Introduction
According to Matt Davies Harmony Communities, new diets are all the rage at the moment. While people are always experimenting with their diet, they are doing the same for their pets as well. While these experiments usually lead to fascinating and beneficial outcomes, at times, they can go very wrong. Let’s figure out if a raw food diet is right for your pet.
- Benefits of a raw diet - Being on a raw diet has several benefits. After all, the ancient ancestors of dogs and cats were on a raw diet. A raw diet can prevent your pet from getting obese. When you put your pet on a raw diet, you have more control over the ingredients. You can tweak their meals and choose exactly what goes in them to make them gain or lose weight.
A raw diet may also help your pet develop a shinier coat due to the high-fat content of most raw food. Feeding fatty meat to your dog promotes healthier skin and makes their coat silky and smooth. A raw diet also promotes healthier teeth and high protein content makes your dog’s muscles stronger and keeps them full of energy. With that, out of the way let’s look at the risks of a raw diet.
- Harmful microbes - Raw meat contains a lot of bacteria and parasites. Cooking food helps people kill those harmful microbes and makes them less susceptible to diseases. The same holds for your pets. Unlike their wild ancestors, domesticated dogs and cats that have been fed cooked meals over hundreds or thousands of years, don’t have a strong digestive and immune system to kill most of the pathogens in raw meat.
Even if your dog or cat seems healthy, an infection caused by those pathogens may bring underlying issues to the surface. In severe cases, those infections may be fatal. That’s why the risks of eating raw meat are too high. This risk of infection alone is enough to outweigh all the benefits of a raw food diet.
- Expensive and time-consuming - A raw food diet costs good money and takes up a lot of time to prepare. It’s much more expensive than buying an FDA-approved kibble from the store. For instance, dry dog food would cost you around a dollar each day. On the other hand, you’ll need to buy a generous amount of raw chicken to feed your dog and the costs can range anywhere between $3 to $5.
That increases the expenses for your pet by as much as five times and a lot of families can’t afford it. Even if you can afford it, you need to figure out if you have the time to prepare raw food for your pet every day.
Conclusion
Matt Davies Harmony Communities suggests that you don’t feed your pet a raw diet. While being on a raw diet has a few benefits, the risks outweigh them all. Most pets that have been domesticated for generations don’t have a strong digestive and immune system to resist harmful bacteria found in raw food.
