My raw feeding experiment

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Originally Posted by Antonia

To Ncarver: you say “the pro-raw food sites claim that cats digestive systems allow them to eat bacteria with no problems--except they cannot cite a single bit of science to back up that supposed "fact."
That is true. But neither do I know of any scientific backup for the opposite claim: “Raw fed cats get salmonella and e coli infections more often than cats fed on commercial food.” I have searched and searched but couldn’t find anything.

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The two are not in the least bit equivalent questions. It has been scientifically proven that properly canned food is free of disease-causing bacteria while it has also been scientifically proven that a significant fraction of raw meat contains disease causing pathogens. Thus, the burden of proof is squarely on anyone claiming that cats can eat raw meat without contracting diseases.

Since it is a fact that canned food does not contain disease causing bacteria it follows that canned cat food is not causing *any* infectious diseases in cats. If you want *proof* that raw diets lead to more infectious diseases than none, that is quite easy for me to provide you. Our breeder tried a raw diet for a while and ended up with a litter of kittens that contracted a salmonella infection. QED! :grin:

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Originally Posted by Howlinbob

Cats fed a commercial diet die at epidemic rates from kidney failure and cancer, and suffer from high rates of chronic diseases like thyroid problems, asthma, and IBS due to bad nutrition.

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Cat are dying "at epidemic rates" due to commercial cat food? Seriously? There are 75 million cats in the US. All but at most a few thousand are being fed a "commercial diet." In fact it is likely that most are being fed mainly a dry diet. I would assume that dying at "epidemic rates" would have to be much more than 1%. So you appear to be claiming that commercial cat food is causing more than 750,000 cats a year to die, in the US alone. Seriously?? The evil pet food industry is certainly doing a heck of a job covering this up.

In truth there is no epidemic of death; domestic cat lifespan is certainly not thought to be decreasing. While certain medical conditions like thyroid problems are becoming more common, there are many things that cats are being exposed to that are much more likely causes than commercial cat food. E.g., use of topical pesticides on cats has increased dramatically during the same time frame.

I have no problem with you choosing to feed raw food--that is entirely your business. As a scientist I will tell you that I do not know whether it is entirely safe for cats or not, and I do not know whether it will improve their health or not. No credible research has been done that allows us to answer these questions. But as seems typical for most raw food proponents, you seem to feel the need to make unsubstantiated, exaggerated, and just plain obviously untrue claims. You say it is each person's choice whether to feed raw or commercial, while in the same breath saying that feeding commercial food is causing cats to die at epidemic rates. So I can either feed raw or kill my cats, is that what you are saying? Or was this whole "dying at epidemic rates" business a rather extreme bit of hyperbole after all.

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Originally Posted by candes

I am far from being a true germaphobe. In fact I am the exact opposite. But when a definate risk is involved, then yes I can be. You will not catch either me or my cats eating steak tar tar. :LOL: (Just in case you are not familiar... Tar tar is raw ground beef and raw eggs.)

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I will admit that I have eaten cookie dough and the like containing raw eggs certainly several hundred times during my lifetime and never gotten sick from it (at least not that I recognized). This appears to prove that it is perfectly safe to eat raw eggs, doesn't it? Wait, though, how many millions of eggs were recalled in the US last year due to salmonella that sickened people? Oh, yeah, there's that pesky little problem of the extremely limited value of relatively small numbers of observations.

On the other hand, I will under no circumstances ever eat undercooked ground beef, having read about how horrific HUS is.

Now raw ground beef and raw eggs, together? Sounds like a killer combination to me!

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Originally Posted by Howlinbob

I have read that there is salmonella in kibble.

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There have been a few dry pet food recalls in the past few years in the USA because of salmonella. A number of kids got sick from contact with the food and/or the pets, but the animals that ate the food were all fine AFAIK.

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Originally Posted by NCarver

it has also been scientifically proven that a significant fraction of raw meat contains disease causing pathogens.

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There is no denying that. Raw meat can contain hazardous germs which can be killed off by cooking. It is not only scientifically proven, but also common knowledge. And a good thing too.

But that was not what I meant. What I’d like to know is: has it been scientifically proven that raw fed cats get sick more often, or pop off before their time when compared to commercially fed cats? Have those questions ever been studied? And what were the results? I would love to know about it.

I am very sorry for your breeder friend who lost his kittens. But however tragic, anecdotal evidence is not scientific proof. Surely, you as a scientist are aware of that.

For scientific proof you need a large-scale study, preferably longitudinal, using cases and controls. An epidemiological study like the ones conducted on the effects of diet on people’s health.
But AFAIK there is no such study. Which I think is a great pity. Don’t you?
But again, if you do know of such a study, please tell me where I can find it.

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Originally Posted by candes

Anyways, my first google search on salmonella and cats brought up 78 google pages.

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Thanks for the links candes. I read through them. Most of it is about the risk that people run of getting contaminated with their pet’s germs. Like the poor Englishman in the Telegraph story.
What the articles basically say is: the bugs are there in your pets and they could pose a risk to people, especially the vulnerable.

But I already knew that. And it was not what I was looking for. I am looking for studies that investigate if bugs in raw meat can make your pet ill, or even kill it.

This afternoon I spent virtually dredging the internet. The combination salmonellosis+cats turns up many articles that mainly come down to the same thing: cats do get salmonella infection, but it seldomly makes them sick. The true danger lies in the fact that cats are subclinical carriers. In other words, without being sick themselves they can transmit the disease to people, who are much more at risk.

I only encountered one contradictory view. This guy writes on his website: “Cats are much more susceptible [to salmonella and e coli infections] than dogs; in fact they can quite easily die of infection with Salmonella.” Ironically, he is a holistic vet who actually is in favor of raw feeding! Isn’t that weird?

So, the main drawback of raw feeding seems to be the zoonosis thing. Bugs hopping from cats onto people, making the people sick but not the cats.

Now I think it is obvious you should always take the proper hygiene precautions when handling raw meat, be it for your own table or for your pet’s feeding bowl. A no-brainer, really.

Anyway, for people who want to read more about the zoonosis risk caused by raw fed pets, here is a very interesting and wonderfully objective article, quoting the views of a number of vets. There are some very good points made in there.
VIN News
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Originally Posted by Antonia

But however tragic, anecdotal evidence is not scientific proof. Surely, you as a scientist are aware of that.

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Hence the smiley I had after the QED. Of course I have never seen *anything* but anecdotal evidence supporting the safety or superiority of raw diets. Commercial diets have at least been subjected to numerous long term feeding studies and various ongoing forms of testing (that sometimes lead to recalls). In particular, our Purina Pro Plan Selects bags say right on them that nutritional sufficiency has been confirmed via feeding studies; they have actually fed the food to cats and verified that they are not having health problems due to nutritional deficiencies in the food. Now we can certainly debate whether such studies would pick up subtle issues that might develop long term, but we at least have some guarantees, which is much more than one has with raw diets.

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Originally Posted by Antonia

For scientific proof you need a large-scale study, preferably longitudinal, using cases and controls. An epidemiological study, like the ones conducted on the effects of diet on people’s health.
But AFAIK there is no such study. Which I think is a great pity. Don’t you?
But again, if you do know of such a study, please tell me where I can find it.

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Right--there is essentially no reliable, factual basis for making a decision--and it is very unfortunate.

The only controlled study comparing raw to commercial diets that I have ever seen is the Winn Foundation financed study noted on the Wikpedia "raw feeding" page (you can find more complete info on it if you search online). Incidentally, that page is probably one of the best sources of balanced and factual information on the Internet, so I highly recommend it:[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_feeding"]Raw feeding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Chien_mangeant_une_pintade.jpg" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Chien_mangeant_une_pintade.jpg/220px-Chien_mangeant_une_pintade.jpg"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/1/19/Chien_mangeant_une_pintade.jpg/220px-Chien_mangeant_une_pintade.jpg[/ame]

That one study was stopped when the raw fed cats started dying, and raised as many questions as it answered (e.g., subjective evaluation was that the raw fed cats appeared if anything a bit "healthier"...right up until they began dying...so much for the value of subjective health assessments). Wiki sums up the objective health assessments: "There were no differences between the groups in terms of growth rate, degree of inflammation in the intestinal tract and the numbers of bacteria in the upper small intestine, although a slightly higher number of cats in the raw diet group were shedding pathogenic organisms (Giardia and Cryptosporidia) in their stools."

I have also seen a couple of assays of nutrients in various raw diets that have found multiple deficiencies relative to the US/Canadian cat nutrition standards (AAFCO). That is it!

BTW, the Winn Feline Foundation is one of few organizations that funds research on feline health issues. I strongly encourage people to take a look at their website and consider making contributions. We have. For example, they provided funding to Dr Meurs that eventually led to the HCM gene test for MCs. Their website also has a lot of good information on it: Cat Health Information from the Winn Feline Foundation

For years I Fed raw from a company called Angian meats in the UK, now I get it delivered from a Dutch firm, but also I do my own i have a meat grinder and put a chicken in and out come the meat, mind mine love all sorts and have never been fussy!

Debbie

I see you have posted in another thread on this subject a year ago.
http://www.maine-coon-forum.info/die...its-worth.html

At that time you provided a link to the Winn Foundation study, which unfortunately no longer works.

So I had to make do with the Wikipedia link … I am not big on Wikipedia, but I read it anyway. The page is indeed quite balanced, especially for Wikipedia standards.

I am a bit disappointed really. This Winn Foundation study merely shows that feeding cats on rabbit and rabbit alone is not the best way to keep them healthy.
Too right. Feeding the same thing day in day out for months on end is not what raw feeding is about.

So, still no answer to my questions. But thanks very much for the link anyway.:smile:

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Originally Posted by NCarver

I have also seen a couple of assays of nutrients in various raw diets that have found multiple deficiencies relative to the US/Canadian cat nutrition standards (AAFCO). That is it!

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How nutritious a raw diet is, is entirely up to the cat slave. If you do it wrong, the cat is bound to get deficiencies.

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Originally Posted by Antonia

This Winn Foundation study merely shows that feeding cats on rabbit and rabbit alone is not the best way to keep them healthy.

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No, that is not what the study shows. The rabbit-based diet was made from multiple parts of the rabbit and had been designed and assayed to ensure that it was nutritionally sufficient. If you have a truly nutritionally complete food then you most certainly can feed it alone. Many cats are fed an essentially single food diet. One of our female cats gets more than 90% of her nutrition from a single food. The fact that the diet was based solely on rabbit does not invalidate the study. That this raw diet ended up being (apparently) deficient in taurine was a major surprise given the assays. So one thing the study showed is the danger of relying on assays rather than feeding trials to assess nutritional sufficiency, and that people using raw diets must work hard to try to ensure complete nutrition. Remember that these were vet researchers designing the diet, with the assistance of lab testing, and they still got it wrong. The study also found no objective health benefits to the raw diet--with a focus on intestinal health and growth--over a 12 month period. I would also suggest that it clearly demonstrates the limited value of subjective evaluations. The subjective health evaluations suggested that the raw fed cats might be a bit healthier, while in reality their hearts were being destroyed and they were slowly dying. In other words, the subjective health evaluations were extremely misleading.

In searching around the Winn site for the report, I came across this recent grant award that you might find interesting:
Cat Health Grant Awards 2009: Winn Feline Foundation