Not Nice
Yesterday I was out with our dog when I noticed another dog on the other side of the road. It was off its leash and appeared to have wondered into the road. The owners were a Chinese family, mother, father, and child in stroller. Unusual, I mused, you don’t see that many people of Chinese extraction with dogs.
Anyway, I continued, thinking for a moment that maybe a dog with a tendency to wander into the road should not be off its lead in a city. Oh well, it’s their dog, hopefully they know what they are doing, I hoped. Read more
Ok, so I chatted with the vet
On the way back from picking up a few things from the supermarket, I decided to drop in at the vets and have a word about giving our pup raw meat. At first, the vet said it is not good, basically because dogs are no longer wild animals and there is potentially dangerous bacteria in raw meat that domesticated dogs cannot handle. But when I pointed out many humans in Italy eat raw meat, that dogs sniff dog excrement, and that I had a dog that ate wild rabbits etc to no ill effect, he changed his tune a wee bit.
He still maintained that the mass produced dried dog foods are specially studied and prepared to provide our four legged friends with a balanced diet blah blah, but seemed to concede that there is nothing that definately states that giving dogs raw meat can do them harm, although he seemed to think that there might be long term negative effects. What these effects may be, we did not go into. He did say that humans should not eat raw meat, because it can be dangerous for them. So no more raw sausages, carpaccio, and uncooked mince for us bipeds.
My other half, though, remains unconvinced despite my arguments, and thinks that giving our dog raw meat will not do him any good, even though I said that I only wanted to supplement his diet, which means one meal a day or so of raw meat and other meals using the dried dog food. My opinion is that the meat will reduce the possibility that our town living dog will end up with mysterious allergies and the other signs of poor health that come from living in our pollution ridden city. Alas, other half does not want to hear about the positive results of American and Swedish research into the effects of what are oft called BARF type diets.
What will I do? I shall go against the grain, even if the direction in which the grain runs is not too clear, and continue to feed our pup some good old raw meat. If this causes problems, and I really do not think it will, I will be happy to admit that I was wrong.
Time for a chat with the vet
As you may have read elsewhere on this blog, we now have a Manchester Terrier puppy, in the photo on the left, who goes by the name of Atman. He is a real little sweetie and is playful, good natured and great company. However, his presence has generated a little friction between my Italian other half and myself because I want to feed our pup some, not too much, raw meat, because I think it is more natural for an animal to eat raw food. Wolves and Coyotes seem to survive just fine on a diet of fresh raw meat, so why not dogs? Seems quite logical to me. But my other half, the pup’s breeder, and, I have learnt, our local vet all disagree.
While my other half cannot really explain why feeding raw food to dogs is bad, apart from saying that she has heard that raw food makes dogs more aggressive, the attitude of the breeder is a little more worrying. He even went so far as to say that we should definitely not feed our pup raw food as this will lead to attacks of diarrhoea. Oddly enough I have been giving our pup, twice a week or so, raw hamburgers, and, so far zero diarrhoea. As for the aggressiveness issue, it is possible that this is not really aggressiveness, but an indication of a dog being more lively, as a result, possibly, of being healthier. This is something else I may mention to our vet later on.
Moving on to the vet’s opinion, his comments are much more interesting, seeing as they come from someone who specialises in animal health. He claimed to my other half, I was not present, incidentally, that raw meat is potentially dangerous for dogs because it contains microbes. And he added that the packets of dry little brown balls made by various large multinationals provide a far healthier more balanced diet for dogs. This, I have to say, is not what I have read elsewhere on the Internet. But then again, I’ve read some articles that are for raw food diets and others that are not, so it is difficult to know, even if I can appreciate the logic behind feeding raw food to what are basically domesticated wild animals. However, what is particualry odd about our Italian vet’s opinion is that he seems to be forgetting that dogs have pretty strong stomachs, and that they often sniff/eat microbe ridden excrement, with little or no effect, and country dogs often kill and eat wild animals without killing themselves. I know because the Springer Spaniel we had when I was growing up in the UK, often killed and ate rabbits and pheasants. This dog, Muffin, lived until he was 15 - which is not a bad age for a dog from what I understand.
There is also something else I don’t comprehend from the vet’s attitude towards raw meat for dogs. That is he would seem to be implying that raw meat, with all its dangerous microbes, must be potentially dangerous for humans too, and yet, Italians themselves often eat raw sausages (my other half), raw mince (with lemon and olive oil) and the very well know carpaccio dish which is raw beef, and is considered something of a delicacy in Italy. It is very good, to this I can attest, having eaten carpaccio on more than one occasion, and I am still around and I do not recall that the ingestion of this food led to my having had an attack of runny bottom syndrome. Then we have the famous, here in Italy, Fiorentina steaks, which are often served rare, so rare in fact that you could actually say ‘raw’. Again, I have tried this and I am fine. But, my vet’s opinion leads me to believe that I have swallowed a lot of very risky microbes.
This means, that I am probably lucky to be still alive and writing this by the sounds of things, especially when you take into account that I have tried most forms of raw or almost raw Italian cuisine. According to our vet, our dog, on the other hand, is likely to suffer more harm than good as a result of eating raw food than humans. Well, this is how I interpret the vet’s opinion. Strange. Or, maybe what the vet will tell me is that the raw meat sold in Italian butchers and supermarkets is really unfit for consumption by animals, which means he is indirectly claiming that this meat must be just about lethal for humans. Odd, I was under the impression that food that was considered unfit for human consumption could be, up to a point, quite safely eaten by animals that, as I believe, have much stronger bacteria killing enzymes in their digestive systems than homo sapiens. Well, I’m not a vet, so I could be mistaken, I suppose.
I can see that I shall end up having quite an interesting discussion about all this with our vet. I will post the outcome of this little discussion here, so you can read about it and establish whether Italian raw meat dishes are not the best thing, health wise, since sliced bread. I wonder if my little discussion will strike any ‘raw’ nerves. Oh, what a wicked little blogger I am. Of course, I shall publish a full retraction if my vet manages to convince me that raw food for animals really is so very dangerous. I’m quite open minded. Well, almost.
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September 8, 2008
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September 8, 2008
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