Trends in Home-Prepared Diets for PetsFeb 17, '06 6:54 AM
by
alicia for everyone
By C. J. Puotinen
In the United States, most people believe that "people food" is unsuitable, even dangerous, for dogs and cats. For half a century, pet food manufacturers and veterinarians have explained that commercial pet foods are "scientifically balanced," "nutritionally complete," and superior to anything our pets might otherwise consume. These experts frown upon giving pets table scraps, raw food and supplements that disrupt a commercial pet food's "precisely controlled balance of vitamins and minerals."
We're so used to these notions that most of us accept them without a second thought. But some pet owners have remained skeptical and have taken a different approach. In recent years their numbers are growing.
What are these eccentric people feeding their animals? Just the things the experts say will kill them: raw meat, unpasteurized milk, raw eggs, raw vegetables and fruits and—worst of all—raw bones. If these dogs and cats don't die from indigestion, botulism,
Salmonella, E. coli bacteria, or a deficiency disease, they'll surely choke to death or puncture their intestines. Any veterinarian will tell you that these animals are living on borrowed time.
Make that
almost any veterinarian. Members of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association,1 an organization that reflects the surging interest in natural therapies for pets, believe those animals are eating exactly what Mother Nature intended.
Pottenger's Cats
A diet of mostly raw animal foods for cats was examined back in the 1930s by Francis Pottenger, MD. He conducted a ten-year-long study in which nearly a thousand cats were fed the same basic diet of milk, meat and a small dose of cod liver oil.2
The healthiest cats were the ones who received raw meat and raw milk. This was the only group to produce generation after generation of healthy kittens with broad faces, adequate nasal cavities, broad dental arches, strong and correctly shaped teeth and bones, excellent tissue tone, good-quality fur with a minimum of shedding and an absence of gum disease. These cats were resistant to infections, fleas and internal parasites. They showed no sign of allergies and were gregarious, friendly and predictable in their behavior patterns. Miscarriages were rare and litters averaged five kittens, which the mothers nursed without difficulty.
Another group received raw milk and cooked meat. The cats in this group developed skeletal and dental deformities, heart problems, vision problems, thyroid imbalances, infections of the kidney, liver, testes, ovaries and bladder, arthritis and inflammation of the joints, and inflammation of the nervous system with paralysis and meningitis. Their second and third generations had abnormal respiratory tissues. Cooked-meat cats were so irritable that some of the females were named Tiger, Cobra and Rattlesnake, while the males were docile and passive, a sexual role reversal not seen in the raw-food cats. Vermin and intestinal parasites abounded and skin lesions and allergies appeared frequently. Adult cats died of pneumonia or infections of the bone while kittens died of pneumonia and diarrhea. The cooked-meat cats had serious reproductive problems including sterility, miscarriage, a lack of maternal instinct and difficult labors with high infant mortality rates. Many females died in labor.
The cats fed raw meat with pasteurized milk showed similar changes, and those fed evaporated milk showed even more damage, while the most marked deficiencies occurred among those fed sweetened condensed milk.
Because the health of each new generation was adversely affected by its parents' inferior diet, the cooked-food kittens had even more problems, and there were no fourth generation kittens in any of the cooked-food groups because the third generation always died before reproducing. Had antibiotic drugs been available, these kittens might not have died of pneumonia and other infectious diseases, in which case the experiment could have continued through longer chains of deformed offspring.
One of Dr. Pottenger's most exciting discoveries was that the health deterioration caused by cooked foods can be reversed, although it took four generations to completely restore perfect health to cats whose ancestors ate cooked meat or pasteurized milk.
The Natural Rearing Diet
During the 1940s and 1950s, while food scientists in England and Europe were developing commercial pet foods, Juliette de Bairacli Levy fed her unvaccinated Afghan hounds raw meat, raw bones, raw goat milk, raw fish, raw eggs and a variety of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and oils. The only medicines she used were herbs. Supremely healthy and intelligent, her dogs won numerous championships and de Bairacli Levy gained a devoted following around the world. In 1955, she published
The Complete Herbal Book for the Dog, which explained the Natural Rearing diet and philosophy. (The book was renamed
The Complete Herbal Handbook for the Dog and Cat3 in subsequent editions.)
The Natural Rearing canine diet is based on raw meat, including bones and organs, from a variety of animals. The meat is never frozen and is served whole or in large chunks, not ground or minced. The diet also includes raw milk, especially goat milk; cereal grains, especially those that have been flaked and soaked overnight in raw milk; small amounts of sprouted seeds; finely grated or baked root vegetables; occasional fruits and nuts; and miscellaneous foods such as honey, eggs, seaweed, carob, coconut, avocados and olives. These items should be organically grown whenever possible.
One day each week the dinner is meatless, with raw milk, eggs or cheese mixed with slowly cooked whole-grain cereal, rice or lentils. The following day is a fast day, with only water served or, if necessary, a small amount of honey in water, diluted milk or water from flaked oats or barley soaked overnight. In the wild, dogs hunt when hungry, eat when food is available and often go a day or more without a substantial meal. Feeding a light dinner followed by a day-long fast approximates this schedule.
The Natural Rearing diet for cats is similar, emphasizing a variety of meats, meaty bones and small amounts of soaked grain, raw milk, raw cheese and vegetable matter. While Dr. Pottenger proved that cats thrive on a diet of raw meat and raw milk, cats in the wild consume vegetable matter through their prey's digestive organs. The Natural Rearing diet strives to duplicate the constantly changing fare on which dogs and cats evolved.
"Many people are doing a natural food diet nowadays," says Washington state resident Jo Forsythe4, a longtime Newfoundland fancier who breeds Portuguese water dogs, "but Juliette de Bairacli Levy deserves credit as the grandmother of the movement. I have friends who have followed her guidelines exclusively for many, many generations of healthy dogs. For convenience, I've had to modify her plan when I travel, but at home my dogs eat an almost all-raw diet. They don't have digestive problems or deficiency diseases, and they thrive on fresh, whole foods. I think that by eating a constantly changing assortment of foods, they have a better chance of getting whatever nutrients they need than if they ate the same foods every day."
Marina Zacharias4 saw the difference a natural diet makes when she bought her first Basset Hound fifteen years ago. "He had been raised on a premium-quality pet food for the first five months of his life," she says. "I switched him over to the Natural Rearing diet, which he had a much easier time digesting, and he grew very well. When he was 18 months old, I saw some of his littermates and the contrast was amazing. He had been one of the smaller puppies in the litter and now he was the largest. His coat, bone density, posture, eyes, disposition, alertness and everything else were superior."
He became the patriarch of a line of raw-food Bassets, and Zacharias became a full-time animal nutritionist and publisher of the newsletter
Natural Rearing.5 "It works the other way around, too," she continues. "I know breeders who raised their puppies on raw food and sent them to homes where for one reason or another their diet was changed. When they met up with the pups in show-handling class a few weeks later, their coat quality and bone density had deteriorated and they didn't look as well as they used to. It's not that a raw-food diet pushes growth, which would be unhealthy, but it meets the animal's genetic potential by providing all the nutrients the body needs to grow properly."
Breeders who feed a natural diet do more than strengthen individual dogs; they improve their entire lines. "When we had our first puppies from a four-year-old mother who had been on raw food all her life, the difference was dramatic," says Barbara Werner4 who raises Golden Retrievers in New York. "She showed none of the signs of nutritional stress that are common in pregnancy. Her coat stayed gorgeous, her labor was short and she produced nine strong, lively pups that landed on their feet. This is a breed so prone to autoimmune disorders and cancers that one veterinarian told me a three-year-old golden is now considered middle-aged. I find this attitude unacceptable. The puppies' grandfather was still winning ribbons at dog shows when he was eleven."
to be continued...The Pitcairn Diet