Ask any veterinarian if you should put your pet on a raw food diet, and they’ll likely tell you, in no uncertain terms, that you’d be playing roulette with your pet’s life. (Pathogens and pets don't play well together.) So why is raw pet food being sold in major pet stores?
The short answer: it’s not really raw. While raw meat is usually contaminated with pathogens like salmonella, e. coli, and campylobacter, good raw food companies use pasteurizing techniques like high-pressure processing, which ruptures the cell walls of single-celled pathogens but leaves the molecular structure of compounds like proteins, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals intact, unlike cooking.
“Cooking kills some of the natural vitamins and antioxidants and changes the structure of the proteins,” says Susan Wynn, DVM, a nutritionist for BluePearl Georgia Veterinary Specialists who also consults for Nature’s Variety pet food company. Wynn says another nutritional benefit of avoiding traditionally processed food is that it won’t be contaminated by acrylamides and other toxins that form on cooking surfaces like grills and Teflon pans and hide out in cooked kibble.
Should your pet go raw? Not necessarily. Wynn says cats benefit more from high-meat diets than dogs do. “Cats are obligate carnivores, and in my opinion, they do better on low-starch diets, though they can thrive on diets with lots of starch.” Dogs’ dietary needs are more flexible, but they tend to be less well-equipped to handle the high-calorie, high-fat content of raw diets than felines are. “I wouldn’t recommend a raw diet to dogs that are somehow intolerant of increased fat in their diet, whether they have pancreatitis, hyperlipidemia, or are already overweight,” Dr. Wynn says.
Still, if your pet doesn’t seem to respond well to traditional dry or wet food, or you simply want to find out if your pet can benefit from a high-nutrient, minimally-processed raw diet, explain your choice to your vet and make sure there aren’t any issues first. Once you’ve gotten a green light, Dr. Wynn recommends choosing a high-pressure pasteurized, “complete and balanced” option and gradually integrating it into your pet’s diet, to give the gastrointestinal tract time to adjust.
“Ideally, you should make the change over a period of 10 days," Dr. Wynn says. "Substitute an additional 10% of the new food for the old each day until you reach 100%."