifetime by over 50%.
Daily Health Investments are Cheaper in the Long Run
By investing in your dog’s health through diet, exercise, and holistic care, you can prevent most chronic illnesses that send dogs to the vet. When your dog does require veterinary care, treating them in a way that focuses on cause rather than symptoms and on preserving whole-body health over short-term solutions, can help them thrive in the long run.
Best of all, this type of consistent, proactive investment will cost you much less over the course of your dog’s life than reactive care, which often leads to hefty vet bills and problems that only get worse over time.
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Sara Seitz worked in the pet industry for over a decade. In addition to being a certified dog trainer, Sara gained experience working as the general manager of a dog daycare and boarding facility, as the creator and manager of a pet sitting company, as a groomer, and as a dog behavior evaluator. She also has a bachelors in animal behavior from CSU. Currently, Sara works as a freelance writer specializing in blog, article and content writing.
