Hannah Zulueta The Court of One’s Own Logic
On feeding tribes, longevity drugs, and the standing to judge.
A few years ago I watched a friend feed her dog kibble from a green bag. The dog looked fine. The dog acted fine. I caught myself starting to say something, and then I caught myself catching myself.
This is not about whether kibble is good or bad, or whether raw is. It is about the impulse itself.
The way every one of us, the moment we have made a decision about something hard, recruits our own logic into a small court and starts trying other people’s choices.
I felt my own certainty flex. It was an interesting muscle to notice.
Looking back, I’m glad I held my tongue. That dog lived to be 19, by the way.
I also know what I think about ultraprocessed pet food. I know the inflammation markers, I know the dental data, I know the patterns I see when people turn to me for help. None of that knowing required me to say one word to my friend at her own dinner table. But the impulse was there. The little involuntary lean toward correction.
That impulse is what this article is about. Not whether kibble is good or bad. Not whether raw is good or bad. It’s about the impulse itself.
In the dog food world, it sorts cleanly into tribes. The raw feeders are sure raw is the only honest answer. The cooked feeders are sure cooked is the only safe answer. The kibble feeders are sure their veterinarian would not have recommended it if it were not fine. The freeze-dried feeders, the gently cooked feeders, the rotational feeders, the prescription-diet feeders, the NRC/AAFCO formulators. The list is endless.
Each tribe has built a wall around its own choice. Each wall is reinforced by a logic that, from inside, feels airtight.
I have been witness in every one of these groups. I have heard a raw feeder describe a cooked feeder as someone who has not done the reading. I have heard a cooked feeder describe a raw feeder as reckless. I have heard kibble feeders dismissed as lazy and raw feeders dismissed as fanatic and prescription-diet feeders dismissed as captured by the veterinary-industrial complex.
Everyone in this conversation believes they are doing the right thing for their dog. It’s very narrow-minded, actually. That is the part the tribes forget about each other.
A day ago I wrote about LOY-002 on Instagram, the canine longevity drug Loyal is bringing through FDA review. I am skeptical of pieces of it. I named those pieces. I was also careful to say the company is run by serious people, with serious money, and the lead veterinary voice is the loudest skeptic in evidence-based veterinary medicine.
I will admit something. That Instagram post was part one of this conversation. I wanted to see where and how the community thinks. I wanted to see if people had the ability to hold their own views and respect others at the same time.
What I noticed in the comments was not disagreement about the science. It was a kind of moral sorting. Some readers were appalled that anyone would put their dog on a pill to extend life. Other readers were quietly grateful that someone, somewhere, was trying. The same drug was a violation of the natural order to one person and a quiet hope to another.
This is where the article wants to go. I would like to ask if we can start getting into “yes, and” thinking. Meaning yes, you can have your opinion and I can too.
Because if you step back, every choice a person makes about their dog’s body is an intervention. Food is an intervention. Vaccines are an intervention. Supplements are an intervention. Exercise is an intervention. The decision to take a dog to acupuncture is an intervention. The decision to never give a dog Western medicine is also an intervention. The word means “something done.” Anything you do, you have intervened.
The raw feeder who scoffs at a longevity pill is still intervening. They have just chosen the intervention that feels natural to them and labeled the other one unnatural. The kibble feeder who scoffs at acupuncture is still intervening. The acupuncturist who scoffs at the kibble feeder is still intervening.
We are all intervening. We are only disagreeing about which intervention is the moral one.
I’m currently in the human health space. As a future Doctor of Chinese Medicine I see the friction points among human health topics. The clearest mirror is what is happening right now with the GLP-1 drugs. Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. A friend of mine, a brilliant woman who has been in a body that has not felt like hers since her second child, started a GLP-1 last year. For the first time in a decade she is not thinking about food constantly. She told me this with the kind of relief that I have only heard a few times in my life, from people relieved for the first time in years.
I’ve seen multiple people lose over 100 pounds and feel so grateful they had the ability to do so.
I have also heard the other side. The people who say it is cheating. The people who say it is a shortcut that bypasses the real work. The people who say her body will pay for this later. The people who say she should have just walked more or eaten less or tried harder.
She tried. For 30 years. The trying is not the part that was missing.
The same sorting happens with HRT, with peptides, with the various pieces of the longevity stack that wealthy biohackers are stitching together. One person sees an act of self-care. Another person sees vanity. One person sees a lifeline. Another person sees a moral failure. It’s not that intervention changes; the interpretation does.
This does not mean every intervention is wise. Some are not. Some have real side effects, and not everyone gets them, but some people do, and that matters. The literacy required to evaluate any intervention is real work. I have written about that work. I will keep writing about it.
What I am trying to say is something underneath the literacy. The fact that we are even in a position to evaluate someone else’s intervention assumes a thing we should not assume. Which is that we have the standing to evaluate it at all.
Every person who loves a dog has agency. The agency is not granted by me. It is not granted by the veterinary establishment. It is not granted by the raw-feeding community or the cooked-feeding community or any community. It is just there. They have it because they are the human who loves that dog and lives in that house and watches that body and pays those bills and will sit on that floor when the dog is dying.
I do not know what they know. I know what I know. The clinical patterns I have seen, the nutritional therapies I have used, and the cases that taught me what I now believe. I do not know the financial pressure they are under. I do not know the time pressure they are under. I do not know what their last dog died of, and what they swore they would never do again. I do not know what their veterinarian told them at the appointment last Tuesday. I do not know whether they are recently widowed, or recently diagnosed themselves, or just barely keeping it together while loving this dog as well as they can.
I know what I would do for my dogs. That is the only territory I can honestly speak from.
When someone tells me they feed kibble, the right response is not to correct them. The right response is curiosity. What does their dog seem to need. What have they noticed. What is the food doing for the rhythm of their home. What questions do they have? When someone tells me they feed raw, the same. When someone tells me they are looking into a longevity drug, the same.
The opposite of judgment is not approval. The opposite of judgment is interest.
Years ago, Dr. Dennis Thomas, a holistic veterinarian, wrote about a colleague of his. I will call him Ed, because that is what Dr. Thomas called him. Ed had an old Labrador Retriever who went everywhere with him. To work. On every trip. The dog was a constant.
One day, Ed told Dr. Thomas the dog had splenic cancer. The plan was a surgical exploration. The standard protocol at the time was clean. Open the abdomen, look at the spleen and the surrounding organs. If the cancer had spread, the prognosis was days to weeks. Under those conditions, you euthanized the dog on the table without letting him wake up. If the cancer had not spread, you removed the spleen, the dog woke up, and the family got two to six more months.
They opened him up. The cancer was everywhere. Spleen, liver, intestines, lymph nodes. Dr. Thomas describes his own heart sinking. Ed paused for a long moment. Then, instead of following the protocol, Ed began surgically removing the spleen. Dr. Thomas, politely, reminded him that he was going against protocol.
Ed looked at him and said, “I can’t put him to sleep. He is my dog and I just can’t do it.”
The dog recovered from the surgery and lived several months before he reached the mark on the calendar.
That is the part you would expect me to tell you. That is the part where, depending on which tribe you sit in, you decide whether Ed did the right thing. You could call it denial. You could call it love. You could call it bad medicine. You could call it grace. Depending on where you are standing, all of those are available interpretations.
The part that Dr. Thomas said etched a mark on his own heart was what Ed told him afterwards. Ed said: knowing his dog was near death, he spent each moment with him in that awareness. He felt genuinely grateful for every day. He said it was the best experience he had ever had with the dog.
From outside the operating room, the choice looked like a vet who could not let go. From inside Ed’s life, the choice produced the most awake, present, grateful months he had ever had with the animal he loved most.
Both opinions are real. Only one of them is true to Ed.
I cannot tell you what was right. I am not sure Ed could either. What I can tell you is that the answer is not available to anyone who was not in the room.
In 1978, after her own breast cancer diagnosis, Susan Sontag wrote an essay called Illness as Metaphor. She had noticed that the people around her were treating her cancer as if it were a message about her personality. Repressed emotion, suppressed creativity, some inner failure made visible. She rejected the entire framework. Illness, she said, is illness. It is not a moral statement. It is not a personality test. It is a medical condition, and the metaphors we wrap around it harm the patient more than the disease often does.
I think about her essay when I read comments under longevity drugs. Someone has decided that taking the drug is a moral position. Someone else has decided that not taking the drug is a moral position. Both have done what Sontag warned against. Both have turned a question of intervention into a question of character.
The dog the drug is for is not making a moral statement. The dog is just being a dog. The drug is a tool, like food is a tool, like acupuncture is a tool, like a knee surgery is a tool. The owner is using the tools available to them in the way they can. Whether you would use the same tools is a separate question. Whether you have the standing to judge them for the tools they use is a separate question still.
In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande writes about doctors who keep operating, keep treating, keep intervening, long past the point where intervention serves the patient. He is critical of his own profession for this. He is also careful not to make the mistake in reverse. He does not say that stopping is the right answer either. What he says is that the question itself was wrong. The right question is not “should we treat this.” The right question is “what does this patient actually want from the time they have left, and how do we honor that.”
That reframe is the one I want for the dog community at large. The question is not “should this person feed raw, cooked, kibble, fresh.” Should this dog be given a supplement, herb, or longevity pill? The question is “what does this dog need, what can this owner sustainably provide, and how do we honor the relationship between them.”
A person who feeds kibble because that is what they decided and what they can manage with two jobs and three kids is doing right by their dog. A person who spends three hours a Sunday making fresh food is doing right by their dog. A person who chooses a longevity drug because they cannot bear to lose another year is doing right by their dog. A person who refuses the drug because they want their dog’s last year to be unmedicated is also doing right by their dog.
The dog is loved in every one of those houses. That is the part the tribes forget about each other.
I am not asking you to agree with every feeding choice. I am not asking you to be a relativist about nutrition science. I am not asking you to agree with any medical intervention. I have my opinions. You have yours. Hold them. Hold them tightly if they were hard-earned.
I am asking for one small thing underneath that. The next time you hear about a feeding choice that you would never make, or a drug you would never give, or an intervention that strikes you as strange or extreme or insufficient, before you decide what you think about it, ask one more question. Ask why this person, who loves this dog, made this choice.
You do not have to agree with the answer.
You only have to hear it.
The court of one’s own logic is a small room. It is well-lit, the chairs are comfortable, and you will always win the case. But nothing happens in there. No one’s mind changes. No one learns anything. The dog at the center of the case sleeps under the table while the trial proceeds. At the end of it, the dog still has to be fed, the way his or her person knows how to feed, in the house where they live.
Ed was in a different room. He was in the operating room with his old Labrador’s body open on the table. He made a choice that did not make sense from outside. It gave him the best months he ever had with the dog he loved. Because he wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet. Because that was his decision. Because that was his dog.
Most of us are not in the operating room. We are in the comments section, or in a kitchen across the table from a friend who feeds something we would not feed, or on the phone listening to a relative talk about a drug we would not give. The room is not ours. The dog is not ours. The choice is not ours to make.
This was part two. Part one lived on Instagram.
All we have to do is hear it. Hold space for them, because ultimately, what our dogs teach us is to act less from the space between our ears and more from a place deep within our hearts.
References: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978). Atul Gawande, Being Mortal. The account of Ed and his Labrador is drawn from the writing of Dr. Dennis Thomas, holistic veterinarian. LOY-002 is a canine longevity drug in FDA review by Loyal.
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
