Baunji Strong

Baunji Strong

This page is dedicated to Baunji. To help spread awareness of cancer affecting so many dogs.Baunji h

As most of you know the heartfelt story of Baunji, and his journey in the last 2 1/2 years after literally being saved from a high kill shelter in Brooklyn NY 12-8-14

His journey has touched those who met him and even those who haven't! His huge head has intimidated many he's come in contact with, but his Love for people over shines with that huge smile of his face and his zest for life, just bei

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17/10/2023

Join us on tonight at 7 pm (BST) where we discuss - Vitamin B1 - Thiamine.

If a dog is deficient, you'll see a lack of appetite, weight loss, and GI upset.

As symptoms progress, dogs will experience neurological symptoms such as neuromuscular weakness, unequal pupil sizes and decreased light response by the pupils.

Interesting stuff!

https://fb.watch/nKJLx0jr4e/

06/10/2023

Dogs First
ANOTHER STUDY SHOWS FRESH MEAT BETTER FOR THEIR GUT HEALTH
Another dry v raw comparison. Another win for biologically appropriate raw dog food.
It was a look-back at 95 client-owned dogs in a vet clinic - 48 with chronic enteropathy (CE, gut disease) and 47 without (the control group).
They found that a diet containly mainly meat was protective of CE (as was zero carbohydrates and a meal with more than 14% water).
Link in comments.
This builds on the study released in Nature last year that found raw fed dogs suffer less gut disease.
I think the score is around 6-0 now for these comparisons. That is, ZERO studies indicate high-carb dry food is actually good for anything in dogs or cats.
***
If your dog is suffering bad gut disease there is a process when changing them to real food. This is important as sometimes, particularly in bad cases, simply shifting them to a new food may not work as well as you'd hoped. We liken it to buying a new car but driving it on a bad road. You must fix the road first if you want the car to work. Below is how to do it. We call it the ReSEG solution. 13 years doing this tells us it absolutely works for the majority. If it doesn't work to fix your dog's recurring gut issues we will give you your money back instantly. That's the deal.
https://www.dogsfirst.ie/step/canine-allergies-landing/

03/10/2023

Dogs First
DID YOUR VET TELL YOU YOUR DOG "NEEDED" GRAIN FOR HEART HEALTH?!...VITAL POST FOR ANYONE STILL CONFUSED OVER DCM IN DOGS...
Got your morning coffee in hand?! Good. I put my rant pants on for this one.
A post two days ago highlighted a strange uttering that has been heard in vet clinics across the land for the last few years.
Apparently dogs, an animal that doesn't eat grain and won't choose it in food trials, NEED grain for the health of their hearts.
Does that seem right to you?
No, me and you both. So, where the hell did this one come from?!
Dogs have has ZERO physiological need for carbs. Even the pet food "regulators" AAFCO/FEDIAF agree with us there. They also have zero physiological need of the near impossible-to-digest protein that comes with it (wheat and corn gluten) let alone the anti-nutrient compounds therein (phytic acid sure but also tannins, saponins, gossypol, lectins, protease and amylase inhibitors and goitrogens!).
I wonder what magic compound is in grain that isn't in their normal diet (normal being meat, organ, bone, bit of veg maybe). .
Answers on a postcard.
At this point, if you think hard, you might come up with "heart healthy" plant oils, which is yet another harmful nutritional myth stubbornly perpetuated by health and heart organisations alike.
Aside large doses of omega 6 throwing out the crucial omega 3:6 ratio resulting in inflammation, something that most of us are now familiar with, we're pretty clear that plant oils are not the saviours we thought they were, in fact, they're more dangerous than sugar. If you or your doctor are under any illusions there, please check out "Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism" on Youtube. Everyone NEEDS to watch that video and needs to remove all products containing refined plant oils from your life, certainly if cancer and heart health are your concern.
So when your vet says dogs NEED the grain, what are they talking about?! Honestly, ask them to elaborate. What exactly were they missing?!!
Because here's what they're talking about - for the last 6 years the FDA and pet food producers (the ones that use grain, which was most until recently) COLLUDED to repress the growth of the "natural" pet food market. They began by attempting to slow the growth of "grain-free" pet food.
Now, we can't have a product going around boasting about NOT containing our most profitable junk food ingredient, so they contrived a plan to slow them down and came up with 600 cases (in a population of 90mil US dogs...) of POSSIBLE Dilated Cardio Myopathy (DCM) that MAY have been linked to a handful of grain-free pet food companies which the FDA dutifully named straight away so the public could be alerted and AVOID the POSSIBLE suspects.
They then did their thing, getting on their microphones to alert the public via the usual outlets - in this case The New York Times and the Washington Post, who dutifully picked up on the ‘link’ and spread the concern to worried dog owners throughout the nation. Very quickly, a Facebook group ‘Taurine Deficient (Nutritional) Dilated Cardiomyopathy’ popped up and had more than 60,000 members.
It was another terrifying pandemic being fought by the worlds most trusted regulator...after just 600 unverified cases.
It was just strange the way it happened. I mean, compare this to the melamine scandal just a decade earlier (still going on, btw) where GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS were killing tens of thousands and the FDA wouldn't name a single manufacturer even when it became clear they KNEW WHO WHICH BRANDS WERE AT FAULT and congress had to step in.
There was another scandal most are forgetting about. Back in the 1970's tens of thousands of dogs but mainly cats started dying from DCM as GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS stopped putting meat (and therefore taurine) in pet food. This was where the "cats need taurine" bit came from. They do but they actually need MEAT, meat being the best source of taurine (ta**us is the latin for bull).
This was the start of the NRC / AAFCO - they were brought in to get pet food off the floor so this may never happen again.
So how are they doing, if just on the DCM front?
Well, today there are still between 500,000 and a million cases of DCM in the US (90mil dogs) EVERY year.
[I can't bog down this already-lengthy piece with studies, all this has been covered in my book, Feeding Dogs The Science Behind the Dry V Raw Pet Food Debate, available from many independents and Amazon].
But the FDA are particularly concerned about just these 600 here.
6 years on, what have we learned. To summarise,
- no such issues popped up in EU grain-free-kibble-fed dogs
- no manufacturers found an issue, no recalls occurred
- despite heavy media advertisement, no more than 600 cases were found
Many issues in kibble can cause DCM in pets, including a lack of taurine but also methionine and cysteine (taurines' precursors / building blocks) as well too much plant fibre (think "light" pet food) which perturbs both digestion and reabsorption of bile (and thus taurine) from the intestines.
For that reason, there's no reason grain-free pet food, being high carb, low protein, ultra-processed and full of plant fibre, would be any better or worse than cereal-based pet food for causing DCM in dogs. They are a tiny step better in that they don't include wheat or barley and thus gluten, but few are better where it matters for DCM (meat).
Back to this case, the FDA charged that the new fillers being used in pet food (potatoes, peas etc) were "ingredients of concern" and highlighted two previous works that appeared to highlight such a link, neither were published and today, both "studies" are in the bin, disproven by the likes of Mansilla et al. 2019 who clearly showed neither study addressed the lack of taurine, methionine, cystine or excess fibre in their test foods.
Lack of supporting evidence aside, this tiny handful of DCM cases was enough to prompt a group of American veterinary nutrition specialists from major research universities - Dr Lisa Freeman, Dr Josh Stern and Dr Darcy Adin - to put together a piece entitled “Diet- Associated Dilated Cardiomyopathy in Dogs: What Do We KNOW?”. In fairness to them, they all declared interests to the big 3 cereal-based pet food producers (Hills. Royal Canin, Purina). Their piece remains today the seminal work linking DCM in dogs to grain-free pet food. It is certainly the most popular. Published in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association, it has been downloaded more than fifty times more often than the Mansilla et al. (2019) showing no correlation. With more than 80,000 downloads in just six months (Dec 2018 to July 2019), it had three times that of any article published around the same time in that journal. In fact, with those sort of numbers, it is likely the most widely read canine nutritional science article ever written, which is quite a remarkable feat for Freeman who ALSO HAPPENED author JAVMA’s other most popularly downloaded articles, this time a piece on raw dog food in 2013, titled “Current Knowledge About The Risks And Benefits Of Raw Meat-Based Diets For Dogs And Cats” which today lies in ruins, revealed for the industry-loaded, heavily biased nonsense that it was. But my, my it was effective.
Like their 2013 hatchet job on real food, this piece too is replete with errors. Again in point form for brevity:
- it states ‘over the past few years, an increasing number of DCM cases involving dogs appear to have been related to diet’ although they provide no evidence of this.
- they repeatedly implicate ‘BEG diets’ (essentially grain-free pet foods) with DCM in dogs without using a single reference
- they rely heavily on the two unpublished studies (by them) that made no such association. In fact, the Adin study was caught with its pants down when they found it had been published previously and their findings were not nearly as dramatic as their new findings reported the issue to be.
- the article was not peer-reviewed (hence they could get away with such vagary...despite saying "what do we KNOW" in the title, but it would be enough to slip it past the worlds vets who are too busy to get into the details).
Long story short, the whole debacle is being hammered out in the courts as grain-free pet food companies were not happy. They said it was bad for sales (which was the objective). While "natural" pet foods were now 50% of the market, in 2019, Statista confirmed a significant drop in their sales in the US. Where previous years, it had enjoyed year-on-year growth of nearly 10%, in 2019 sales had fallen to just 0.3%.
If by this stage you are wondering why the US government appears so willing to step in and assist the plight of the poor, suffering cereal-based pet food sector, then consider the fact that US pet food, now wiser and "naturally driven" are no longer happy feeding hazardous food waste to their pets.
Cereal-based pet food is historically a profitable endpoint for the waste of the human food industry. It is an outlet for poor-quality grain, as well as indigestible leftovers from the likes of the beet, corn and grape industries. Most importantly, it is the dumping ground for the meat industry.
Today, Americans are eating a LOT of animal protein in the form of meat, eggs, cheese and milk. The problem is this sector produces a lot of hazardous waste. Typically, less than half of a slaughtered cow is consumed by humans. The rest, much of the head, brain, carcass, much of the organs, innards, feet and tail, is waste, as far as the human market is concerned. Nor is it just the good stuff. They also have copious amounts of 4D meat (dead, diseased, dying, disabled) stuff (which has to be cremated here in the EU), along with road kill, euthanised cats and dogs (honestly) and truly toxic ingredients like left over restaurant grease.
Now, in the US, producers have two options available to them at this point – sell their waste to rendering plants which will stew it with all other meat waste and sell it to big pet food and other animal feed groups...or dump it.
Here are some throw away figures on that latter option, to give us some context: the US produces more than 50 million tonnes of meat each year (beef, chicken, turkey and pork, combined, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures). That is potentially 25 million tonnes of animal waste each year (or 25 billion kilos). If we estimate that the producer asks for just $0.10 per kilo of their product (in Ireland, chicken and duck carcass is worth €0.30/kg when bought by the tonne, beef organs €0.70/kg), that’s a market value of $250 billion.
This shifts our focus immediately. No longer are we talking about a $30 billion US pet food market. Now we are talking figures of a quarter of a trillion. In fact, we could easily double that figure, considering now we are asking the meat industry to adapt its supply lines and storage facilities and start paying to dump what was once a profitable commodity. Maybe half a trillion dollars? That is 1.5 times the size of the US entire prescription drug market, and we all now know how the FDA "regulates" those guys.
So, either the producers pay or the home of unchecked capitalism, currently $33 trillion in debt (to who?!!!), will be picking up the tab to manage it for them.
They could insist meat prices increase significantly but this would result in less US meat being consumed, which is equally bad news for the economy and heavily lobbied governments as a whole.
There is simply no profitable way out of this, so they dig in and continue to relentlessly drive consumption by any means necessary.
There is one more sting in the tail. The FDA continued their completely unsupported and repressive line of inquiry until Dec 2022. Why did they stop then? Mars acquired Orijen, the worlds largest and most successful grain-free pet food company the month before. Bet they got it a significantly better price.
DCM from grain-free pet food is now no longer mentioned.
Talk about a conspiracy!
So there you have it. Your vet is still parroting the same confused, utterly unsupported and today completely disproven nonsense invented by Big Pet Food, fuelled by the FDA, supported by morally bankrupt (albeit highly effective) whitecoats like Freeman et al. and shat out repeatedly by your ever-caring mainstream media.
That's how effective this sort of nonsense is - years later, with zero evidence in support, our vets still believe it is GRAIN-FREE pet food that causes DCM in dogs so therefore the GRAIN must have been protective to heart health in dogs...despite it historically being a cereal-based pet food issue.
A shocking endictment of the state of nutritional nouse deployed by the industry today.
Now, I'm off to change my pants before I have a heart attack.

02/10/2023

That's right - this tuesdays FB live 7pm (BST) we're doing Vitamin B1 - Thiamine.

If a dog is deficient, you'll see a lack of appetite, weight loss, and GI upset.

As symptoms progress, dogs will experience neurological symptoms such as neuromuscular weakness, unequal pupil sizes and decreased light response by the pupils.

Interesting stuff!

01/10/2023

DID YOUR VET TELL YOU YOUR DOG "NEEDED" GRAIN FOR HEART HEALTH?!...VITAL POST FOR ANYONE STILL CONFUSED OVER DCM IN DOGS...

Got your morning coffee in hand?! Good. I put my rant pants on for this one.

A post two days ago highlighted a strange uttering that has been heard in vet clinics across the land for the last few years.

Apparently dogs, an animal that doesn't eat grain and won't choose it in food trials, NEED grain for the health of their hearts.

Does that seem right to you?

No, me and you both. So, where the hell did this one come from?!

Dogs have has ZERO physiological need for carbs. Even the pet food "regulators" AAFCO/FEDIAF agree with us there. They also have zero physiological need of the near impossible-to-digest protein that comes with it (wheat and corn gluten) let alone the anti-nutrient compounds therein (phytic acid sure but also tannins, saponins, gossypol, lectins, protease and amylase inhibitors and goitrogens!).

I wonder what magic compound is in grain that isn't in their normal diet (normal being meat, organ, bone, bit of veg maybe). .

Answers on a postcard.

At this point, if you think hard, you might come up with "heart healthy" plant oils, which is yet another harmful nutritional myth stubbornly perpetuated by health and heart organisations alike.

Aside large doses of omega 6 throwing out the crucial omega 3:6 ratio resulting in inflammation, something that most of us are now familiar with, we're pretty clear that plant oils are not the saviours we thought they were, in fact, they're more dangerous than sugar. If you or your doctor are under any illusions there, please check out "Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism" on Youtube. Everyone NEEDS to watch that video and needs to remove all products containing refined plant oils from your life, certainly if cancer and heart health are your concern.

So when your vet says dogs NEED the grain, what are they talking about?! Honestly, ask them to elaborate. What exactly were they missing?!!

Because here's what they're talking about - for the last 6 years the FDA and pet food producers (the ones that use grain, which was most until recently) COLLUDED to repress the growth of the "natural" pet food market. They began by attempting to slow the growth of "grain-free" pet food.

Now, we can't have a product going around boasting about NOT containing our most profitable junk food ingredient, so they contrived a plan to slow them down and came up with 600 cases (in a population of 90mil US dogs...) of POSSIBLE Dilated Cardio Myopathy (DCM) that MAY have been linked to a handful of grain-free pet food companies which the FDA dutifully named straight away so the public could be alerted and AVOID the POSSIBLE suspects.

They then did their thing, getting on their microphones to alert the public via the usual outlets - in this case The New York Times and the Washington Post, who dutifully picked up on the ‘link’ and spread the concern to worried dog owners throughout the nation. Very quickly, a Facebook group ‘Taurine Deficient (Nutritional) Dilated Cardiomyopathy’ popped up and had more than 60,000 members.

It was another terrifying pandemic being fought by the worlds most trusted regulator...after just 600 unverified cases.

It was just strange the way it happened. I mean, compare this to the melamine scandal just a decade earlier (still going on, btw) where GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS were killing tens of thousands and the FDA wouldn't name a single manufacturer even when it became clear they KNEW WHO WHICH BRANDS WERE AT FAULT and congress had to step in.

There was another scandal most are forgetting about. Back in the 1970's tens of thousands of dogs but mainly cats started dying from DCM as GRAIN-BASED PET FOODS stopped putting meat (and therefore taurine) in pet food. This was where the "cats need taurine" bit came from. They do but they actually need MEAT, meat being the best source of taurine (ta**us is the latin for bull).

This was the start of the NRC / AAFCO - they were brought in to get pet food off the floor so this may never happen again.

So how are they doing, if just on the DCM front?

Well, today there are still between 500,000 and a million cases of DCM in the US (90mil dogs) EVERY year.

[I can't bog down this already-lengthy piece with studies, all this has been covered in my book, Feeding Dogs The Science Behind the Dry V Raw Pet Food Debate, available from many independents and Amazon].

But the FDA are particularly concerned about just these 600 here.

6 years on, what have we learned. To summarise,

- no such issues popped up in EU grain-free-kibble-fed dogs
- no manufacturers found an issue, no recalls occurred
- despite heavy media advertisement, no more than 600 cases were found

Many issues in kibble can cause DCM in pets, including a lack of taurine but also methionine and cysteine (taurines' precursors / building blocks) as well too much plant fibre (think "light" pet food) which perturbs both digestion and reabsorption of bile (and thus taurine) from the intestines.

For that reason, there's no reason grain-free pet food, being high carb, low protein, ultra-processed and full of plant fibre, would be any better or worse than cereal-based pet food for causing DCM in dogs. They are a tiny step better in that they don't include wheat or barley and thus gluten, but few are better where it matters for DCM (meat).

Back to this case, the FDA charged that the new fillers being used in pet food (potatoes, peas etc) were "ingredients of concern" and highlighted two previous works that appeared to highlight such a link, neither were published and today, both "studies" are in the bin, disproven by the likes of Mansilla et al. 2019 who clearly showed neither study addressed the lack of taurine, methionine, cystine or excess fibre in their test foods.

Lack of supporting evidence aside, this tiny handful of DCM cases was enough to prompt a group of American veterinary nutrition specialists from major research universities - Dr Lisa Freeman, Dr Josh Stern and Dr Darcy Adin - to put together a piece entitled “Diet- Associated Dilated Cardiomyopathy in Dogs: What Do We KNOW?”. In fairness to them, they all declared interests to the big 3 cereal-based pet food producers (Hills. Royal Canin, Purina). Their piece remains today the seminal work linking DCM in dogs to grain-free pet food. It is certainly the most popular. Published in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association, it has been downloaded more than fifty times more often than the Mansilla et al. (2019) showing no correlation. With more than 80,000 downloads in just six months (Dec 2018 to July 2019), it had three times that of any article published around the same time in that journal. In fact, with those sort of numbers, it is likely the most widely read canine nutritional science article ever written, which is quite a remarkable feat for Freeman who ALSO HAPPENED author JAVMA’s other most popularly downloaded articles, this time a piece on raw dog food in 2013, titled “Current Knowledge About The Risks And Benefits Of Raw Meat-Based Diets For Dogs And Cats” which today lies in ruins, revealed for the industry-loaded, heavily biased nonsense that it was. But my, my it was effective.

Like their 2013 hatchet job on real food, this piece too is replete with errors. Again in point form for brevity:

- it states ‘over the past few years, an increasing number of DCM cases involving dogs appear to have been related to diet’ although they provide no evidence of this.
- they repeatedly implicate ‘BEG diets’ (essentially grain-free pet foods) with DCM in dogs without using a single reference
- they rely heavily on the two unpublished studies (by them) that made no such association. In fact, the Adin study was caught with its pants down when they found it had been published previously and their findings were not nearly as dramatic as their new findings reported the issue to be.
- the article was not peer-reviewed (hence they could get away with such vagary...despite saying "what do we KNOW" in the title, but it would be enough to slip it past the worlds vets who are too busy to get into the details).

Long story short, the whole debacle is being hammered out in the courts as grain-free pet food companies were not happy. They said it was bad for sales (which was the objective). While "natural" pet foods were now 50% of the market, in 2019, Statista confirmed a significant drop in their sales in the US. Where previous years, it had enjoyed year-on-year growth of nearly 10%, in 2019 sales had fallen to just 0.3%.

If by this stage you are wondering why the US government appears so willing to step in and assist the plight of the poor, suffering cereal-based pet food sector, then consider the fact that US pet food, now wiser and "naturally driven" are no longer happy feeding hazardous food waste to their pets.

Cereal-based pet food is historically a profitable endpoint for the waste of the human food industry. It is an outlet for poor-quality grain, as well as indigestible leftovers from the likes of the beet, corn and grape industries. Most importantly, it is the dumping ground for the meat industry.

Today, Americans are eating a LOT of animal protein in the form of meat, eggs, cheese and milk. The problem is this sector produces a lot of hazardous waste. Typically, less than half of a slaughtered cow is consumed by humans. The rest, much of the head, brain, carcass, much of the organs, innards, feet and tail, is waste, as far as the human market is concerned. Nor is it just the good stuff. They also have copious amounts of 4D meat (dead, diseased, dying, disabled) stuff (which has to be cremated here in the EU), along with road kill, euthanised cats and dogs (honestly) and truly toxic ingredients like left over restaurant grease.

Now, in the US, producers have two options available to them at this point – sell their waste to rendering plants which will stew it with all other meat waste and sell it to big pet food and other animal feed groups...or dump it.

Here are some throw away figures on that latter option, to give us some context: the US produces more than 50 million tonnes of meat each year (beef, chicken, turkey and pork, combined, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures). That is potentially 25 million tonnes of animal waste each year (or 25 billion kilos). If we estimate that the producer asks for just $0.10 per kilo of their product (in Ireland, chicken and duck carcass is worth €0.30/kg when bought by the tonne, beef organs €0.70/kg), that’s a market value of $250 billion.

This shifts our focus immediately. No longer are we talking about a $30 billion US pet food market. Now we are talking figures of a quarter of a trillion. In fact, we could easily double that figure, considering now we are asking the meat industry to adapt its supply lines and storage facilities and start paying to dump what was once a profitable commodity. Maybe half a trillion dollars? That is 1.5 times the size of the US entire prescription drug market, and we all now know how the FDA "regulates" those guys.

So, either the producers pay or the home of unchecked capitalism, currently $33 trillion in debt (to who?!!!), will be picking up the tab to manage it for them.

They could insist meat prices increase significantly but this would result in less US meat being consumed, which is equally bad news for the economy and heavily lobbied governments as a whole.

There is simply no profitable way out of this, so they dig in and continue to relentlessly drive consumption by any means necessary.

There is one more sting in the tail. The FDA continued their completely unsupported and repressive line of inquiry until Dec 2022. Why did they stop then? Mars acquired Orijen, the worlds largest and most successful grain-free pet food company the month before. Bet they got it a significantly better price.

DCM from grain-free pet food is now no longer mentioned.

Talk about a conspiracy!

So there you have it. Your vet is still parroting the same confused, utterly unsupported and today completely disproven nonsense invented by Big Pet Food, fuelled by the FDA, supported by morally bankrupt (albeit highly effective) whitecoats like Freeman et al. and shat out repeatedly by your ever-caring mainstream media.

That's how effective this sort of nonsense is - years later, with zero evidence in support, our vets still believe it is GRAIN-FREE pet food that causes DCM in dogs so therefore the GRAIN must have been protective to heart health in dogs...despite it historically being a cereal-based pet food issue.

A shocking endictment of the state of nutritional nouse deployed by the industry today.

Now, I'm off to change my pants before I have a heart attack.

28/09/2023

An uncompromised message with guaranteed results 🐾❤️🥩 Got Raw

Dogs First
ANOTHER RAW V DRY STUDY...
Concerning my post on Saturday where raw-fed dogs seemed to use the vets less, folk were wondering about confounding factors. One might be that raw-feeders are (sadly) more suspicious of veterinary advice, maybe they would be more inclined to have a go at fixing their dog themselves. That may well be true, for sure. There is evidence that shows raw-feeders are significantly less likely to go to their vets for at least advice on nutritional matters (and significantly more likely to use "the internet"). Perhaps that tendency could spread into other diseases too. Great point.
Also, when you start learning about how to feed a dog online you inevitably begin to learn about and thus question excessive parasite control and annual boosters for already vaccinated dogs. Suddenly, a cash-strapped family may see the annual health check as less relevant. So that's surely in there too.
Then I came across this study (thanks Neus!) that shows raw-fed dog owners are more likely to use supplements and there was a difference in exercise / sporting activities compared to dry-fed dogs (reference below).
So, all these things may be playing a role in the fact raw-feeders seem to use the vets less not only over the course of a year but are significantly less to need a vet 4 times or more in a year, which is telling for disease severity, etc.
That said when you MEASURE the health of the dogs (i.e. not just a survey of the owners) and find measurable differences in raw-fed dogs whereby they so far suffer less skin, gut and dental disease than dry-fed dogs (the most common reasons for visiting the vets), that you separate the wheat from the chaff.
In this case, the authors measured the health of the two groups using a composite clinical health scoring system based on dental score + otitis score + integument score and found raw-fed dogs were significantly healthier (p=0.03) when using this measure.
The authors conclude:
"Further work is needed to specifically determine the impact of diet processing and nutrient content on canine health."
That is EXACTLY what we plan to do. We will be announcing the study at the end of the week, whereby we will be looking retrospectively at a large group of raw and dry-fed dogs that were assessed by vets, measuring health status and potential behavioural impacts of their chosen diet.
We need your help to get it done. The sad reality is if we want these sorts of studies, the real, health-promoting, non-product-pushing answers, we're going to have to go and find them ourselves.
The attached pic is the cover pic for it. Cool eh?! I did that myself.
REF Hiney et al. (2021). Clinical health markers in dogs fed raw meat-based or commercial extruded kibble diets. Journal of Animal Science, Volume 99, Issue 6,

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