The Living Arts
Back to Nature
Raw food diets for dogs
by Ben Noble
Lucy has spent all but three days of her life eating a diet of mostly raw meat. “I feed it to her for the simple fact that she enjoys it so much more; it’s way more natural and she digs it,” Lucy’s dad, Jesse Harkous said. “She’s growing constantly. She was the runt, and she’s bigger than all of her brothers and sisters.”
Lucy is a nine-month-old black English lab. Although it is not endorsed by the American Veterinary Association, the raw diet Harkous and his girlfriend, Amanda Steinhaus, have raised Lucy on has steadily gained in popularity over the past decade.
“Seven years ago, you could not buy commercially-made raw food for pets,” Liz Oshant said. “You made your own and there was nowhere to really buy it.” Oshant co-owns Noah’s Natural Pet Market, formerly Noah’s Ark, in San Diego‘s Pacific Beach neighborhood. She and her business partner, Mary Jansky, are part of the growing number of pet stores that cater to and endorse the raw diet for dogs.
Adherents of the diet claim it provides a plethora of health benefits for their pets, both physical and mental, including cleaner teeth, healthier coats, smaller and less odorous stools, as well as increased energy and alertness.
“She’s never once been sick,” Harkous said of Lucy. “Her coat and breath are phenomenal. We only bathe her once a month even though she doesn’t smell, and her intelligence level is just unreal. She’s always got a ton of energy; she’s nonstop all day, everyday, and in fact her energy level is higher than any other dog’s I’ve ever had.
“We tried switching her over to kibble but she couldn’t handle it and wasn’t sleeping at night. It was the end of her world, like she was dying.”
The theory behind the diet is the simple idea of mimicking what the dog would be eating in its natural habitat. “If a dog is in the wild, they’re going to chase a rabbit, kill it and eat it raw,” Oshant said. “They’re not going to barbeque it over a campfire; they‘re going to be eating fresh, raw meat along with the bone and organ meat.”
Although you can prepare the raw diet for your dog using your own ingredients, it isn’t as simple as dropping a slab of raw hamburger into Fido’s food dish. Recipes are available online and commercially and frozen dog meat has become increasingly more available at pet stores. Two common products are meat patties often mixed with other ingredients deemed natural to a dog’s diet, and raw, meaty bones.
And the quality of the meat is generally high and comes from a USDA-approved meat-packing facility, Jansky said. “You yourself can eat our meat.”
“My husband actually did once,” Oshant quipped. He unwittingly grabbed what looked like a bag of ground hamburger out of the refrigerator and tossed it, along with other ingredients, into a breakfast skillet. When Oshant informed her husband who the meat was meant for, he ate it anyway. Oshant, however, passed on the meal. “I’m just not a big fan of liver,” she said.
Feeding your dog the raw diet is even easier than throwing together a breakfast skillet. “It’s no harder than feeding kibble,” Jansky said. “You just take a patty out, thaw it, put it in the bowl every night with a little warm water, and voila, you’re done. There’s no cooking involved.”
There are some things to look for, however, when first getting your dog started on a raw diet. “You need to check out what kind of dog you have,” Oshant said. “Some dogs naturally are gobblers.” If you are feeding your dog a whole chicken neck, for example, it’s important to make sure they don’t swallow the neck vertebrae whole. If the bone is soft and uncooked, there is little risk of injury to the dog, but coughing up bones is unpleasant for both dog and owner. To help “gobblers” learn how to chew the bones, which helps improve dental hygiene, Oshant suggests holding onto the piece of meat while the dog chews on it the first few times. Cooked bones should never, under any circumstances, be fed to dogs because the bones become fragile and rigid and they can cause intestinal perforations and dental fractures.
“It’s not for every single dog,” Oshant cautions. “There are some dogs out there that should not eat raw.” Owners may want to think twice before starting dogs with compromised digestive tracts, weakened immune systems, or very elderly dogs, on a raw diet. Dogs can start the diet at any point in their life, although the owners of Noah’s Natural Pet Market recommend mixing the foods from the new and old diets for about 2 weeks to transition to raw food and thereby avoiding what they call a ‘traumatic detox.’
Many in the raw diet community suggest that a majority of veterinarians are influenced by corporations that sell kibble through manufacturers’ financial contributions to veterinary schools and associations. Some vets sell commercial kibble out of their offices, as well.
“I think people really trust their vet so much, and if their vet is against it, then they don’t even want to explore it or think about it,” Jansky said. “And it’s not prevention [these vets seek through diet]. It’s more ‘let’s cure, let’s fix what the problem is,’ when diet causes a lot of problems.”
Ben Noble is a freelance journalist in San Diego, and contributes to a variety of newspapers such as the Union Tribune and the Star. Noble likes puppies, and can be found spending time with his dog.