I’m not quite sure why, but we have had a resurgence of clients asking about or already feeding raw diets to their pets. This was a trend that surged in the early 2000’s and then went away. Frankly, I had hoped it was gone for good as this was also the period of time I worked in an ER and saw countless patients for issues related to this. So, I obviously wasn’t a proponent back then. With the recent inquiries, I decided to go back to see if there had been some peer-reviewed data I had missed about newer, safer raw diets that had been published. There were not. So, let me go over the common fallacies and mis-information that is currently out there.
For starters, I certainly don’t blame people for thinking this would be a good idea. I mean, if a dog or cat caught a prey animal in the wild, they certainly wouldn’t cook it and process it into a kibble before eating. That critter would be basically gone on the spot. Therein lies our first problem with raw diets: the meat is not coming from a freshly killed animal. Even if someone is using human-grade meats from the butcher counter, it is still potentially several days old. While refrigeration and certain storage methods can certainly decrease contamination, food poisoning is still an obvious problem even when food is partially cooked. It is much worse with the commercially-produced diets since much of the meat was actually passed-over for human consumption before being sent to the food companies. In an FDA study a couple of years ago, dozens of samples from commercial raw diets were found to be contaminated with Salmonella and Listeria, both of which can cause major disease and death. Conversely, only one out of almost 500 samples from non-raw diets was contaminated. As you can expect, the FDA is currently very much against feeding your pets raw food.
The second issue is nutritional inadequacy. Proponents of raw diets say it will improve coat quality and stool consistency. They say this because the one controlled study done with cats fed raw diets did actually see this. That said, many of those cats went on to develop issues with malnutrition, including irreversible and fatal heart damage from taurine deficiency. As I have said in past articles about pet foods, there are no real regulations that companies HAVE to follow. The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) was formed to provide guidance on balancing nutrition in commercial foods. However, many companies don’t choose to follow those recommendations and rely on general nutritionists to design diets they think will be good. While some succeed, many do not and this has led to some very sick pets. Worse is when people try to make their own raw diets using online resources. Much like Flat Earth Society websites, these are rarely giving credible information.
As always, I recommend chatting with your vet about this subject if you are thinking about a diet other than standard commercial diets. There are veterinary nutritionists that will work with them and you to design a diet that will keep your pet healthy and safe. If you do still want to try a commercial, non-kibble diet, please make sure the packaging states that it went through both design and feeding trials based on AAFCO standards.