The commercial raw and fresh (cooked) food market for dogs and cats has absolutely exploded in the last few years. There are lots of beautiful-looking packages with tempting slogans offering an easy solution to fresh food for your pet. Some are produced by local butchers – surely they must know about meat? Many say “complete” or “balanced” on the front, so they must be ok?
Unfortunately this isn’t the case. The local butcher has found a way to use up the scraps of meat they can’t easily sell, or to sell cheap cuts and fat for more money, and doesn’t have a clue about nutritional balance. Unfortunately the labelling of pet food is not regulated, so many commercially produced raw foods claim to be complete or balanced when they aren’t.
This makes it really difficult to know which commercial foods to trust. There are some excellent brands out there, and some to avoid. Generally speaking you get what you pay for:
If the price seems too good to be true, it is often because they are using very high fat content, or high bone content (neither of which is ideal).
Just as happens with other commercially produced foods, there can be problems with batch contamination. In 2019, 13 cats were infected with tuberculosis (TB) after eating Natural Instinct venison raw food. Of course, kibble is not immune to contamination; in 2021 over 500 cats were diagnosed with feline pancytopenia after Fold Hill dry cat foods were contaminated with trichothecene mycotoxins.
The convenience of commercially prepared fresh foods is very attractive. Certainly when compared to the time it takes to source an prepare ingredients every week/fortnight for home-made recipes, using commercial pre-packaged foods makes fresh food feeding accessible to many families that wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
As long as you pick a good quality brand, such as Poppy’s Picnic, Able, Hug, Different Dog,
Katkin or Butternut Box, feeding a commercially produced raw or fresh-cooked food is a (relatively!) convenient and safe way to feed. DIY raw and fresh-cooked feeding requires a lot of time, skill and dedication. However, DIY does enable you to adjust the ingredients to perfectly suit your pet’s needs, allows you to source ingredients from safe and ethical sources, and reduces packaging when compared to commercially produced foods.
Contact hello@veterinarywellnesscentre for more advice on nutrition and raw feeding.
