Feeding Your Dog – What Is The Best Food?
Over the past few years, store bought pet foods have had their quality questioned, and for good reason. Not long ago, there was a huge recall of pet foods involving a vast number of pet food brands due to the detection of poisons in the food. During and after the recall, many families discovered that their beloved pet had become very sick while others agonized over the death of their canine best friend.
Even so-called “high quality” dog foods were recently discovered to have high levels of aflatoxin and had to be removed from store shelves. Liver cancer is known to be a possibility after consumption of fungi like aflatoxin.
These problems have caused concern in many pet owners. Many have searched for food sources that they can trust with some suggesting araw meat diet for dogs.
It is no surprise that the commercial pet food industry does not want pet owners to consider abandoning their products. It’s a billion dollar plus industry and they certainly don’t want to have their profits cut into. Trying to convince owners of pets to not switch diets, these large pet food companies are attempting to scare dog owners away from considering a change to a raw meat diet.
On the other hand, major benefits of a raw diet fed to their dogs are reported by many owners. These benefits for their pets include:
- Fewer visits to the Veterinarian due to decreased health concerns
- Cleaner and pearly white teeth
- Vast improvement in the stool (fecal matter)
These are but a few of the benefits. Of course, the pet food industry want to point out that this is simply anecdotal evidence, and is not proof that feeding your dog a raw meat diet is healthy in the long run. They claim that feeding a raw diet has greater risks including that of bacterial infection.
Perhaps most of the evidence is anecdotal, but for those who are nervous about quality control in commercial feeds, there’s not much else to go by. It is doubtful that the animal feed producers will be funding studies that put their product up against what canines have been eating forever.
It’s not hard to feed your dog a raw meat and bones diet. There is some hesitation on the part of pet lovers, but the risks in feeding raw are quite low when you consider the risks of contaminated dog food.
Another issue is the manner in which commercial foods are labelled, wanting us to believe that the primary ingredient in their food is meat. But it is false that most commercial dog foods are primarily made of of meat. Combined, the total weight of all the other ingredients including grains outweighs the amount of meat in dry kibble.
Meayt bones that are raw are an important part of a raw diet for dogs. While some might find this odd at first, it is exactly what canines eat in the wild. When bones are cooked, they become hazardous, but it is a myth that we need to be careful when the bones are raw. When bones go through a cooking process, it changes their composition and that is when they are more prone to splintering and becoming a hazard. A dog’s digestive system, just like their counterparts in the wild, are adapted to eating raw bones. Clean white teeth with no tartar is another perk of feeding raw bones.
In the end, there is much to be said for the benefits of feeding dogs a raw food diet despite the warnings of those who have a financial interest in pet owners not doing this.
Click to learn more about raw meat for dogs.


