Why should you feed your dog a raw diet?
If we walk into any pet food store, or even supermarket, we are faced with a wide array of options of what to feed our dogs. Tinned food, dried food, grain free food, with chicken, without chicken, beef, lamb, for puppies, for seniors, for spayed bitches, for neutered males, science diets, steamed wet food - the options are almost endless. So what should we be feeding our dogs?
Most pet foods are supplied for our convenience but the driving force for the suppliers is not nutrition for our pets but profit for themselves, usually at the expense of the health of our pets. A lot of manufactured pet food uses low quality ingredients including scrap meat and carcasses deemed unfit for human consumption that are rendered and used as protein sources. There have even been reports of pet carcasses being used in pet food in America. These ‘proteins’ are then mixed with other low grade, often inappropriate and cheap ingredients, such as grains, wheat, rice or alternative carbohydrate sources as soy, corn or pea protein.
This combination of ‘proteins’ and other low grade ingredients undergo a high heat processing to sterilize the mixture so that it is even safe for consumption. Unfortunately this heat processing denatures the value of the proteins decreasing the foods nutrient value further, and in the process introduces carcinogens such as acrylamides and heterocyclic amines.
The resulting baked offering is usually not tempting or attractive to our dogs and is lacking in necessary nutrients. To overcome this a top coat is sprayed onto the kibble adding back nutrients and making the food more palatable for our pets. Often these added ingredients include forms of oils to add necessary omega 3’s to the foods (notice how your hands feel oily if you handle kibble), unfortunately these oils are particularly unstable in this denatured form and can rapidly turn rancid, and rancid oils are not good for our dogs.
So if our pets have to be tempted to eat this denatured food we are trying to feed them what would they rather eat?
If we look back in time we can get more of an idea, even back to more recent history before the advent of commercial dried dog foods dogs were primarily fed from the kitchen - the scraps and leftovers the family did not eat, and bones from the butchers. If we look way back in history at our domesticated dogs ancestors living in the wild we would find them eating a prey and scavenged diet - whole small animals, heads, offal, and some, although very little, stomach contents with feather and fur, partially decomposed carcasses and the odd fruits and berries, often slightly rotten.
If we examine at the genetic makeup and internal workings of our domesticated dogs today we find that they remain the same as their carnivorous ancestors. A dog cannot move his jaws side to side like we can, or as ruminant animals like sheep and cows do. Their jaws are designed to move just up and down - to grab, tear and gulp down his food with little chewing, certainly nothing like the masticating of a ruminant that starts the digestive process of their food. The digestive process of a dog does not start until the food hits the stomach.
The mouth passes food into the canine's stomach and digestive tract which is very short in comparison to our own. This is to enable the dog to cope with some of the foods that it will eat - whole prey and scavenged carrion (already dead) food. The short digestion process does not give any pathogenic bacteria that may be ingested the chance to thrive, it passes on through and out doing little or any harm to the dog. The PH level in a canine’s digestive tract is much lower than our own, helping this control of any nasty bacteria, but also to enable the dog to digest raw meat and bones.
A dog's digestive system is not designed to ferment foods like our own, or vegetarian animals.
The natural diet of a canine is carnivorous, with lots of seasonal variety, made up of whole living foods, mostly whole prey high in protein, and moderate in fat. Some plant food may be consumed, often as the stomach contents of the prey, as such this vegetable matter is already partially fermented. What is very definitely missing from their diet is carbohydrates in the forms and quantities that we feed them when using commercial kibble pet food. These lead to inappropriate levels of high glycemic starches that are detrimental to our pets health and can lead to inflammatory processes and degenerative diseases.
As with humans the best prescription for the health of our pets is as much unprocessed fresh food as we can afford, to mimic their natural diet. Ideally this should be in the form of whole prey including fur, feather and all the internal organs, but for many of us this is not readily available, or generally acceptable. So we can ‘build’ a diet that mimics this as much as possible - a BARF diet - a Biologically Appropriate Raw Food diet that includes meat, bone, offal, heads, hearts, and a little vegetable matter, mainly in the form of leafy greens. All raw with as little processing involved as possible.
Nature knows best!
