The Carnivorous Animal’s Dillemma
by Michael Schaffer

Pet Connection’s very smart Christie Keith has a story on SFgate about the phenomenon of raw feeding for dogs and cats.

I spent a bunch of time writing about that in the food chapter of my book. As with most of the other things I wrote about, I was most interested in what it said about humans and where we are as a society. Just as the pet food of the 1950s was a pretty good reflection of the TV-dinner era, so too is today’s pet food, with a diversity stretching from Wal-Mart’s bestselling house brand to an endless procession of high-end, organic boutique indie brands.

At the top of the line, price-wise, is raw food, which plays to our modern attention with nature, and more fear that we’ve lost touch with the natural order. In the wild, the argument goes, wolves didn’t have baked food that looked like breakfast cereal: They had prey, which they ate raw. So there are now a few lines of food that come raw, some with a bit of bone mixed in on the logic that a wolf would consume some bone while devouring a rabbit. Of course, the ground-up, freezer-friendly stuff isn’t good enough for advocates of the “prey model,” who note that wild wolves didn’t have precut medallions to eat, but had to rip flesh from bone. This model suggests people ought to feed whole chunks of carcass to their pets, no matter the consequences to the living-room carpet.

Anyway, I felt like the whole scene was pretty telling about our human fads and phobias with regards to food and nutrition–not that those fads and phobias are at all wrong, given what the melamine scandal has taught us. Christie is right to analogize it to the locavore and slow-food movements in human-eating. No matter what nutritionists say about how complicated it is to feed a pet a balanced diet on a DIY basis, there are a lot of people who for pretty good reasons think it’s better to try.

Christie writes:

To most people, pet food is something that comes in a bag or can. The package might be illustrated with pictures of meat chunks, vegetables and grains, but what’s inside is probably the most thoroughly processed food product on the market.

Still, quite a few dog and cat owners are deciding that packaged food isn’t the only way to feed their pets. Over the last two decades, they’ve become a vocal movement advocating food for pets made with whole, fresh, minimally processed and usually raw ingredients.

…

Most of those people, when they did mention raw diets to their veterinarians, got a lecture about the dangers of homemade diets and raw foods in particular. A lot of vets think it’s impossible to make a homemade meal for a dog or cat without a PhD in nutrition and a food laboratory in the garage. And a raw diet? Given the amount of bacteria in raw meat, they say, that’s a recipe for sickness and death for your pets.

So why do so many pet owners insist on feeding raw diets to their pets? And why is the modern raw pet food movement not just alive, but growing?

If the terms “slow food” and “locavore” come to mind, you’re on the right track. Modern raw feeders aren’t crazy, back-to-nature hippies or indulgent pet parents trying to spoil their fur babies with grass-fed steak tartare. They’re part of a much larger movement interested in doing right by farm animals, the planet and their local economies.

Read the whole thing here. Or check out Chapter 11 of my book.