Green Education Network awards Pet News and Views its seal of approval.

Pets at Home Pet Supplies
«  
  »

Raw Meaty Diets for Dogs

By Jim McBean, guest blogger, of DoggyBytes

For the past two decades or so, many people have been choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet over a traditional animal protein based diet. Their reasons usually include a desire to not contribute to the suffering of slaughter animals, environmental reasons or because they believe that animal source protein is unhealthy.

Over the long term, I believe a strict vegetarian or vegan diet is unhealthy for humans (omnivores); it’s a free world (most of it) and people are free to choose for themselves what they eat, and that’s cool. My problem is when people impose their eating philosophy on their pets, dogs and cats who are carnivores.

For all of their exterior differences, a dog’s insides are the same as a wolf’s. Digestively speaking, a dog is a wolf and both are carnivores. Want proof? Read some of evolutionary canid biologist Dr. Robert K Wayne’s stuff (he’s the guy that mapped the canine genome), or respected wildlife research biologist David Mech, who specializes in studying large carnivores, specifically wolves.

Common Sense
For as good a job as the pet food companies have done to “brainwash” ah, “persuade” people that dogs are omnivores, fortunately there are still common sense thinking people that trust in Mother Nature’s wisdom, and continue to feed their pets raw meaty bones, the diet that they evolved on and thrived on for millions of years.

This recent trend of feeding dogs a vegetarian diet is terribly irresponsible and scares the hell out of me. Most vegans/vegetarians are aware that they must combine food because vegetable protein does not contain all of the eight essential amino acids required by humans. The problem is that the quality and bio-availability of the amino acids from vegetable proteins are of lower quality and bio-availability compared to vegetable sourced proteins. Now let’s apply this to dogs.

Trusting Mother Nature
Dogs are carnivorous animals which by definition means they’re meat and bone eaters, and they have been for thousands of years. The canine digestive system has a PH (acidity) of between 1 and 2. To putt his in perspective, a PH of 1 equals the acidity you would get from a 0.4 percent solution of Hydrochloric acid–seriously corrosive stuff able to digest bone. A little bit of overkill for digesting plant material don’t you think?

Another problem with feeding a dog a vegetarian diet is, that diet will be in the form of an extruded kibble. All kibble is extruded, cooked. What happens when you cook vegetables? That’s right, you destroy valuable nutrients, like fragile amino acids, vitamins C and B, etc. So, that the dog will pass the AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control) Feeding Trial (cough–a joke) and doesn’t die, the pet food manufacturer adds those nutrients back into their products somewhere along the processing line.

Benefits of a Meat and Bone Diet
There are many, many benefits to feeding our pet carnivores a meat and bone diet that mimics as closely as possible their evolutionary diet, and there are many, many, many potential negative health effects that will come from feeding a carnivore a vegetarian diet.

If you’re feeding your carnivore a vegetarian diet, you’ve just taken your dog’s nutrition and health out of the hands of Mother Nature, who by the way just celebrated her three-billionth birthday, and into the hands of a pet food company that’s been around for 70 years.

Jim McBean is an expert on raw meaty bone diets for dogs. He writes the DoggyBytes blog, and you can get a good understanding of why he believes raw is the way to go.

April 12th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Guest Posts

8 comments to Raw Meaty Diets for Dogs

  • Eric Goebelbecker
    April 12, 2010 at 12:10 PM

    I would never advocate a vegetarian diet for a dog or a cat. Period.

    That said:

    Dogs are not wolves. I understand that as soon as people put their “raw diets are the way, the truth, and the light” hat on they like to gloss this over, but they are not. Even the relatively recent decision by some to reclassify dogs as a subspecies of wolf is controversial.

    Most of the people that support the “dogs are basically wolves” assertion also support the “adoption” theory of domestication – that man domesticated wolves by taking cubs back to villages and camps. So, do we really believe that if man actually did that – and it’s by no means a given that he did – that the wolves were fed exclusively meat and raw bones? Really? Food was always that abundant? I don’t think so.

    I think dogs adapted as scavengers. Many dogs still live around the world as “homeless” scavengers that either fend for themselves all or most of the time, eating whatever they can get their paws on – many more than are kept in homes and fed gourmet and raw foods. They do just fine. In terms of evolution they are kicking the wolves asses.

    That’s not an excuse to feed dogs crappy kibble, but the raw diets are really getting a bit oversold in my opinion. In some ways they are reinforcing the “dogs as wolves” argument, which has set dog training back a good 20 years (even though the biggest proponent of that training doesn’t even understand wolves.)

  • Leigh of GoFetchGifts.com
    April 12, 2010 at 6:48 PM

    In my opinion, raw diets are undersold. That is why people are so passionate about raw feeding online, because in the real world, too few people know about or trust raw food diets. Most only learn about them when they think to search the net because they need to switch brands, or their dog is sick and they google the symptoms or syndrome. Whether dogs are wolves or not is beside the point. Dogs are canines. Canines are omnivores. Omnivores eat variety. Cats are felines. Felines are carnivores. Carnivores eat fresh, raw meat. Thems the facts.

  • Rod@GoPetFriendly
    April 12, 2010 at 7:41 PM

    All I know is that everything about my dogs has improved since we switched them from kibble to a dehydrated raw food diet. (Were it not for our travel, we would be feeding our dogs a diet of raw meaty bones.) Benefits of the switch away from kibble have been: healthier coats, shinier teeth, less thirst, weight loss, and a reduction in the dosage of the seizure medication for our GSD and the hypothyroidism medication for our Shar Pei.

    With respect to Eric’s comment. Dogs can be wolves from a diet/digestive perspective AND they can be treated as individuals, not as pack animals, for training purposes. It can be both – it’s a matter of educating pet owners.

  • Karen Friesecke
    April 15, 2010 at 7:38 PM

    I would feed Jersey a raw diet, but she just doesn’t like eating raw meat., which I think is wierd, but she is a princess. If you want your dog to be a veggie, let him choose. Put down a plate of meat and a plate of vegetables, I assure you that he won’t choose the veggies!

  • Raw Feeding: A Veterinary Tech Student’s Take (Part 2)
    April 16, 2010 at 12:21 AM

    [...] (Purina included) and the veterinary community claiming that commercially produced pet foods are “the way, the truth, and the light”, and do their very best to discredit raw feeding, confusing pet owners and ensuring further growth [...]

  • Jim (DoggyBytes.ca)
    April 16, 2010 at 3:11 AM

    Eric, I think you would agree that an animal’s physiology is quite a separate thing from its behavior. Digestively speaking however, a dog is a wolf. That is quite clear, from the tips of their canines and carnassials to their highly corrosive (capable of digesting whole bone) stomach acids.

    What I feed my dogs today really doesn’t have much to do with how dogs were domesticated from wolves, however, the more likely scenario of the progression from gray wolf to domestic dog occured when “naturally tamer” wolves hung around the campsite waiting for scraps of meat. Was food always “that abundant”? Scavenging striclty from humans probably not, but from hunting and being supplemented by what humans gave them – very likely.

    I’m not really sure what you mean by “in terms of evolution they (dogs) are kicking the wolves asses”, or how that is even relevant to what people feed their dogs today, but since you brought it up – the domestic dog’s existence only became possible through direct human intervention by breeding together tamer versions of its ancestor the gray wolf, giving rise to the 400 (or whatever) distinct domestic dog breeds we have today. Personally I would consider that devolution, but in any event it’s highly unlikely that would have occured (at least to anywhere near the degree it has) without human intervention.

    People will probably debate the designation of canis familiaris as a carnivore for some time, and maybe the earth is actually flat. It really doesn’t matter what order you choose to classify the domestic dog under though, the fact is, it is designed for eating and digesting meat and bone, whether from prey it hunted and killed itself or whether that meat and bone was offered by a human being.

    In some ways, “the reinforcing of dogs as omnivores” by the pet food companies and most in the veterinary profession and others, has set back canine nutrition (and health) thousands of years.

  • Eric Goebelbecker
    April 18, 2010 at 10:08 PM

    Actually no, I wouldn’t agree that physiology is separate from its behavior. That’s why I brought up the foxes. By selecting for behavior the physiology changed. Dogs still have a lot of the machinery for eating raw meat and bones. Doesn’t make it best much less required for health.

    You’ve done exactly what I said: you backed into what you think the origin of the dog is and then used it as proof that raw feeding is best. Dogs may have self-domesticated. They definitely didn’t self-domesticate into 400 breeds – that’s definitely our doing much to the detriment of many dogs, but where the first dog came from is still *open up for debate*. We know the world isn’t flat….we still don’t know where dogs came from. Wanting it to be one way and actually knowing are two different things.

    Either way, as dogs have eaten stuff other than meat for a long time. They ate something other than meat before canned dog food and kibble existed, and they did fine.

    The reason I brought up the success of the dog’s is that that outnumber wolves by a tremendous factor. Most of those dogs are not “owned” by anyone. They live as scavengers, eating garbage, leftovers, and occasionally some prey. They eat whatever they can whenever they can. Left alone dogs are NOT hunters. They are opportunistic scavengers. Much more like coyotes and jackals than wolves. And they do pretty good, outnumbering the animals that insist on only eating raw meat and bones by a long shot.

    That’s what is happening today. I don’t know what happened in the past, despite the assertions by the raw food manufacturers….

  • raw food diet
    July 5, 2010 at 5:08 PM

    Thanks for the neat tips – I appreciate worthwile content to read! – Debra http://www.veganfamilystyle.com