Feeding Fido Raw Pet Food a Risky Choice: FDA Doing so raises risk of food poisoning

A trainer who helped me start my Brittany also owned one of the same age. This trainer was pushing everybody into raw feeding. She kept telling me my dog looked skinny but the truth is at that time he out weighed her slightly plump Britt by 3 pounds. Her dog also couldn't run as fast or keep up to mine. It would be simplistic to draw the conclusion that it was only food related but you also can't discount it. Both of our dogs have excellent pedigrees and breeding.
As for the level of contaminated commercial kibble vs raw I don't know the actual stats but my guess is the kibble produced and sold in North America is likely in the billions of bags. I doubt that raw would even be close to 5% of what dogs are fed annually. The more bags you sell the larger are the odds of some manufacturing defect so without a useful number to compare consumption of kibble vs raw quoting a few recalls really doesn't help making a decision one way or another. How many raw producers are large enough to issue a recall or have it recorded in the media? It would be like comparing the recalls of a Honda civic vs a Mercedes. With so many more in the field of one over the other the actual percentage of defect is not reflected in the reported incidences.

This country and other neighbours have gone crazy about what we feed ourselves and our pets, while in other countries people are starving to death. Fattest people in the world live in North America. Somehow we have transferred our love affair with food to our pets.

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Originally Posted by Sharon

This country and other neighbours have gone crazy about what we feed ourselves and our pets, while in other countries people are starving to death. Fattest people in the world live in North America. Somehow we have transferred our love affair with food to our pets.

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Best post of this entire thread. Well said Sharon :)

I concur :)

Thanks.

I saw a documentary of factory workers in Japan, making jeans to be sent to Canada/USA. They were having a great laugh about the sizes they were making .They fit 3 Japanese into one pair of size 42 jeans. :)

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Originally Posted by Sharon

. Somehow we have transferred our love affair with food to our pets.

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More like we transferred our 'poor' eating habits to our pets :)

When I was a kid growing up we had sled dogs that we fed raw seal meat/fat mixed with corn meal. Strongest dogs I've ever seen in my life.

S.

Survival of the fittest and healthy genetics over thousands of years were the development of these northern breeds. You could feed them an old boot and they would survive.lol

A bit off topic, but I believe A dog's health has an awful lot to do with it's activity/exercise levels, just like humans. Calories in, calories out. For example, a dog that is not tied up and spends most of its time outdoors free to roam, (to a point) will be leaner, stronger, faster and healthier than the same dog that spends most of its life tied up or indoors mostly, with only a daily leashed walk for "exercise".
Now for sure some dogs are chow hounds so food intake has to be controlled. I'm lucky, mine eats when, and as much as she feels like. Often she'll pick up her bowl of kibble and carry it out on the lawn for later lol.

To the OP, I think it's just common sense that one would think that the risk of poisoning would be higher with raw food than processed, but in this day and age who knows for sure? What i do know, is that the risk of either is super low so it doesn't really matter anyway. Besides, dogs have cast iron guts for the most part. It's also not like I believe every report that comes out from self serving government bureaucracies, that for sure, Specially when big money like the pet food industry is affected.

One last thing. I don't feed my critters raw food, but after seeing this post and then checking the ingredients on the commercial food I can certainly understand why pet owners would want to use a raw food diet, at least for the protein part of it.

Cheers

It basically boils down to the animals healthy or unhealthy genetic make up. Animals that have had to survive in extreme conditions either lived or died and had to live off of high fat diets depending on the season and the adaptation over hundreds if not thousands of years. My working dogs were fed raw with supplements and performed extremely well based on their genetic make up. They were also at times fed cheap kibble with supplements, added fat and still performed very well. Was feeding a raw diet better than feeding a high protein and fat kibble ,only slightly better. It was years later that i switched from a raw diet to a top end kibble mainly out of convenience and the end result proved to be a more consistent working animal in harness .Sled dogs digestive tracts have evolved in such a way to utilize all food sources and turn into energy. Siberian working lines have always been known to go a very long distance on a small amount of food because of there genetic make up. Many people believe or would like to believe that raw is better for an animal over a quality kibble. I believe a dog with a skin disorder, digestive disorders etc. is not entirely related to poor or high quality kibble. I believe it's a piece of the breeding program puzzle when choosing animals to be part of a breeding program that's missing and should be included. It's not intentional but something that has been overlooked in most breeding programs and the end result is sick animals. Also my dogs never suffered food poisoning from eating a raw diet.