Cats are a lot cleaner, if you want a clean indoor pet. Dogs are better for spending time outdoors. Don’t feed them commercial pet food (especially dry).
Nearly every dog in the country is fed commercial dog food (few people have the time and money to prepare food for their dog), and with few exceptions, those dogs seem to live a healthy life. My last dog lived to be 14 (pretty good for a 70 lb shepherd mix) and lived entirely on commercial dry dog food. (but it wasn't cheap grocery store food)
If not- I'd be interested to hear some scientific support that dry food isn't good for dogs. Last I talked to my vet he was happy with the commercial dry food my dog was eating- but if that isn't the consenus I'd like to know some more.
It isn’t veterinarians spreading this advice. My vet recommended against it.
I would guess that for every person doing raw diets right, there are five screwing it up.
It’s really nonsense un-actionable advice and it doesn’t actually align with what veterinary professionals tell you to do.
You didn’t even recommend which food I should be buying or making. You just told me to put my tinfoil hat on.
I’m doing what my vet told me to do. Why should I listen to people without veterinary degrees?
But with any dry pet food, you have to be careful to make sure the animal drinks enough water to stay properly hydrated. I think most pets in the US are probably at least partially dehydrated their entire lives, and they don’t know it nor do their humans.
IMO, if you’re not doing your due diligence to confirm what feeding regimes are good for your pet, then you are committing a crime.
Absolutely correct. Don't feed any pet commercial pet food! Feed raw. I recommend Darwin's Raw Food, but there are many others out there.
I accidentally gave diabetes to my beloved cat Penguino. He was eating standard dry (and occasionally wet) cat food for the first 6-ish years of his life. Suddenly he dropped from 13 lbs to 9 lbs in about a year. Fast forward four years and thousands of insulin and vet dollars, he is much healthier and on a raw diet, but will need insulin 2x a day for the rest of his life. Mishandling his food and health is one of my deepest regrets. And it was almost entirely avoidable, had I had the right information.
My vet recommended against raw diets because they’re easy to contaminate and difficult to manage properly.
Why would you just assume that diabetes couldn’t possibly be genetic?
My cat's raw food is delivered once every few months, it's kept in sealed packages in the freezer, and I've never had a problem with contamination or managing the food. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I would encourage you to do your own raw food research.
Now, it doesn’t have to be 100% protein. If they were eating mice and birds in the wild, then the bodies of those prey animals would not be composed of 100% protein. But they would be primarily protein.
So, when we feed our animals, we need to make sure that we keep their natural dietary requirements in mind.
Two of them have been on raw since kitten, one of which was pretty young and in pretty bad shape while being fed commercial crap after she got abandoned by her mother. She was no more than a couple of week at the time, bloated belly, etc. Everything she was eating was pretty much passing through undigested.
As for the third one, we transitioned her from kibble to raw and she got noticeably less bloated and got much nicer pelt.