Is Totally Raw Natural Dog Food Right for You ?

A Look at the Dog Food Industry:

Did you know that your veterinarian gets almost no education on feeding your canine companion? Most universities provide their students with one day of propaganda hosted by a commercial kibble company that sponsors the university! The graduated vets often set up practice and become addicted to the revenue provided by the kibble they sell. This is the same kibble that makes the dogs sick thereby providing more revenue for the vet office.

Let’s look at what veterinarians who specialize in Canine nutrition are saying about raw feeding and the commercial kibble industry

Alfred Plechner, D.V.M

"The most common and most visible symptoms of nutritionally caused deficiencies are allergies of one kind or another. Because many commercial foods are woefully deficient in key nutrients, the long-term effect of these foods makes the dog hypersensitive to its environment. . . . [It's a dinosaur effect. Animals are being programmed for disaster, for extinction. Many of them are biochemical cripples with defective adrenal glands unable to manufacture adequate Cortisol, a hormone vital for health and resistance to disease." Allergies can be, and often are, unrecognized deficiency diseases.

Dr. Ian Billinghurst, B.V.Sc.(Hons), BSc.Agr., Dip.Ed.

"The sad truth is that prepared pet foods help provide patients for vets."

"Raw chicken does of course carry bacteria, E.g. Salmonella. These are of absolutely no consequence to a healthy dog."

"As a veterinary student in the early seventies, I found it hard to understand why Aussie vets had fewer and simpler dog and cat diseases to deal with than the Americans. It seemed to make the Aussie vet somehow inferior. We did not need to be trained to the same high degree of complexity and sophistication. There was a simple explanation. At that time, more than seventy percent of Aussie dogs were still fed raw bones and scrapes. They were still pretty healthy. American dogs had been eating processed food and no bones for decades. They had developed a wide range of problems. Their vets had been forced to develop a complex set of diagnostic and therapeutic tools to deal with them. I need not have worried. Our dogs' disease problems are increasing on a par with their increasing consumption of processed and cooked foods. We Aussie vets now have to be as good as our American counterparts to deal with them. There are many reasons why the commercial pet foods have never been close to a dog's natural diet. Those reasons include the fact that they are based on grain, and that they are cooked."

Dr. Richard Pitcairn, DVM

"...When I began to suggest the feeding of raw meat I found animals becoming more healthy even without other treatment. Indeed, I have frequently had the report that people find their animals become healthy when they make this change and diseases for which they were hoping to have treatment (on a waiting list) have disappeared. Since that time, other veterinarians have told me similar things about the use of raw meat. I do not have numbers but I think the veterinarians recommending raw meat in the US are in the hundreds. My experience, albeit clinical and not based on studies, is that my patients have improved health on a raw diet. Furthermore, I have not seen significant parasite problems. Dogs and cats, being carnivores by nature, are meant to eat raw meat and do not have a problem doing so."

"Although we have come to accept commercial foods as being normal or natural ways to feed animals (and indeed ourselves), in fact they are not. They are simply what we've gotten used to in the last few decades. But nothing we can produce commercially ever can rival those mysteriously complex foods manufactured for eons by nature itself."

"All processed pet foods - whether sold in cans, bags, or frozen packages, in either giant supermarket chains or local health food stores - are missing something that seems to me to be one of the most important "nutrients" of all. This key ingredient is something nutritional scientists have practically ignored. But when it's there, you and I can know it and feel it. It is a quality found only in freshly grown, uncooked whole foods. It's life energy."

"The many objections we can make about the nutritional quality of animal convenience foods boil down to two basic types: these foods don't contain things we wish they did, and do contain things we wish they didn't... The two basic problems are linked together as an unhappy pair because the presence of various toxins and pollutants actually increases the body's needs for high quality nutrients necessary for combating or eliminating these contaminants. When the overall nutrition is already lower that it should be, we are inviting trouble."

William Pollak, DVM

Poor nutrition is one of the major contributors to our pet's lower life expectancy. By feeding our pets most commercially available pet foods, we are unintentionally depriving these animals of important nutrients needed for sustaining the states of greater Wellness that their genetic material encodes. "The results of a clinical trial suggest that 74.7% of common diseases in dogs and 63% of common diseases in cats can be eliminated without medical intervention over a period of one year with proper diet modifications and an understanding of the healing process as exhibited through healing episodes. Approaching disease from the perspective of health is the most powerful means of eliminating disease. Poor fuel makes for little momentum in life. The commercial food we are feeding' is the disease we are treating - so treat on and on, curing one disease after another, again and again"

"Health is an inevitable by-product of natural raw foods for our pets."

"Survival is insured by commercial food; nothing more; not health, not the robustness for life."

"In the wild, no one cooks for the coyote or wolf; no one brushes their teeth. Their foods are raw and unprocessed."

"Eating supermarket pet foods is like eating cardboard. Our pets just get by on them…”

Christina Chambreau, DVM

"Meat should be raw. Cooking destroys enzymes and denatures the proteins rendering them less digestible to cats and dogs."

"Dogs and cats need raw meat to be really healthy and even the best processed foods cook their good ingredients, & most commercially available foods, even the expensive ones, use the cheapest ingredients (that means dead, diseased and decaying meat & by-products)."

Tom Lonsdale, DVM

"Raw meaty bones promote health."

"Dingoes and feral cats keep themselves healthy by eating whole carcasses. The closer you come to this ideal for pet dogs and cats the better."

"As the natural pet food industry increases, so the artificial industry, together with its harmful effects, should go into decline... No more slurping of canned stew, no more rattle of dry pellets; instead, the sounds of nature, the crunching of raw meaty bones."

Dr. Wendell O. Belfield, DVM

"Their pets may have diarrhoea, increased flatulence, a dull hair coat, intermittent vomiting or prolonged scratching. These are common symptoms associated with commercial pet foods." In 1981, as Martin Zucker and I wrote How to Have a Healthier Dog, we discovered the full extent of negative effects that commercial pet food has on animals. In February 1990, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John Eckhouse went even further with an expose entitled "How Dogs and Cats Get Recycled into Pet Food".

Dr. Charles E. Loops, DVM

"The best diet is a raw food diet."

"Science Diet & Hill's dog & cat food products are not good diets. They use chemical preservatives that have been shown to cause problems in some animals & they use by-products, which are words on the ingredient label that need to be avoided at all costs. This generally means food not utilized for human consumption."

Dr. Alicia McWatters, Ph.D.

"Fresh, raw foods contain the highest level of enzymes and these enzymes assist in digestion. Cooked foods and dry convenient diets have been denatured and are devoid of enzymes: life-promoting elements. While they may maintain life they do not promote optimum health or longevity!"

Items that pass AAFCO guidelines for dog food

AAFCO Approval

The official Publication of the American Association of Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) gives wide latitude for ingredients that can be used in pet foods.

• Dehydrated garbage

• Undried processed animal waste products

• Polyethylene roughage replacement (plastic)

• Hydrolyzed poultry feathers

• Hydrolyzed hair

• Hydrolyzed leather meal

• Poultry hatchery by-product

• Meat meal tankage

• Peanut hulls

• Ground almond shells

(Association of American Feed Control Officials, 1998 Official Publication)

Is Totally Raw Natural Dog Food Right for Your Pet?