Should you feed your pet raw food?
People think what animals eat in the wild is better. It’s not, vets say
A hundred years ago, pet food would have been a relatively obscure, niche product.
Dog food came first, with Milk Bone and Ken-L-Ration (canned dog food) introduced in 1908 and 1922, respectively. Most cats didn’t graduate from table scraps, saucers of cream and whatever bugs and rodents they could catch until the 1960s when cans and kibble started hitting the supermarkets.
The pets have come a long way since and Canadians now spend an estimated $1.9 billion on pet food per year. Dry food, canned grub and squeeze-up treats (chicken can come in a tube these days) are big business.
Their humans, however, are increasingly opting out of Big Kibble and serving up homemade or high-end “natural,” high-protein, raw and even vegan diets, according to a University of Guelph study that surveyed pet owners around the world.
The study found only 13 per cent of respondents fed their animals only conventional pet food — a big change over the 10-year comparison period.
You might expect this move away from processed foods to lead to a new generation of superdogs and cats, but it’s not clear that the upgrade is always a good tradeoff. It’s actually a lot harder than it looks to figure out how to create a balanced diet for doggos.
“A few studies have demonstrated that many recipes researchers were able to find online were not formulated by a veterinary nutritionist,” says Sarah Dodd of the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, one of the authors of the study. “And by and large they were not appropriate for the species or the life stage for the species that they were intended.”
Dodd isn’t saying there aren’t also problems that crop up with conventional commercial pet foods, which are occasionally subject to recalls for a range of reasons, including sometimes having lower levels of vitamins and minerals than they’re supposed to. Or sometimes higher levels.
In 2019, Hill’s had to recall multiple products in its Science Diet and Prescription Diet lines in the U.S. after dogs were exposed to potentially toxic levels of vitamin D. Whether from homemade or commercial diets, though, vitamin and mineral overloads and deficiencies can cause serious health problems, especially with puppies and kittens.
“Even in adults, they might look like they’re perfectly fine for months or even years and then a fracture or ‘rubber jaw’ develops,” says Dodd, noting that rubber jaw is pretty much exactly as unpleasant as the name suggests. “These critical illnesses seem sudden, but are actually the result of weak bones leaching calcium for a long time.”
And then there’s the potential of food poisoning. One of the more popular DIY pet food regimens is the raw food diet, which boosters claim is what animals are meant to eat, despite there being no evidence that uncooked food is any easier to digest or better from a nutritional standpoint. Raw foodists say that animals don’t get salmonella, which some vets who have treated animal food poisoning take issue with.
More vets, however, express concern over the humans getting food poisoning. Even those who take great precautions against cross-contamination during food prep might not be able to control the threat posed by a bearded, slobbery dog whose snout is in a bowl of raw chicken one minute and, a few minutes later, licking a toddler’s face.
So, if good information is hard to find and the risks are so great, why are so many people convinced that alternative diets positioned as “natural” food are the way to go?
“My guess is that it’s all based on this false belief that wild animals are healthier,” says Robert Pepper Jones, veterinarian and owner of Main Street Veterinary Clinic in the Upper Beaches. “They think: ‘This is what they eat in the wild, so it must be better.’ But wild animals are starved and parasitized. There’s nothing pretty about being a wild animal.”
Jones recalls when he first started seeing patients on raw food, he did note that skin conditions seemed to clear up and, as such, did think there was something beneficial in the diet. After investigation, though, he decided the benefits of that diet had more to do with switching away from commercial processed food than the fact that it wasn’t cooked.
“There’s a reason people cook their food,” says Jones. “It’s so they don’t die from eating raw food.”
The history of pet food is riddled with pseudo-scientific claims that we should be suspicious of, from raw foodists to the grain-free, protein power proponents. Cats and dogs need a lot of protein, of course, but there is such a thing as too much, even for carnivores. And, more importantly, it’s what they’re not getting when you eliminate all the carbs. Both animal experts we interviewed said that a lot of the fancier pet foods with claims on the package aren’t nutritionally complete.
Both vets recommend consultation with a veterinary nutritionist if you want to go off book and make your own food. Jones also recommended Hilary’s Blend, a Guelph company that sells cookbooks and supplements, so people can just add (cooked) meat for a nutritionally balanced meal.
And for those of us who have neither the time nor energy to cook vittles for our pets and just want to buy some kibble?
“Rely on the food companies that have a lot of research and development behind their name, typically in the veterinary line,” Jones advises. “Because it’s such a big industry, there are a lot of boutique foods with names like ‘nature something’ or ‘science that’ or godknows-what, and there’s a lot of research that goes behind making a label look appealing to humans.
“The good foods aren’t in sexy bags. I go for the boring brands because you’re buying the research and development they put into the food,” he says. “The animals don’t care about the label.”