.dog/ to raw food or not to raw food

Raw Dog Food: Make It Easy for You and Your Dog
by Carina Beth Macdonald

A pretty good article on the Raw Food Diet at Salon.com [you've got to watch an ad to read the whole article, but I've always been really good at ignoring ads]. I sort of admire folks who feed their dogs Raw, but I also have some trouble with it, the first related to the following quotation from the Salon article:
Salon.com News | The beef over pet food: Levin-Yarlick contends that raw food is a natural way to feed dogs. “When they evolved in the wild, nobody cooked their food for them,” she says. “They killed their prey and they ate it.”
Ahem. See, here's the thing. Dogs didn't evolve in the wild (unless by “wild” you mean in a place without modern conveniences and homes and freeways to get you to and from your Raw Food Co-op)... and I pretty much doubt that without humans dogs would have “evolved” at all. This is arguable, and I know it's arguable. But dogs became “man's best friend” precisely because of “man's” role in their evolution. Dogs do not generally hunt and kill their own food. A critical aspect of their evolution as dogs is that they eat what is left over. They eat what humans discard. They were and remain a kind of scavenger, and rely on humans to feed and care for them... and they become more reliant on this every year they live in our company. This does not mean I believe that we should feed dogs whatever scraps are left over from the table. Quite the contrary. I myself try to purchase the best kibble available, and will give them some of the best meat from my plate if I'm having something I consider tolerable to them (each dog in my home has individual tolerances, and I wouldn't dream of giving my Border Collie a quarter pound of beef as she would deposit the half-digested contents of her meal on my kitchen floor within the hour). I worry just as much about treating dogs as domesticated “wolves” as I worry about treating them as slightly-wild humans. They are neither, and we should treat them as neither. Feed them good food, whether it be raw or kibble or some mixture of the two, and you will be rewarded with a well-fed dog. Make sure they receive the proper veterinary care (and if your vet recommends a different diet, find out why... don't just pretend you know better than them... maybe you do and maybe you don't, but if you do then why do you go to that vet in the first place?). ℅ dogma

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