Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello, I'm Dr Edward the healing vet. I'm here for my weekly how to help your pets session, which is also going out to our pets people and harmony podcast. If you're listening on a podcast, welcome. If you're watching live, welcome. If you're watching the videos, welcome.

Speaker 1: 0:17

Today's themes, or this week's themes, are desires and needs. Now I'm really hot on talking about both ends of the leash talking about the human side of the human animal bond and talking about the animal side of the human animal bond because it's really easy, as someone who loves your pets, to kind of neglect yourself to care for them, and this is kind of like a false economy. It really doesn't do anyone any good and in the long term it's not the best way to go for your pets. So today we're talking about desires and needs. And how are those of you here live? Please say hi in the chat, but you know where you're from. Love to hear where you're checking in from around the world. So let's talk about desires versus needs. We're going to start off talking about needs Now.

Speaker 1: 1:17

There are fundamental needs that all living creatures have, that's, our pets and ourselves. We need to have safety, we need to have shelter, we need to have healthy food. We need to have social connection and love and support. What are the other ones we need? Oh, there's a couple of others that are just momentarily slipping my brain because my brain is kind of you know, it's Monday, give me a break but these are the fundamental things that we need to provide for our pets, but we need to not neglect ourselves. Either, you know, we need to make sure that we have healthy food or we won't have the energy to be present with and care for our pets as they need. We need to make sure that shelter is secure for us, that we have security and safety in our lives so that we're relaxed and not stressed, because if we're stressed, then that impacts our pets. And we need to make sure that we have healthy exercise. That's another thing that our pets need is space to move around and exercise and all these kinds of things. So these are primary needs that have to be cared for before anything else.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Now there are other needs that we humans have which are a little bit more complex than our animals, and if we neglect these more complex needs for social connection, for perhaps spiritual practices, for community, for having recreation and hobbies, things that keep us active and our brains active and our creative life alive, our career, education. There's a whole lot of needs that the human side of the leash needs to be cared for as well. So when you come to needs, they kind of need to be non-negotiable. You need to make a real priority to get everything in place you can to have all of the fundamental primary needs of your pets met, but also yours, and you have to find a balance in that so that you and your pets are getting everything you need and no one's being neglected. The pets are much less likely to be neglected than the human. I find in this situation, now we always it's the human who neglects themselves to care for their pets. Now you really I really want to emphasize this that it's super important that you care for yourself and look after yourself as well as you look after your pets. And then that brings us to desire.

Speaker 1: 4:00

Now, all living creatures have desire. You know our pets. Let's start with our beautiful pets. You know my pet. I've got Pavati here. I'm going to disturb a little bit so that those of you are watching video can say hello. You might be able to hear her purring away if you're on just the podcast, but Pavati has a desire to come and sit beside me and video bomb everybody.

Speaker 1: 4:24

Whenever I'm doing doing these kinds of presentations and talking to you people out there in the internet world, mitzi has a desire to be close to me. Is that just a desire? Is of need? There can be kind of a crossover that all of us our animals and ourselves have these feelings that we want what we need, which is also a desire. So there's a little bit of overlap. But when it comes to desires, it's really really important to understand that we have, and our pets have, healthy desires and unhealthy desires. Now, healthy desires might include a desire to exercise, to get fit and well. It might have a desire to want connection, healthy relationship with your pets or with other humans. Other healthy desires might include a desire to grow and evolve as a human being, to learn more, to learn better how to care for yourself and how to care for your pets.

Speaker 1: 5:25

And healthy desires can include desires. But in our animals they might desire to hang out with their best mates. They might have a desire for particular toy, they might love to go for a drive. In the case of cats, they might love to roam the streets at night, which my cats desire very much and I'm not actually allowing them to fulfill that desire, which has led to quite a bit of grumpiness of cats in the evening. So that's a healthy desire for the cat from the cat's perspective, but it's an unhealthy desire for the cat from my perspective due to the danger of them being out and about and also due to the fact that one of my cats got picked up by the pound. It cost me nearly 900 dollars to get them back.

Speaker 1: 6:06

So there's all these different things that you have to balance out to get to a point of balancing needs and desires for your pets and for yourself. Now you might have pets who have an unhealthy desire to put pressure on you they're human to give them all the food they want whenever they want, and if you do that you'll get a really fat, pudgy pet that will have healthy shoes. But that's not a healthy desire for the animal, even though the animal probably thinks it's a healthy desire. So you sometimes got to do what your pet doesn't want so that they don't manipulate you into feeding their unhealthy desires. And we humans nearly always have unhealthy desires as well, which are, you know, perhaps like me, you like chocolate more than you should and you eat more of it than perhaps is healthy for you.

Speaker 1: 7:06

And a lot of humans have desires for various substances or activities which are actually harmful to them, but they don't show up with the courage and determination that they need to show up to to say right, I'm not going to do this harmful thing even though I desire it anymore. And that is really a hard now, easy later solution. You do the hard thing now and then your life will get easier later, but it doesn't get easier immediately. So you have to then have a healthy appetite for what I call healthy discomfort, and you have to also be willing to have your animals go through healthy discomfort at times, in that perhaps you know your dog does get a little bit overweight or your cat does get a little bit overweight and you need to put them on a diet. Now, when it comes to dinnertime and they've had half their normal amount of food and they go, oh, I'm hungry. Now you mean I'm not getting any more food. And they start you know, in the case of a cat, maybe now and complaining on the case of your dog, giving you the sad puppy dog eyes and I'm going to die if I don't get any dinner. If you then give in to your animal, you're doing them a disservice.

Speaker 1: 8:20

So not all desires should be met. You should meet all the healthy desires you can for your animals and all the healthy desires you can for yourself, because that increases the gross happiness of the household and that's a benefit to everyone. But if you meet unhealthy desires, it does seem to make everyone happier, at least initially. But there's a cost. There's a cost of harm down the track. So you could kind of define an unhealthy desire as something that, while it might give short term pleasure, it causes long term harm, whether that's a dog that loves really unhealthy treats like smacos or too much food. Maybe it's a human who wants to drink, you know, three or four glasses of alcoholic beverages every night, which will cause harm over the long term.

Speaker 1: 9:12

There's all these different things that we have to balance out. So, in essence, you want to work out what the primary needs are for the humans and the animals in the family unit. You want to make sure that you can meet them in an equal and balanced way for humans and animals, not neglecting humans in favor of the animals. Super, super important. Then it's a good idea to when you do have desires for things to kind of sit back and go.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Well, is this a healthy desire or is this an unhealthy desire? Do I have the resources, in the case of desire for luxury things, to actually indulge in them, or will indulging in them then mean that my finances suffer and the whole family suffers as a result? So it's really important to balance this out, and I know that a lot of the time when I'm talking about how to help your pets, I'm talking about more abstract things. I'm not talking about immediate practical things that you can do with your pets, like how to make them walk on, lead without pulling or whatever. But these more abstract things like desires and needs are incredibly important to get a handle on in your life for the benefit of your beautiful pets and of your beautiful selves.

Speaker 1: 10:25

So that's it for me this week. I'll be back next week. I don't know what the theme for next week will be yet, but I look forward to talking to you then. But in the meantime, make sure you get stuck into getting needs met for everybody and kind of maybe do a bit of a desires audit and look at which ones are healthy. Give them lots of attention, make sure you feed them as much as you can in the context of your life, and the unhealthy ones maybe bite the bullet. Embrace some healthy discomfort and stop feeding your unhealthy desires for your pets and for yourself, and everyone will be happier and healthier when you do that. Thank you so much. Goodbye for now. Have a beautiful week with your pets and give them a pat from me. Bye for now.