I've fed raw and homemade diets to my dogs and cats for 23 years. In that time, I've fed around two dozen animals, as well as litters of puppies, and have never had a dog or cat suffer any form of food-borne illness, nor any disease of nutritional deficiency or excess.
But according to some veterinarians, neither I nor my pets exist, because a great many of them believe that feeding such a diet will make my animals' skeletons turn to jelly just before they die of hemorrhagic diarrhea.
So when I got a call from a veterinarian with the San Francisco Veterinary Medical Association, asking if I'd like to come talk to them about raw diets, I was interested but a bit worried. And while at first I didn't get the impression it was going to be a debate, when I saw the outline of the evening, I decided it probably was after all, as one of my co-panelists was a board-certified veterinary nutritionist who was being presented as "against raw diets."
The evening turned out very well, although I suspect the boarded nutritionist was mostly being gracious and professional rather than agreeing with much of what I had to say. The third panelist was my friend and former holistic vet (she practices in the county I lived in until two years ago) Lisa Pesch, and the overall tone of the evening was very friendly. There were even a few raw-feeding vets in the audience, and my current vet here in San Francisco, Lea Del Rosso, showed up, too. She's really terrific so I was happy to see her there.
When I introduced myself, I explained I'm not interested in converting anyone to feeding a raw diet, nor convincing any veterinarian there that evening to recommend them to their clients. I don't counsel people on pet diets, not even for free, because I don't like gurus and don't aspire to be one. I don't have anything to sell, not a diet, not a supplement, not even a book.
What I am interested in, I said, are the ways in which veterinarians react to the news their clients are feeding raw and homemade diets to their pets, and the effect their reactions have on the veterinarian-client relationship, the pet's health, and the idea of vets as credible authorities on how to feed our pets.
Something like 8 percent of pet owners feed raw diets to their pets, and I would guess that in the Bay Area that number is quite a bit higher. I get dozens of emails a week from people asking for advice about their pets, and a lot of it is from people who know I feed raw diets to my pets and want my assistance in finding a veterinarian who will be supportive of that choice. Nearly all these people have been lectured, belittled, and even yelled at by veterinarians in the past when they told them what they were feeding their animals, and have adopted a policy of just not telling them. Although I think that more vets than you might think would actually be pretty reasonable about it if they did tell them, they've gotten gun-shy.
But it was during a question about bacterial levels found on meats in some studies that I got carried away on something of a rant about food safety. See, I get very irritated in discussions of the safety of raw meat for dogs and cats when the analysis goes something like this: raw meat is all risk, no benefit, and processed foods (kibble, etc.) are all benefit and no risk.
Anyone who lived through last year's pet food recall knows very well that processed foods for pets and for humans have the potential for contamination and spoilage at many -- perhaps dozens -- of points during their production, from the farm to the slaughterhouse to the processing plant to the manufacturer and beyond, right up until you buy them in the store.
So I shared my experience at Western States Veterinary Conference last February, where the vet speaking in a session on raw diets showed some research that found there's basically no way to safely clean the bowls used to feed raw meat to our pets -- not even washing them in hot soapy water, or with bleach, or even on the sanitize cycle in the dishwasher.
"Don't any of you cook?" I asked the veterinarians after sharing my tale. "How do you mix a meatloaf or marinate a chicken, if there's no way to safely clean a bowl after it's had raw meat in it? And if it's really true that our meat supply is so contaminated with fecal bacteria that we can't safely wash our dishes, why, instead of resolving to come home and lecture us on what we're doing in our home kitchens, don't you all go talk to your colleagues in large animal and agricultural practice, and do something about our broken food safety system?"
That's all probably very familiar to Pet Connection readers, but I'd never said it to a group of vets before. And I don't mean to suggest I am dismissive of food safety concerns when eating or feeding raw foods; I am not. But I wish that the veterinary profession would spend an equal amount of time talking about and trying to change the safety of the food system as they do trying to convince us not to feed raw diets to our pets.
Fortunately, everyone was very kind about my little outburst, and a few came up to me afterward and mentioned it was a view they'd never considered before.
Speaking of the pet food recall, do you remember that press conference with Stephen Sundloff, D.V.M., Ph.D., director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said pet owners shouldn't feed homemade diets to their pets because it was so difficult even he wouldn't want to try it? I told that story, too, and pointed out that feeding a homemade diet really isn't as hard as, with all due respect, pet food companies and boarded nutritionists want us to think it is. It is, in fact, no more difficult than feeding ourselves and our families.
Of course, there's the issue that many people don't do such a hot job of that, but consider this: the difference between the people who live on Happy Meals, pizza, and soda pop and those who eat a varied, fresh, wholesome diet isn't that the latter group has gone to a human nutritionist or eatsPeople Chow. It's that they have made a commitment of time and effort into educating themselves about how to eat well, and made it a priority for themselves and their families.
That may not be the case with every person who feeds a raw homemade diet, but it's the majority of them. Vets should be a resource for helping us do that better if that's what we're going to do, not a God on High telling us we're crazy for trying and that it's impossible. It is not impossible nor even particularly difficult, and while not free of risk, if you do it carefully, the risk is really not that great.
Something that's often said by anti-raw vets, and that I heard last night, is that there's no "proven benefit" to raw diets. And that's true, but so is the statement that there's no proven benefit to processed foods over homemade diets, or cooked diets over raw. There was a lot of discussion in the audience of patients who were helped by being put on raw diets, primarily cats and dogs with symptoms of IBD, and I've seen animals who did far better on raw than cooked or processed diets.
Nonetheless, I'm not a fanatic on the issue of raw diets. They're outside most people's comfort zones. And cooked diets, while certainly safe, are more trouble than most people want to go to. Hell, most people don't cook for themselves, let alone their pets.
No, I think most people will go on feeding commercial foods, because they're convenient. But I'd like to see a more respectful and open dialogue between those of us who make a different choice and our pet's veterinarians. And I hope this panel discussion went a little way towards making that happen.
I covered the demonstration against Prop 8 that was held Friday night here in San Francisco for 
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