A fairly interesting 'article' about BARF.

It's by a vet, though just on her blog. Reason I post it is it's one of the least biased articles on barf I've read in a while.

No scientific research or anything real neat but ya'll may find it interesting. It's basically her talking about how there needs to be better nutrition classes taught at vet school but also highlights a few reasons why vets don't/won't recommend barf (primary point being litigious).

Anyhow I found it interesting. Ya'll might too.

Link

That is a really good article, GO.

It's pretty much how I feel about Vets and raw feeding... and how my Vet feels. Even IF their Vet is extremely knowledgable about raw diets, the vast majority of people are not going to do the work nor the research that they need to do themselves, making it risky for a Vet to recommend to the "average" pet owner. I completely understand that.

But, it would be nice if more Vets had at least a general knowledge of the diet, so that they can guide owners that do choose to feed raw. It would also be nice if more Vets recommended (or at least knew of) premium foods and educated owners about ingredients in foods and how much a good diet effects the health of their dog... I would be incredibly happy with that, alone!

Well the problem is that the majority of the evidence of how a 'good' diet affects a dog is anecdotal. IE "We started feeding X and now Y's coat is shinier!"

There's not been many non-biased studies (and the bias goes both ways, don't think it's just the dog food companies not wanting to do the studies) done in this sector. And there needs to be.

CSU has put their toes into the water by doing the herbal supplement study I posted earlier but that's all I know so far. But these new premium, expensive foods are a relatively new fad so it may take a few years before any results are pronounced. It's hard to quantify things such as energy, coat shine, etc because much of that is based in genetics and metabolism, stuff out of our control in the dog population. And I don't think feeding mice Canidae would be very conclusive.

I think another issues is quality control. What is in todays 'chicken by product' is not the same as what is in yesterdays. Same as buying 4-D meat to put in dog foods. Today's batch might not have to many drugs in it.. but there might be a lot in next weeks.

This IMO is a huge issue when doing studies. It can vary from bag to bag so its hard to say what result is valid when you have so many variables.

At least common sense tells me feeding 4-D meats to my dogs isnt' good.