BALLS!

[loonylupinlover]

My vet always said that the pet food companies -- no matter which one it is -- are out to make your pet eat more food than it needs so they can sell more. Case in point, the Purina rep at school said Charlotte would need 7/8 cup Overweight Management per day to lose weight. I gave her 3/4 cup per day instead, dropping it a little, and she gained

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[loonylupinlover]

I can't buy bulk of anything. I can't even fit a 24-oz package of orange chicken in my freezer, my freezer's the size of a textbook. It's impossible for me to buy bulk for myself, let alone for my animals. I am constantly having to be careful of what and how much I buy because I can't fit everything in there that I would like to have on hand. It's just not possible.

You cannot convince me that getting the meat out of the package, opening it up, cutting it into the correct amounts, rewrapping and freezing the rest, and then cleaning the counter where it was on (which I have almost no space, because of the aforementioned tiny kitchen) is easier than scooping a cup of food out of a bowl of waiting dry food. If you get into a habit I can see it taking less time than when you first start, but still.

No. Parasites are not bullshit. Toxoplasmosis is spread primarily through eating uncooked pork, not through catboxes, for example. Toxoplasmosis is incurable in both humans and animals, whether by immune systems or by drugs. If there's an immunocompomise in the future toxo can come back and cause serious problems from paralysis to blindness. And just because animals are evolutionarily used to eating raw meat does NOT mean they don't get parasites in the wild -- in fact they are usually stuffed to the gills with them! Animals may be adapted to eating raw meat, but parasites are adapted to those animals. Why do you think wild wolves live only a few years, as compared to domestic dogs of the same size living to be 10 or 15? Not having to fight off parasites constantly certainly helps!

All of the wild birds I dissected a few months ago were stuffed with worms, most of them had more than one kind. Most animals' immune systems can keep the worms at bay so they don't cause symptoms, but they can cause nutrient malabsorption, damage to the intestinal/stomach walls from larvae literally burrowing through them, and inflammation. Severely heavy parasite loads can kill puppies and kittens, they can cause blockages in the intestines or cause the animal to starve. If there's an illness that distracts the immune system from the parasites the parasites can easily do damage. Horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, they all have various parasites they can die from and even with extensive deworming regimens such as performed in farming operations, those regimens can really only keep the animals asymptomatic, they can't keep them actually parasite-free. So the meat you buy very likely does often have parasites in it. You probably have some parasites right now, as do I.

So no. It's not overrated. The one client we had at the vet clinic feeding raw, his dog was stuffed with roundworms and hookworms. Puppies and kittens constantly get worms anyway from their mothers, I wouldn't personally add the stress of raw meat to it. If you deworm your kiddos yearly or more frequently and check fecal samples every year and it's all good, then great for you! But I don't want to deal with adding on another challenge to my animals.

Additionally, vet prescribed food is not McDonald's and is not the devil. I'm not saying that raw food can't be done well and that pets can't be healthy on raw food -- just saying you do need to know the risks, and as long as you do and make sure to feed good sources of food, then great. I think they can do great on it. But that's for healthy pets. Pets with specific veterinary issues (not so much obesity, but more like heart disease, diabetes, or urinary stones) can benefit HUGELY solely from veterinary nutritional management. I've seen cats that were getting blocked every few months never experience another recurrence when on a urinary acidifying diet, and cats with kidney disease go on for years and years after their initial diagnosis once they started eating a diet meant for renal management. For healthy dogs/cats I agree that the more meat in the diet, the better. But in some cases the corn-based veterinary diet will do WONDERS for prolonging their quality of life and for managing their conditions. Raw isn't the answer for everything. Again -- animals in the wild eating wild diets do NOT live very long, so I'm not sold on raw as the magic bullet for all of your ills.