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Question:
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"Are you familiar with the BARF (Bones and Raw Food) diet espoused by Dr. Ian Billinghurst or other natural diets by other authors, such as Dr. Pitcairn? If so, what is your opinion on their safety and benefits?"
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Like all vets these days, I’m aware of the popularity of such feeding plans for some dog owners, and I try to keep up with the arguments for and against the diets.
For those who are not familiar with raw-food diets, here’s a sketch of the basic features of four popular variations. Please note that these descriptions cannot be used as recipes for formulating a balanced diet for your dog; they are merely an overview.
1. BARF: Developed by Australian veterinarian Dr. Ian Billinghurst. The diet is 60 percent raw, meaty bones and 40 percent a changing variety of vegetables, fruits, meat, organ meat, yogurt, and eggs.
2. Ultimate Diet: Developed by Kymythy R. Schultze, a Certified Clinical Nutritionist. The diet includes raw meat, raw bones, vegetables, and nutritional supplements (such as kelp, vitamin C, and essential fatty acids). She believes dogs should not be fed grains or dairy products.
3. Volhard Natural Diet: Developed by Wendy Volhard, a well-known trainer and the coauthor (with veterinarian Dr. Kerry L. Brown) of The Holistic Guide for a Healthy Dog. Breakfast is oats, buckwheat, millet, rice, vegetables, oil, egg, vitamins, molasses, and kefir or yogurt. Dinner is raw meat, raw liver, fruit, herbs, and nutritional supplements (vitamins and minerals). Bones are given about twice a week as a treat. Volhard suggests pouring boiling water over raw poultry and fish before feeding them to dogs to “kill any bacteria.”
4. Dr. Pitcairn’s natural diets: Developed by American veterinarian Dr. Richard H. Pitcairn. He advocates feeding a wide variety of foods and provides numerous recipes. Ingredients he uses include raw meat, raw eggs, raw milk, cottage cheese, yogurt, whole grains, legumes, raw and cooked vegetables, vegetable oil, and vitamin and mineral supplements.
My opinion of feeding raw meat, bones, and eggs to dogs has softened over the years from blanket condemnation to thinking that such diets may be workable for some dogs and their owners. Here are the potential benefits and drawbacks of such diets as I see them.
Benefits
•Getting vitamins and minerals from whole-food sources. Research has shown that for people, eating a variety of fruits and vegetables provides more health benefits than simply taking vitamin and mineral supplements can. Perhaps there are subtle beneficial interactions among the nutrients in blueberries or broccoli, or perhaps they contain healthful substances that we aren’t even aware of. So I can accept that dogs probably derive similar benefits from getting some of their vitamins and minerals from whole foods. But note that most homemade diets include vitamin and mineral supplements as well as whole foods, to ensure that they are not deficient in any essential nutrients.
•Getting nutrients from a variety of foods rather than from the unvarying ingredients of a commercial diet. A homemade diet may provide a larger variety of whole-food nutrients than a commercial dog food can. However, if the homemade diet is based on the same six ingredients week-in and week-out, I wouldn’t describe it as particularly varied.
Drawbacks
•The difficulty of balancing the diet. Studies in dogs have established minimum—and in some cases, maximum—levels of nutrients required for good health. These nutrients include protein and specific amino acids; fat and essential fatty acids; minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, sodium, iron, and zinc; and vitamins such as A, D, E, B-12, and folic acid. Commercial dog foods are formulated to provide the appropriate amounts of these nutrients. Feeding a dog raw chicken wings, raw beef bones, carrots, apples, and rice every day would not provide appropriate levels of all of these nutrients. That’s why vitamin and mineral supplements are usually added to homemade diets.
I’m not saying that a motivated person with a good grasp of nutrition is incapable of balancing a homemade diet; just that it requires planning and effort. And you can’t just order in Chinese or pizza for your dog when you haven’t had time to buy groceries.
•Food-safety considerations for the dog. Advocates of feeding raw bones and meat insist that dogs are less susceptible to such food-borne bacteria as salmonella, enterotoxigenic E. coli, campylobacter, and clostridium than people are. It may be true that dogs are less susceptible to such pathogens, but they are not unsusceptible to them. Bacteria can cause diarrhea in dogs: many vets check fecal samples from dogs with diarrhea for campylobacter and clostridium spores, and other toxic bacteria can be identified in the feces of dogs with diarrhea via bacterial cultures. Dogs with diarrhea accompanied by large populations of toxic bacteria are often given antibiotics to reduce the bacterial overgrowth.
Dousing raw meat with boiling water, as Wendy Volhard suggests, would kill bacteria on the surface of large pieces of meat, but it would be ineffective for ground meat or bones, because bacteria are mixed into the center of the food by the grinding process.
Another potential health risk is obstruction or perforation of the stomach or intestines by bones. This happens rarely but is not unheard of. Cooked or sterilized bones are harder than raw bones (hard enough to fracture a dog’s teeth, in fact), and they splinter into sharper fragments. But raw bones that are gulped down in large pieces can also get caught up in the stomach or intestines and cause blockages.
•Food-safety considerations for the people. Anyone chopping, grinding, or mixing raw meat and bones for their dogs must be conscientious about cleaning all utensils and surfaces—preferably with an antibacterial agent—before using them for cutting up vegetables or fruit or preparing uncooked food for themselves.
The same precaution holds true, of course, when people prepare meat for themselves, and I know that 99.9 percent of the dog owners who are motivated enough to try a raw-foods diet possess eminent good sense, but I am compelled to mention this because I will never forget reading in the mid-1990s about an infant who died of salmonellosis because her parents washed her baby bottles in the same kitchen sink where they routinely cleaned their lizard’s cage.
•Trusting the supplier of your raw meat and bones. I buy most of my groceries from a large, undistinguished chain supermarket, and I would not feed my dog raw meat, bones, or eggs from that store. Anyone feeding raw meat and bones to their dogs should be sure that the meat is impeccably fresh and “human grade,” not just whatever’s in the butcher shop’s scrap bucket.
•Addressing the special nutritional concerns of puppies. Feeding puppies a diet that’s too high in calories, calcium, and vitamin D contributes to the development of bone and joint problems, including hip dysplasia (click here for more about risk factors in hip dysplasia). Too little calcium and vitamin D, and the puppies could develop rickets. To me, formulating a homemade diet for a puppy is too high a tightrope to walk at home.
•The downside of food variety for some dogs: vomiting, diarrhea, and gas. Some dogs seem to have very “sensitive stomachs,” and minor changes in their diet can cause vomiting or diarrhea. I have no data to say whether the incidence of vomiting and diarrhea is higher in dogs on raw-food diets than in those eating commercial dog food, but I consider it a potential risk factor in feeding raw meat, vegetables, and fruit to dogs.
Many dogs will develop gas and abdominal discomfort when they eat certain vegetables or fruits. The trigger foods vary by individual dogs: some dogs are fine with peas, others get tremendously gassy and uncomfortable if they eat them. It’s possible that a specific dog may gradually acclimate to the addition of vegetables and fruits to his diet, but I don’t know how you could predict whether he will or not.
•Illnesses caused by deficiencies or excesses of vitamins and minerals. Deficiencies of the following nutrients are known to cause specific illnesses: calcium (bone deformity or fractures); zinc (scaly skin, poor wound healing); iron (anemia); vitamin A (eye diseases, muscle weakness); and vitamin D (bone deformity or fractures). Excesses of the following nutrients are also known to cause illnesses: calcium (bone and joint problems); vitamin D (diarrhea, weight loss, calcium overload in the blood); vitamin A (loss of appetite, bone deformity); and zinc (blocks absorption of calcium). So a diet that provides inappropriate levels of vitamins and minerals—either too much or too little—can cause health problems.
A call for unbiased research on raw-food diets in normal, healthy dogs
I have not seen a research study comparing the health effects of a raw-food diet with a commercial diet in a large population of healthy dogs. To me, this is the information that would be the most convincing in documenting the merits and demerits of specific raw-food diets. For starters, I’d like to see a population of 100 or so healthy dogs randomly assigned to two different groups. One group would be fed a conscientiously prepared BARF diet; the other group would be fed a high-quality commercial diet. The food trial would go on for six months.
The incidence of illness—vomiting, diarrhea, bloat, ear infections, skin infections and so on—in both groups would be recorded. In addition, all dogs would have physical exams once a month to evaluate their skin, teeth, hair, etc. Monthly fecal cultures would evaluate relative levels of toxic and nontoxic bacteria. At the end of six months, the health of the two groups could be compared to see whether or not the raw-fed dogs had glossier coats, less itching, cleaner teeth, and fewer illnesses than the commercially fed dogs.
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