Thanks a lot, Bruce, for that introduction. Just one little correction, I actually left clinical practise and joined Tails in 2015. I qualified in 2010.
So I've been with Tails.com for just nearly 3 years now. And it's been a great transition.
And as Bruce said, obviously, we're presenting quite a potentially contentious topic for some people this evening. I am taking my tails.com hat off to some degree, and I'm here presenting as a vet and trying to be as unbiased as as I can.
So, the aims of tonight's webinar really are to examine the evidence base for and against raw or barf feeding, barf being biologically appropriate raw food. I, as a scientist before I was a vet, you know, like to examine the evidence on anything for and against before I make up my own mind on, my opinion. So hopefully it'll be helpful for anyone out there that's confused or I'm trying to kind of sort out what is, kind of fact versus fiction, what do they need to tell their clients, how do they give responsible and safe advice around different feeding practises, and otherwise.
The second thing we want to do. I give you that information as veterinary professionals, whether you're vet nurse, vet, or kind of veterinary reception or or customer care staff to give you some information to educate and support your clients in their nutrition decisions. So I'm not here to steer you one way or the other.
I'm definitely of the opinion that we need to support our clients with their, their decisions when it comes to their pet healthcare and the pet nutrition, but we want to do that in a supportive way and in an educational way so everyone has the full picture, and isn't confused. The third thing, which I've already mentioned it. Is to remain unbiased, as unbiased as I can.
I have seen online, during the week quite a bit of, hearty discussion and lively discussion around this very webinar that you're listening to tonight, for example, on the British Association of Home. Op ath ic veterinary surgeon's Facebook page, you know, there was an announcement there that the webinar was on and there was people saying, well, it's going to be biassed because it's sponsored by Tails.com.
You know, we know kind of what goes into processed food and of course they're going to be biassed against raw food. I am going to say hello, welcome, thank you for joining us. Everyone is welcome here.
And I know and I hope that we have a lot of people from all kinds of opinions and I want to do a good job of giving the for and against, kind of facts around it and letting people make up their mind for themselves. I would say at this point bias goes both ways because we can have people who are proponents of of raw feeding. Putting their fingers in their ears a little bit and not listening to the evidence.
So, whatever side you're on, I think let's approach tonight's webinar with an open mind and with, being open to facts and evidence and, and, and maybe realising that it's a grey area. It's not, it's not black or white when it comes to the pros and cons around this, this topic. And then because we're obviously under severe time pressure, I say this almost in every webinar.
I have a tendency to waffle on at length on on topics that I'm quite passionate about. But we do have just an hour, or just over with some question time afterwards. So I want to keep it short and sweet, but I've provided a massive list of references and further reading for you to go into later on if, if you so choose.
So there's only so much and we can talk about tonight in the time pressure we have. The last thing to say is about the conflict of interest that a lot of, I've seen some people raise, and I know the webinar vet have had some questions about, this is going to be very biassed because it's from someone who works for a commercial processed pet food company, Tails.com.
I want to give and my, you know, manager would want me to give, Tails.com's point of view. On raw feeding and it's very much that we're not anti or pro anti raw feeding, pro kind of commercial processed food.
We support our customers' nutritional decisions for their dogs if they're right for them. And we're also, we always try to be educational around topics in canine nutrition and canine health. We have plenty of Tails.com customers who feed raw alongside their tails.com blends.
We have plenty of customers. Who for some reason or another, the dog may have multiple allergies or intolerances, have found that a raw food suits their dog better than some of the blends that we've been able to create for them, and we're absolutely fine with that, as long as it's done safely and responsibly in a balanced way. So I'm taking the tails.com hat off.
I'm very much here as Sean the vet who is independent of my day job with Tas.com. And I'm hopeful that you'll trust me in that conflict of interest being eliminated in my approach to to giving you the right information tonight.
So first off, I think it's useful to kind of make some distinctions because there's a lot of kind of words or phrases thrown about and people get very, very passionate about this topic because it is contentious. It is relatively new in the grand scheme of things of how we feed our pets, and it's growing in popularity. But I think there's a few phrases that gets thrown around and there's, it often adds an element of confusion as to what we're actually referring to.
So let's talk about raw versus cooked food. Food, raw food generally means it hasn't been heat treated in any way. It can come in many varieties.
It can be complete or it can be kind of complimentary foods. It can be fresh raw food or it can be frozen and thawed raw food. Cooked food comes again in many forms, and it can be, you know, highly processed, kind of, cooked and dried kind of extruded products like dried kibble.
It can be cooked wet food, it can be cooked treats and so on, dried meats and and and processed meats. Processed is almost seen as a bad word in, and when it comes to pet nutrition as well, processed is bad, unprocessed is good. But you can have processed raw food, the very active, retrieval of of meat from a carcass, processing that.
Away from the kind of human food chain, packaging it, freezing it, refrigerating it, transporting it, make mincing it into more palatable to human kind of formats instead of whole animal parts, and that's all processing that goes on with raw and with cooked food. And so processed shouldn't be the dirty word that it often is when people are talking passionately online about the pet food industry. Really important distinction to make is when we're talking about raw foods and raw diets, if we're going to talk about responsible raw, is the difference between homemade raw food or homemade diets versus commercially prepared diets.
And generally, I think we'll get to this later, but generally the Homemade diets are the ones that tend to have more problems with nutritional balance. So let's separate out homemade raw versus commercially prepared, responsibly prepared raw that is is regulated and adheres to certain certain kind of guidelines and regulations. Want to talk a little bit about the tendency for this topic to become very much a them versus us argument.
And I don't think that's helpful at all. We had some very kind of heated debates and arguments at the conference I went to in Munich a few weeks ago between animal nutritionists and raw advocates, and, and one of the really kind of Powerful points that someone made was, look, we know that raw feeding is more suitable for a certain subpopulation of of pets. We also know that many pets do very well on commercial foods.
Can we stop arguing amongst each other that it has to be one or the other, that there's this right or wrong, that anyone Who choose this one philosophy over another and how they feed their pet is on the wrong side of the argument. I think that is very damaging, and we're moving forward. This is growing in popularity, and I think we need to work together, not against each other when we're we're discussing this and when we're talking to pet owners about making the right choice for their pets.
So, running through the kind of areas we're going to cover tonight, a little bit of a whirlwind. There is quite a lot of copy and text in and presentation, so I apologise if some of the slides are kind of text heavy, but I'm trying to present as much information as possible to you. So we'll look at the current context, in the UK specifically of raw feeding.
We'll look at the evidence base and explore the question of does it exist? Is it balanced on both sides? We talk about the European Society of Veterinary and Comparative Nutrition Congress that was in Munich a few weeks ago and that they had a bar for biologically appropriate raw food, day, this year.
We'll also talk about the frequent claim, you know, and the kind of philosophy that arises from treating the dog as a wolf and and aspiring to a kind of natural ancestral wolf diet when we're, when we're feeding domestic dogs that actually kind of informs a lot of thinking around raw feeding. Then we'll talk about microbiological factors which are obviously one of the main concerns that people would have around raw feeding, homemade raw raw diets in particular. We'll talk about nutritional factors, in particular imbalances and the effects of that, that can have.
And then we'll talk about the actual benefits and proven benefits of raw and bar feeding, and how to recommend raw feeding responsibly. So current context, we know that the raw and barf movement is growing in popularity. I think in any human food trends do tend to cross over into pet food trends as well, and that's not always a bad thing.
I don't say that in a kind of dismissive way at all. I think it's great that pet owners are taking more interest in their own. Nutrition and how that impacts their health.
And I think it's absolutely great that new wave of pet owners or new generation of pet owners, or just more enlightened pet owners of any generation are looking at nutrition as as a really important way to kind of maximise their pet's health. That is a really, really positive thing. But we do need to think of of .
Some of the confusion around extrapolating human theory into and dog nutrition when it's not quite relevant. So thinking about that, and we'll explore it a little bit later. In terms of figures, the Pet Food Manufacturing Association last year released figures on the UK pet food.
And said that between 4 and 5% of the UK pet food market in dogs and cats was raw feeding. In terms of Google search terms, one of my colleagues ails today just looked at what this kind of search volumes and search terms are around raw pet food or raw dog food. And she said that in the last two years it's been growing by 50% year on year, looking at people investigating raw food for dogs on Google.
The term raw dog food itself, I think has something like 25,000 hits per month at the moment on average across the last few months in the UK alone. And I heard this described as a people's revolution, make of that what you will, but there is a kind of turning away from the conventional way of feeding and looking at doing something new, because there's a great belief that it's better and it's the enlightened view and it's the way, the way forward in maximising our pet's health. At the moment, in terms of, manufacturers of raw food, there's over 80, registered with DRA and most licenced pet food manufacturers have to register, and there's over 80 that are doing raw food.
Only 9 of those are members of the Pet Food Manufacturing Association, which is a voluntary, membership, scheme. We are part of it as well. But, there's only 9 of those over 80 that are kind of.
Being part of that and and kind of making a guarantee that they're going to adhere to the strict guidelines and recommendations that the PFMA upholds. Now some of those 9 produce complete diets, balanced diets, and some of them produce complementary diets which are just treats and not meant as a as a whole balanced diet. So it's pretty in its in its infancy in in some respects in terms of the overall UK pet food market.
Do, vets and the nutrition industry have a PR problem? I think that we very much do. I know there's veterinary professionals and non-veterinary professionals on here, and I read all kinds of forums and discussions online.
And I think we do have a very big PR problem and we need to do more to reassure pet owners, you know, that vets have something to say and have a have a positive impact on the pet's health if we work together. But in terms of vets having a PR problem, I think we're seeing a lot of stuff on social media where there's there's a distrust growing in the veterinary profession. There's talk about vets being kind of, bought or brainwashed by big commercial pet food companies, .
There's talk about, even claims amongst some, you know, pet food manufacturers that, vets are kind of feeding or recommending bad dog food, bad pet foods so that animals get sicker and they make more money, which I think as a vet is quite personally hurtful, but it's quite a ludicrous claim that that we would do that. So definitely vets are losing trust as a profession. The other thing about the pet food industry is that, we're seeing a lot of kind of anti pet food industry sentiment just as we're seeing kind of a lot of distrust around big pharma and so on.
There's a lot of very vocal evangelists about the the raw feeding movement, which is, is fine and is good, as long as, in my opinion, as long as they're factual and they're not being misleading. And I think one of the most vocal. If you want to have a look at a YouTube video, Rodney Habib, he lost his dog to cancer.
He has gone on a bit of a mission to find out what are the factors that influence cancer in pets. And his main conclusion is that it's the commercial pet food industry is making pets ill. But I think when you look at some of the statistics he uses and some of the, kind of, Approaches he uses as kind of arguments for raw food and against commercial processed food.
Some of the facts are actually a little bit misleading or scaremongering, in my opinion. Look for yourself. But for as an example, he talks about 10% of all cancer cases are genetic, 90% are results of lifestyle and environment, and he really plays up the fact that diet is the biggest contributor to cancer.
He doesn't specify what species he's talking about. And actually, when you look at the reference that he's provided, it's a human study, and the, the, the study says that the actual percentage is not known and it depends on the specific type of cancer and components of the diet. And the interesting thing there is that Yes, diet does have a massive impact on human cancer cases because humans don't tend to follow a balanced, you know, nutritionally whole and complete diet every day of their lives.
In fact, a lot of humans feed, eat a very poorly balanced and unhealthy diet. So comparing that to dogs and saying that the situation is the same in dogs is is not factual, and I think it's a bit misleading and it doesn't do raw food proponents, responsible raw food proponents any favours to their, their cause that they're trying to promote better health in the dogs. The other anecdote he uses, and we do see anecdote used as fact a lot, is he talked to a single vet about dog lifespan, and this vet said that in his day, early days as being a vet in the 1970s, dogs lived, golden retrievers lived till they were about 17, but now they live to 11, and he's blaming that on the commercial pet food.
That must be what the change is. Actually, it's ignoring the fact that we've Totally changed dog health through genetics and line breeding in pedigree dogs. We're, we're, you know, losing genetic diversity and breeding like with like all the time, and we're creating genetic health problems in pedigree dogs which affect longevity.
But of course that's not useful for the argument of it's all to do with diet. So, there is an evidence conundrum. There's A massive discrepancy for a variety of reasons between the amount of evidence on the pro side for raw feeding versus the cons side of raw raw food.
And part of the, one of the reasons, big reasons for that is that the, the evidence base for what dogs or cats need in terms of nutritional requirements has come a lot from commercial pet food companies putting money into research, which sometimes It is self-serving. I will totally admit that. Obviously, some of the results they come out with are biassed, but we know what we know about the nutritional requirements of our pets because commercial pet food companies had the funding to put into studying that.
The raw food manufacturing companies now that are around for the last kind of 20 years or so are unfortunately . They, they don't have the head start in terms of gathering that evidence. So there is a discrepancy there which kind of puts them on a back footing in terms of proving their claims.
And I identify with that. I think there's a, there's a disadvantage there in terms of proving their claims, but we do need the evidence to back up some of the claims that are made. The main concerns, as I said at the start around raw feeding, which gets people quite heated when some people say that's not an issue, and some people say, well, it is, we need to address it, are around two main broad topics, the nutritional balance of the food that we're feeding to our pets, and food hygiene and public health issues.
And all vets and vet nurses will have done modules and learned about public health and zoonotic disease, as in disease that can be transferred between animals and humans. And but we've also learned about food hygiene and safety and the human food chain when we're producing meat animals and and what the public health risks are there. And I think it would be unwise for any vet not to recognise those concerns.
They are what I would consider noble concerns because they're in the interests of animal health and human health. And I think as well the oaths that we take as veterinary professionals, we have an obligation or a duty to, to question things and to make sure that we're giving out the right advice that that safeguards the welfare of both our animal patients and their human owners. So I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily that vets are and vet nurses and and so on are a questioning lot and are sceptical.
I would say, you know, a lot of vets and vet nurses are very sceptical of what we do at Tails.com, but let's not get into that because we're not here to talk about that. But we're a sceptical bunch by nature, and I think that's a good thing and we should be questioning things so that we can formulate our own opinions on it.
I would say that, as I said, there's there's a bit of a head start in terms of the the big pet food companies that are producing cooked food or processed food, however you want to categorise them. But there is an onus on raw advocates and raw manufacturers to provide more or better evidence versus just anecdote, which is there's plenty of out there at the moment. And then I think there's an onus not to dismiss the very real concerns, you know, as saying, oh, vets are only aligned with certain ways of feeding because it makes them profit or vets like to recommend that food because actually it's not good for animals and, and it makes them sick.
Those I think are are are not doing the raw food movement any favours. And I think also like with the misuse of statistics. And misleading statistics, not to mislead, not to scaremonger, and also maybe importantly, not to guilt or shame pet owners who can't afford to feed raw food or home prepared diets or don't have the time to do that.
I think there is an element of judgement that if you're not doing this new way of feeding, and then maybe you're not a good dog owner, and I don't think that's helpful either, in terms of advocating a new way of doing things. So a very quick summary, which I've talked about before in a webinar I did last September on lots of kind of canine nutrition trends. The benefits of, of raw feeding, barf or or MBD is raw meaty bones, diet.
The benefits that are kind of purported are that it's more natural, which we'll get to, in a little while, which kind of harks back to is the dog a wolf? Should we be feeding a more ancestral diet? Is it, you know, kind of in its evolutionary nature of the dog to be a true carnivore and eat primarily meat, and get away from kind of cereals and processed food?
Talk about that. Definite claims around, dogs having better stool quality or lower residue, higher digestibility and things that can be true on commercial foods as well as raw foods. Many do, very well in terms of faecal consistency and quality on raw foods, but again, it doesn't suit other dogs.
So I would always say that each dog's an individual and you can have some benefits on raw that work for one dog and not for another. Dental benefits. There is some evidence that feeding, raw meaty bones, for instance, has dental benefits in terms of removing plaque and calculus from the teeth and having better periodontal health scores.
Enrichment, I think, can't be denied that dogs will love to, feed normally love to feed on and chew on kind of raw meaty bones and and to whole prey carcasses and things, in most cases. So I don't think we can deny that there's behavioural enrichment benefits there of feeding raw. Weight control is a tricky one because I, I don't think it really stands up that it's raw food specifically that makes weight control easier or more effective.
Weight control primarily is a factor of calories in versus calories expended. Most of us know that, so you can have an overweight dog on raw food just as much as you can have an overweight dog on a commercial cooked food. A lot of the anecdotal reports from owners.
Who have seen a difference in their dog and would say that we're seeing better coat, skin or energy levels or temperament and so on. But unfortunately there is a lack of of very compelling evidence on that front, and that's something that needs further research. And then there's finally some Quite extravagant claims around optimised immune system or the food having more life energy and things like that.
And I think if you're going to make, you know, really medical or clinical claims like optimising the immune system, the burden of of proof is on you to back that up with with evidence, and we're not seeing that really. Well, I haven't seen it in my research. The risks I've I've said already, nutritional imbalances and bacterial contamination are the top two, which we'll talk about.
Parasitic infection and other zoonotic diseases like viruses much less common from, raw food, but nonetheless, they are a risk. Let's talk about them. Dental fractures can sometimes happen, with, with bones, particularly if they're mineralized bones.
Definitely if they're cooked bones, it's not a good idea to give them. But, let's again not play down the fact that there are risks with this. Let's educate and support the owners who want to do this that they recognise the risks.
And then I think it's important to say that there are gastrointestinal obstruction and perforation risks. Dogs are like wolves in that they will swallow large bonuses of food still, it's in their nature to do so, and sometimes that gets them into trouble when it comes to. And blockages and and and so on.
A word on home prepared diets. I've said already, it's really important we distinguish between that. It's, it's a massive effort and expense, and there's massive expertise needed to provide a homemade nutritionally balanced and safe diet for your dog.
The various studies that have been done which have compared the same recipe being prepared by several people, you know, to the exact same spec and producing wide, wide variations in nutritional formula nutritional constitution at the end. So looking at cooked raw or combination, is it an all or nothing approach? I don't think it is.
I think, both can have a place. You don't have to choose one or the other. It's not a religion.
Can the convenience of processed or dry or kibble or cooked or however you want to put whatever category of pet food you choose alongside or can that fit in for convenience reasons? Yes, it can because it does. A lot of owners feed both alongside and don't run into any problems there.
The key really is nutritional balance and a consistent diet, so not changing animals over very suddenly onto a completely different macronutrient profile diet or something which will give them an upset. And the key is also food safety and educating on that. And I think an interesting point, which comes up over and over on both sides, or specifically on the raw side, is the choice of ingredients.
Animal byproducts, which is a legal term that commercial pet food companies have to put if they're, if they're not specifying to the exact degree of inclusion of various ingredients that they use. Put in animal byproducts as a legal term to to describe some of their ingredients, and they're seen as bad, and I understand because there's less transparency around that, that system of labelling. But whole prey is considered good, and actually when you look at whole prey raw food, they're often using the connective tissue, bone, cartilage, organs, offal entrails, and so on, and muscle meat and stuff that that is used, the exact same ingredients as animal byproducts.
So are animal byproducts bad and whole prey is good, and the only difference being the same ingredients, one is cooked and one is in its raw form. There is a bit of a quandary when it comes to saying. You know, categorising, ingredients.
Food safety issues, the food safety issues really are mechanical, which we talked about with, you know, dental fractures or gastrointestinal risk, microbiological, and, and looking at human health, risks, from handling and storing and and feeding those in the home. And I think if we're going to talk about raw feeding with our clients, there is a public health obligation on us to talk about those, those food safety risks. No matter how small they are, no matter how much evidence or how little evidence is out there of proven cases and things, we just have to mention it as an obligation, I think.
And one of the misleading statistics again that I do see brought up time and time again. And quite disappointingly was brought up in the Munich conference by one of the raw advocates, was the, the kind of magnitude of risks being just the same or similar in dry kind of kibble diets versus raw diets. And talking about kind of in the US recalls of pet food for salmonella, for instance, they said, you know, there's 23 kibble recalls and only 14 raw recalls.
Where's the FDA consumer warning explaining the risks of handling cable pet food or or treats. Well, actually, the magnitude of risk is, is far greater in raw because the volume of kibble sold versus the amount of recalls, is absolutely massive, whereas the volume of raw food sold is much less and it's still got 14 recalls that year. So we're talking about a magnitude of over 30 times the risk in raw food.
So I don't think it's fair to say, you know, if you're recommending really serious food safety discussions with your raw feeding clients, you should have the exact same conversations with the ones that feed a cooked kibble diet because the risk is less there. So, as I said, the SVCN congress in Munich. Great couple of days.
There was 188 submissions on a broad range of topics, but uniquely this year they had a whole day dedicated to bar feeding, and that's what they call it bar feeding more so in Germany than than raw feeding. And I went through the pros and. On both sides of the argument, all of the presentations had to be evidence-based.
They were reviewed. Some of them were not yet published, so you won't find them in the reference and for the reading list because they're sort of test out and then at an early stage of pre-publication. So let's talk about barf and the term biologically appropriate, and let's get on to this dog as wolf hypothesis that's often used as the primary reason to go raw.
I think, not recognising that domestic domestication. And the kind of evolutionary changes that have gone on through intense selection pressure over over kind of the last 15 to 50,000 years of the modern dog that we know today, not recognising the differences that have come out in terms of physiology, in terms of behaviour and so on, and when we compare. To the modern wolf is actually doing dogs a bit of a disservice.
And we've seen that in terms of dog behaviour, that dominance theory and wolf theory in dog behaviour has been debunked and is actually harmful to dogs. We also need to talk about the digestive physiology differences and how dogs differ and and why they differ. And one of the big thing, Ways that they do differ is the fact that they domesticate, we domesticated them, or more, more correctly they came into kind of human settlements and and became tamer and started becoming symbiotic with humans in the first place was when we started settling down and becoming agriculturalists rather than.
Hunter gatherers, for instance, and by, the very success of dogs as a kind of species or subspecies depending on how you look at it, relied on them being able to live off our leftovers, which included, grain and cereals. So, one of the presentations focused on behaviour by Ponggrass from Budapest and talked about the differences between the species and their behaviour towards humans, but also looked back at the kind of natural. Habitat of dogs being human settlements and looked at the modern day kind of prototype dog, the pariah dogs of places like India and dingoes in Australia and things, feral dog populations that are as close to the kind of old dog ancestor that derived from the wolf ancestor.
And he also noted that the natural diet of dogs is human leftovers. It's not massive, whole large herbivore prey that packs of these dogs are hunting down and killing and eating and like wolves do. So let's recognise the differences there.
Despite a lot of vocal opinion dogs. Are not wolves. I talked about this in September, and I talked about and was pulled up a little bit on it by a couple of vets saying, we'll talk about species, the definition of species.
The definition of a species has changed from the days of my undergrad where it was two organisms that could mate and produce fertile offspring. That was the definition of a species. But we know a lot more from the study of DNA and the genome and and so on that actually the, the definition of a species is a little bit more of a grey area, than, than we once thought.
And I think looking at the domes all the evidence for domestication of dogs and where they originated from, we know that they originated now in kind of multifocal fashion around various places in the world, . And as far back as 33,000 years ago, we have fairly solid evidence of that, but up to 50,000 years ago, even we have fairly compelling evidence of domestication events. And it's important to say that the grey wolf that we know nowadays is related to the dog, very closely related to the dog, and they can hybridise, but both of those species or subspecies diverged from a common ancestor.
They're not the same. Dogs didn't diverge from the modern wolf that we know today. And the main difference that's relevant for us tonight to talk about and what a lot of the evidence will support is that one of the big differences in terms of genetics and gene copy number and so on is in digestive physiology and the ability or the the the kind of rise of omnivory rather than carnivory and specifically starch digestion.
So, a specific gene copy, a pancreatic alpha amylase, which is thought to have been beneficial in the wolf ancestor for digesting glycogen in liver and muscle stores in prey, and was propagated when dogs started to become more kind of human dependent. Human leftovers dependent and hanging around and becoming domesticated and that was propagated and there's over 30 copies of that in certain, lineages of dogs compared to the wolf. And that enables dogs to digest plant starches very well.
So the grain-free movement and marketing trend in in dog food is a little bit inaccurate when we say dogs can't digest grain or starch. Certainly certain dogs will do better on a grain-free diet because they don't tolerate certain grains or cereals, but that's not to say that grain is not a nutritious and digestible carbohydrate source for dogs, and a lot of evidence to back that up. Let's move on to microbiological concerns and let's talk about some of the papers that were, discussed and topic studies that were discussed at the conference.
The first one that came up, was by Sperner Ed Allen, and they talked about the biological risks associated with handling and consumption of raw meat. Now we all know that raw meat contains bacteria. It's almost an inevitable, part of, meat production that, from the process of farm to fork or in this case farm to bow, you will have contamination of meat with bacteria normally from the intestinal tract.
And they talked about the hurdle concept of food safety that we put safety systems in place, various parts of the process in place to limit the contamination, number one, but also limit the proliferation of bacteria on meat. And that can be anything from, you know, careful dissection of the digestive tract out of the carcass through to, cleanliness and hygiene practises on the, on the food line. Through to rapid refrigeration, rapid freezing of meat, so that any bacteria that has landed on the meat surface doesn't have time to propagate and reproduce.
So those hurdles we put in place all the time when we're handling meat, whether it's for the human food chain or a dog or pet food chain. And one of those hurdles in traditional pet food, production is cooking, which doesn't happen in raw food. So.
The conclusion they came to was there's a non-negligible risk to human health when feeding raw food to our pets, and the presence of microorganisms in raw meat is inevitable. And risk reduction is really what what we should be focusing on in our messaging, focusing on temperature and freeze thought cycles, how to, for manufacturers, how to limit the number of microorganisms on their product, and for the consumer, how to safely store and and prepare the food for, for the pet's consumption. Without heat treatment, obviously, bacterial proliferation is much higher.
The next speaker talked about the microbiology of barf diets that were commercially available and what bacteria ended up being passed in the faeces of raw fed dogs compared to conventionally fed dogs. They studied 106 raw diets. This is where we're going to fly through some, some stats, so apologies if it's a bit of an information overload.
And they studied 21 conventional diets, and they did PCR screens on those diets for E. Coli, salmonella, Listeria, and Campylobacter. And then they also did PCR screens on faecal samples, which were cross-matched, to diet and things as well.
The results, I would say were somewhat unsurprising, and there's a lot of other studies that have found the same thing. There was considerably higher bacterial contamination of barf diets. At 28 of the 106 samples were positive for salmonella, Listeria, and E.
Coli, specific strain of E. Coli. None for Campylobacter, thankfully.
One of the 21 conventional diets was positive and that was for Listeria. In terms of faecal shedding, 32 of 87 raw diet dogs shed at least one of the investigated microbes, so that's 36.8% of the group, and 5 excreted two bacterial species, 5.8% of the group.
4 of 40 conventional dogs that they did that they screened the faecal shedding, shed 1 bacteria. So that's 10%, which actually is quite high. Considering only one showed up, in the previous slide on, with the Listeria.
So does that say that the source is, is, extra to diet or they're getting some of these organisms in, the environment, for instance. And in any case, we're still seeing an increased level of faecal shedding. In the, in the raw diet, dogs, 12 of 87 raw diet dogs shed Listeria, none in the control group.
It's just important to say that Listeria monocytogenes in particular is quite a serious public health concern for what's called the yopie group, so young, old, pregnant, or immunocompromised people. So, those are the kind of questions we need to be asking clients that are feeding well. You know, it, it may be fine and everything, but you just need to be aware if there is anyone in that, those categories within your household, perhaps.
Nutritional concerns then moving away from microbiological, there's many bar studies which show nutritional imbalances occur, definitely more so in homemade diets, but also in some commercial diets. And this raised the point of debate, really. About the importance of a complete and balanced diet.
Should we, is it important to feed, every meal to our dog that's complete and balanced, or if we're feeding a raw diet that we're creating at home, or even, using different commercial products, is it? That every meal is balanced or over a week or over a month if that diet is balanced, is that OK? And I think an interesting viewpoint that came up was the the differences in how fast and how how .
Important balances over certain periods in the dog's life stage versus ours. So the example that was used to illustrate that was, you know, the average human grows to his or her adult body weight of around 70 kg in 18 years, but the average dog can reach their adult body weight in as little as 9 months if you're a toy breed and as much as 24 to 36 months if you're a giant breed. So actually having a nutritional imbalance for as little as a few weeks at a crucial point in terms of skeletal development, for example, can have a much magnified effect than if we're talking about humans.
And so there's the danger in extrapolating kind of human, human nutrition to to dog nutrition. And Vecchiato and Dobnecker produced a study that they'd recently done on nutritional adequacy of evaluation and microbial examination of our foods. And they looked at 44 frozen raw diets from 3 top internet sellers in Germany.
So the picture may be a bit different in the UK and hopefully it is. But all of those had a total bacterial count, which was above the range for human food grade. Two of them tested positive for salmonella species, and at this point, I'm sure a lot of if this pet food manufacturing companies that are UK based are going to be shouting out, please say what the issue is with salmonella.
In, in the UK, the PFMA guidelines are that there's a zero tolerance level for salmonella, in food, so they, the PFMA member, products are tested and there's, salmonella is not allowed to enter. They would they would products would be recalled if there's any salmonella to detected. In terms of nutritional balance, then, only 8 out of the 36 that were tested for these, minerals met the requirements for calcium, phosphorus, zinc and copper.
3 out of 36 had an inverse calcium phosphorus ratio. Only 5 out of 36 had a calcium phosphorus ratio over over the recommended, ratio of 2 to 1. 6 out of 13 labelled with additives exceeded the legal limits for zinc.
About half of the products supplied copper and zinc below the minimum requirement. And in puppy diets in particular, 1/3 of them didn't cover the minimum calcium requirements, or they contained only a proportion of the minimum phosphorus requirement because, for various reasons of kind of meat versus bone ratios and things, it's quite difficult to balance calcium and phosphorus for puppies of various ages, breeds, and, and life stage. The conclusions drawn were that there's an inherent risk of bacterial contamination in commercial raw diets in Germany.
There's potential harm to animals themselves and in contact to humans. The debate came up about what is that harm and what should we be recommending and should we just say it's as simple as hand washing. And disinfection practises.
Again, the magnitude of risk was or the argument was brought up that if we're recommending hand washing for raw, we should recommend hand washing for cable. That's probably true, but it's ignoring the magnitude of risk argument that I talked about earlier. There was also the, the argument of where's all the evidence for this foodborne illness if if there's so much bacteria in meat and making it into dogs bowls and and so on.
. The evidence unfortunately is not, we can assume that it's not always recorded for various reasons. It may be that if someone, and it was admitted by raw food advocates that it may be that people would be reluctant to report that they may have got a foodborne illness from their pet's food. It also is an issue in the human health care field that a doctor investigating foodborne illness is not always going to ask, do you have pets in the house and what do you feed them?
So an absence of records there is not proof of absence that this is happening, and there have been studies showing traceability back to, to pet foods when children or immunocompromised patients have become very ill with foodborne illness. There were studies mentioned that show common kind of washing and disinfection practises don't eliminate certain micro microbes like salmonella from food bowls and pet food bowls. And then the nutritional concerns really were that, most commercially available raw foods in Germany that were marketed as complete are not appropriate as fully balanced dog diets at that point in time, for long term.
So, look at, there's a few kind of papers in the references about balance and so on. We are seeing nutritional diseases like rickets and things coming back, you know, and happening in, normally extreme cases where young growing dogs or puppies are fed a really inappropriate homemade raw ration. So I think that's the kind of real red flag that we need to be picking up in the vet clinic and making sure that if people are choosing raw, they're they're choosing to do it correctly and they're choosing to do it safely.
In terms of the benefits of raw feeding, there were, there was evidence presented for that as well. So, absolutely need balance there. Lee's Gang Adal produced a study on, effects on dental health and fur quality.
They also looked at faecal consistency in there, but we're mainly focused on dental health and fur quality, which are two of the things that are, commonly kind of, talked about anecdotally as benefits when people move their dog from a conventional diet onto raw food. So in this study, they did a standardised lab test with laboratory beagles, 16 beetles, and 8 of them fed raw and 8 fed conventional diets. And then privately owned dogs, and 32 of those split equally, 16 on barf, 16 on conventional.
They eliminated as many variables as possible, especially in the privately owned dog group, and all of the dogs had to be fed those diets for at least 6 months. And the results that they found, the type. Of food really had no effect on uptake of nutrients as long as the ration was balanced.
So you often see claims around better kind of uptake of nutrients and so on or digestibility. And that's not specific to raw. You can have very undigestible raw rations and you can have very undigestible conventional diets as well.
So, the debate point that that raised really, in this paper and in another paper that looked at kind of . Enzyme levels and digestive, products in, working dogs talked about are the benefits we're seeing or the perceived benefits we're seeing, are they to do with actually the, the, state of the food being Raw uncooked, or are they actually an effect of most raw diets having a massively different macronutrient profile of high protein, high fat, very low carbohydrate versus some conventional diets that are chosen in these studies that do have a more balanced level of carbohydrate, fat and protein. There was another paper talked about by a couple of people on both sides of the the kind of discussion about changes in faecal microbiome and could that be beneficial or is it proving that certain diets are bad or certain diets are good.
We're always going to see a change in faecal microbiome. If the macronutrient profile of the diet is vastly different because bacterial fermentation and substrate preference and so on. So I think there's still a lot more to do in terms of tying a lot of these studies together in what they actually mean versus just extrapolating that changes are positive or changes that are negative.
Going back to this study, in all privately owned dogs in this study, the bar rations were not balanced, which is a little bit concerning. Most of them showed high protein, iron, calcium and phosphorus levels, and low zinc and low calcium phosphorus ratio, which can cause, issues in the long term. Feeding barf on the positive side, feeding, barf or raw can have a positive influence on dental health if it contains bones.
So in this study, they used, calf sternum. So young, not fully mineralized bones, and gave them to the dogs on our. On a regular basis, I think daily, but I could be corrected on that.
But they did see improvements in dental health and periodontal, kind of hygiene and disease in the raw fed group. So that is a positive. There there are benefits there, on dental health over conventional diets.
They recognised that cooked or highly mineralized bones were a higher risk. And unfortunately, for, some people who swear by the anecdote that this is true, in this study, there was no effect observed on fur coat, quality or skin issues or on faecal quality here either. Then we had a final session, from Nick Thompson, the president of the Royal Feeding Veterinary Society, on responsible raw and what is the science and, and, what evidence do we have?
And to be fair, Nick did acknowledge, and just as I said at the start, there is challenges involved here because the evidence-based discrepancy between the conventional old established, you know, lots and lots of evidence accumulated over time in conventional cooked diets versus the relatively new on the scene, . Kind of practise of feeding pets a raw or barf diet, and I'd recognise one of the points I've seen Nick make before, in previously that raw has been around for a long time, arguably the dawn of time when dogs were wolves and so on. I recognise that argument as well, but for the sake of this purpose, the raw feeding practises we're talking about are the ones that we've seen in the last kind of 20 years and get really rapidly gaining in popularity today.
So in, In Nick's personal patient group, he reported that, you know, he's seeing massive improvements in various things, generally, skin, dermatological disease and, and, digestive diseases as well. But then that prompted some debate on, we know, as I said at the start, we know that certain, pet populations or subpopulations will do better on raw. Does that mean that we should be pushing the, the, the message that raw is best for every animal?
I'm not sure that it does. As I said at the start, we, you know, have customers that we can't get a blend for or they can't find an off the shelf product from a conventional diet that suits them and simplifying. The ingredient list by going onto a raw diet, that is balanced can often help with those issues where there's unknown allergies or intolerances or other issues that are diet related.
So, then there was a review of the kind of current evidence base for benefits of safely and responsibly feeding more fresh food. I can't get through all of the The papers that were mentioned here in this session, but I have included the link to them in the, in the further reading section. But 31, 3 studies that I thought were interesting to share and to talk about and to encourage you to go and look at yourself and examine.
The first one was a survey, I had 6. 132 responses from raw feeders about their switch from conventional diet to raw and it was overwhelmingly very positive, but it was a survey commissioned by a raw food company to their own customers, so potentially a bit biassed there in terms of kind of respondent selection. Another one, which is quite an interesting study, and I would encourage you to have a look at it, was a case control study in German Shepherd, a young German Shepherds fed raw food, and they concluded that raw food fed at a young age could protect German shepherd dogs from canine hip dysplasia or congenital hip dysplasia.
And then the final one, which was quite interesting was comparing raw versus dry commercial diets in atopic Staffordshire terriers. And it was looking at the differences in gene expression and the conclusion made was that many correlated with better, better health. I'm a little bit reluctant to say that that was a definite, correlation.
There was maybe a little bit of extrapolation of the results. The results to me said there was differences in gene expression, but it didn't prove that there was better health in some cases. So do have a read of that one and, and have a look at the, further reading.
In the in the next session or in the in the final few slides. So in summary, I think there's a few things that I'd like to kind of highlight and maybe stimulate a bit of discussion. I hope I have presented things in a fairly balanced way, recognising that the evidence base is not balanced.
That is going to be difficult, to change minds, but I think, it's right for people to question a new practise that does have some inherent risk there. We need to acknowledge, and I think raw food, advocates and raw food manufacturers do need to acknowledge that there's risks, and many do. I have talked at length to, to many, .
Kind of colleagues in in raw food companies that talk about the risks and and are very educational. I would say not all raw is created equal. We know that some, some manufacturers are better than others.
Homemade is certainly a far more risk in various ways than some of the commercially available products. But also not all processed pet food is created equal. So, it's not a case of raw is good and kibble is bad.
I think that Really simplifying an argument and and and scaremongering. You can have good and bad on both sides, and it's not an, I don't think, I don't believe it's an all or nothing approach. I think we shouldn't say that you're a bad dog owner if you don't feed raw or if you do feed raw, you have to feed 100% raw and never let a kibble pass your dog's lips again.
That's not very supportive to a dog owner who wants to make the right choice. It's very difficult to provide a balanced diet if homemade. I think that's been proven over and over again.
I think it's definitely a given and something, something that we need to work on. Vets in the pet food industry having a PR problem and a level of distrust with pet owners, and, and a lot of their messaging is propagated and widely read, and we need to come out with, you know, some, discussion around that. I think as well the evidence does point to the fact that dogs are not wolves, so it's a little bit misleading, to, to not recognise the digestive physiology differences in dogs and wolves and their feeding behaviours and so on and why they became dogs.
It was a lot to do with diet, dietary differences. Better communication from the pet food industry around animal byproducts, I think that's very important. It is not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily mean it's an indicator indicator of poor quality ingredients.
We can have very high quality and highly nutritious animal byproduct ingredients that we should be using in the pet food chain so that it's not wasted because we as humans find it. Unappetizing or we don't want it in our food chain. I think there's an ethical and moral and environmental obligation on us to utilise all parts of the animals that we produce for the human food chain.
And if some of that very nutritious and high quality material is going into pet food, that to me is a very good thing. We recognise that many pets will do great on raw diets. There's no arguing there that we, the some of the anecdote, anecdotes, many of the anecdotes are true.
My dog does better on a raw food than what I've tried before in the past. That's true for many people, so let's recognise that. But similarly, let's recognise that many more currently do great on cooked.
Diets in whatever format. So it's not black or white. Let's recognise that there's inbreeding and genetic effects on disease as well as dietary effects.
I think the, the kind of scaremongering that goes on online saying the pet food industry is killing dogs and ignoring the fact that we've bred genetic disease into dogs that limits their lifespan, is not a good approach in terms of being truthful and honest and portraying the whole picture. Let's as veterinary professionals, support and educate our clients to make the best choice for their dog. We treat dogs as an individual.
Every dog has individual nutritional needs, and what works for one doesn't work for another. So let's support and educate our clients with the right information to make that best choice. And to do so safely, my recommendation, if there's one take home message that if someone wants to feed raw, I think our, our position on it should be that if you're going to feed raw, we would go with one of those 9 PFMA accredited manufacturers because they're doing it to a good standard and they're taking safety seriously and they're taking nutritional balance seriously.
And the final thing is consider that paw print that we're leaving on the environment and also the ethical considerations of the changing pet food trends that we're seeing and that we're going to see over the coming years. So yeah, in summary, I want to really promote the PFMA as you know, upholding very high standards and FEDA, the European body as well for the pet food, industry. They're upholding very strict, and, and, kind of, .
Valuable regulations within the EU and within the UK that don't apply sometimes in the US where a lot of the messaging comes from and a lot of the scary and concerning messaging comes from around pet food. There are more, it does seem there are more recalls and food safety issues in the pet food industry in the US, but we're very lucky in the UK and in the EU that we have much tighter and more stringent regulations and protections in the pet food industry. And normally at this point in presentation of a tail sponsored webinar, I would give out a code to try us for yourselves in the interests of not being salesy or pushing the tails.com message.
I'm just going to say we're at the British Vet Nurse Association Congress in Telford on the 12th to 14th of October. We're at London Vet Show on the 15th, 16th of November. Come and say hello, come and have a discussion.
I would love to talk to you. I hope, I've presented in a way that, is an open and honest and balanced dialogue, and I'd love to continue that dialogue with everyone, at those two events in the coming month or two. And then I'll just run through very quickly so that if you're looking back, you can pause the screen, on each of these references and further reading slides.
But I've provided those so that you can go away and get more out of this than I can cover in an hour talking to you tonight. So I think that's it from me, Bruce. It's over to questions.
I can see we've had quite a few come in. Sean, thank you very much and I have to say you certainly lived up to your promise of being unbiased and not wearing your your hat from your company. So well done on that.
It's been very good. Thank you. We do have loads, as you will imagine of comments coming through.
I'm not going to be dealing with the, the comments and that sort of thing. We're just going to really deal with, questions. One of the common themes that has come through, and you've answered it, was, how do we know the difference between a good quality and a poor quality?
How do we tell blah blah. You mentioned the PFMA. Do, do they have a website or a list or somewhere where people can go to to look this up?
Or or is it an individual product that they need to look for that has got the endorsement of the PFMA? No, the PFMA have published the list of the raw manufacturers that are members. And they have produced a very, useful and educational fact sheet on raw feeding that you can download and that you can give to clients to give them, you know, a kind of, whole picture.
And if you're going to recommend a company, that those 9 companies are listed on there. So just go onto the PFMA website and search, raw feeding. There you go.
So that will take care of about 20 questions that have come through. So thank you for that. Here's a hot one for you, Sean.
I like doing this. I did this to you the last time we were on together. Toss through these hot topics.
. Yeah, well, not really. I'm sure you'll be fine. There's a comment that's come through that This is a great webinar.
Thank you for the unbiased opinion, and for shedding light on, on all the various aspects of dogs. But what about raw in cats? Yeah, I think I, I, I would like to get into that.
There was a few papers discussed on raw food in cats, . Cats, where do I start? Cats are obligate carnivores, unlike dogs.
Dogs are often talked about as true carnivores, and they're a wolf, which is a main carnivore, but actually dogs are more omnivorous than than wolves. Cats are very different in that they need meat in their diet. There are some vegan cat foods that use synthetic, taurine and acheddonic acid to, to, give them the essential, amino acids they need from meat.
But, cats tend to tolerate, And, and do very well on certain raw foods, but all the same principles and all the same issues apply. If people are doing it at home and feeding their cat on minced beef or minced chicken or raw chicken breasts and not much else, that's going to develop a nutritional deficiency over time. There's also all the same safety concerns with handling a raw diet, but there was some interesting topics discussed on .
The kind of meat texture like minced versus whole meat and cat's preferences and things like that. Unfortunately, in this in the scope of an hour and being very much dog nutrition focused at this point in my career, I decided to focus tonight's talk on on on dogs really. But a lot of the same principles apply no matter what species you're you're feeding.
I warn you it was a hot potato. Sorry about that. But that's fine.
No. Here's another one that's come through from Dave. He says, do dogs need to have raw vegetables as well as raw meat?
There seems to be two main types of prepared frozen diets. Those with and those without vegetables. What should we be advising?
OK, so here's, here's one of the kind of interesting things when we're talking about what dogs need. Dogs need nutrients. OK?
Dogs don't necessarily need ingredients, to a certain extent. There's obviously taste preferences and there's certain types of ingredients you need to include in a balanced diet. But, some, preparations or some products will have a completely balanced and nutritionally complete diet using vegetables as part of that mixing bowl and and the overall nutritional composition coming from meat and vegetables, and some will produce a nutritionally complete and balanced diet without fruit or vegetables.
So there's not a right or wrong answer here. If we're going to go back to kind of Ancestral way of thinking or what dogs would do in the wild, even though they're not a wild species. We can talk about dogs or the dog family being omnivorous and at times eating vegetation and berries and and plant material even from their prey, digestive system.
So there's not a right or wrong answer. I think the the most important thing is to look at the nutrient profile, the nutritional composition of the diet. And make sure that whatever product you're choosing, it has had input from a qualified animal nutritionist that has made sure and the company verifies that it's a complete and balanced diet.
Excellent. Sean, there's a lot of questions and comments coming on, about the mixing of raw and commercial foods in various question forms. But the gist of it is, there's been previous advice never to mix the two because the pH is so different and the stomach adapts to either the one pH or the other.
Yet you're saying it's OK to, to feed them together. Well, a lot of people do, feed them together without, without many problems, and I can know that is anecdote as well. The, the, I think I included one line there on the key is that the diet is balanced and consistent.
So chopping and certainly chopping and changing very suddenly between raw food versus a bag of kibble, can cause issues in the stomach or digestive upsets and so on. But, you know, a lot of the, the raw food, if you want to do raw, completely, a lot of the raw food companies are now, doing kind of, similar macronutrient, type, diets that are partly cooked or partly heat treated and in cans. Or in pouches that you can give to your dog if you're going away on holiday, for instance.
Obviously going away on holiday in a car or or travelling on a plane, you can't bring the freezer full of raw food with you, can you? So there's convenient aspects that sometimes necessitate people kind of have a, a A less extreme one or the other way of feeding their dogs, and that works for many people, but the key is consistency and whether that's a mixing of the two types of food on a daily basis or every meal basis or whether that's sometimes including a little bit alongside, there's various ways of doing that. It's not always that you have to choose one or the other or suddenly your dog's gonna have a massive stomach issue.
But the key is making it balanced and consistent and any changes you're making to your dog's diet doing it very, very gradually. But I mean, Sean, that's, that's something that we recommend to our clients on a daily basis when they're changing from one to another brand. So it's no different in this case and I think it's, it's, I think it may be kind of overplayed as a reason to recommend people just exclusively feed raw sometimes, but we need to recognise that people's busy lives.
Sometimes raw food isn't . Possible to get it right. And it's very hard work if you're doing it.
Yeah. Natalie makes or asks a very valid question along these lines. She says if a Pett is on a raw diet and has been recommended to change on a more commercial bland diet.
Do you think that cooking the raw food before changing would be of any benefit? That's a good question. I don't know is a very honest answer.
I think, potentially, it might be a good transition in terms of kind of similarity and, and, digestibility changes for that, but, I'm not aware of evidence to, to suggest that that's a definite recommendation. Excellent. I'm just screening through and there's, there's a lot here.
One I wanted to mention because it comes from Hillary and I think it really sums up what you've been saying now. She says, I meant to say hello and thank you. She made a typing error on the one and then corrected it.
So I meant to say hello and thank you. This has been a lovely balanced discussion. I feed good quality cooks and my nurse who is with me feeds good quality raw.
We are both happy having sat and listened to this together. Thank you so much. And I think that sums it up.
You really have given us an unbiased pros and cons of everything. So thank you for that, Sean. Great to hear.
Good stuff. That was the aim. Amy asks what supplements would you suggest to client if they are adamant on using either raw or home-cooked diets?
I don't, I, I just would not get into the discussion of using this amount of this supplement and this supplement. It's been shown over and over again with homemade recipes and, you know. Diets that are given out as as fact online that even several people preparing the exact same recipe, you will have wide variation in how it's cooked, how it's stored, how fresh the ingredients were when they got them, and so on and so on.
So I think it's a dangerous, route to go down to start giving people prescriptive advice on how to create a balanced diet at home. If you're not a board certified animal nutritionist that can do that with software, I don't think you really have much place in saying you need to use this amount of this supplement and this amount of that supplement. So my advice would be just don't do it.
Recommend. A balanced commercially available raw diet. Yeah.
I think, as you said, leave it up to the professionals and part of the PFMA's job is to make sure that these things are living up to what they're supposed to. So endorsement. Yeah.
But yeah. We've had a couple of questions and again I'm gonna paraphrase, but basically the, the gist of the questions is if a food is labelled as a complete diet or a balanced diet on their packaging, is that something which is genuine or is this just marketing gum? Well, it depends.
I mean, it's, it's tightly regulated by FEDA and the PFMA, but people can sometimes can put things on their labels that aren't true. What the difference between complete and complimentary is a complete diet is meant to have all of the essential nutrients, macronutrients and micronutrients that a dog needs for that specific stage in its life. And it's important to say that a complete diet for a puppy of a large breed is potentially quite different to a complete diet for an adult of a a small breed.
So I think, designing the diet on an individual basis, and having a complete can, can lead to very different things in that meaning. The meaning of complementary is that it's not a fully balanced product in itself. It might provide a partial, level of the required nutrients, but it doesn't provide a balanced one.
So that tends to be treats or, kind of, kind of toppers or, or, complimentary products. So yeah, it, it, it's not always a good indicator, but again, going with a trusted and regulated, manufacturer that has input from qualified animal nutritionists is the way to make sure that that you can trust the complete label. Excellent.
I'm still scrolling through. There's loads coming in here, but one thing Sean that I need to bring up to you is that we have so many comments of brilliant webinar. Thank you.
Great presentation. Excellent. Thank you so much for being open and discussing this in an open an unbiased manner.
And then there's one I need to read to you here from Mina. It says excellent presentation. You should come to the US and give this lecture.
It's a real circus here. Oh, I don't think I'd be brave enough to do that. I, I read what's going on online, with, yeah.
One last hot potato that I'm gonna do for you, Sean, and then we're gonna call it a night and let you go tonight. And that is the questions that are coming through about veganism. Yeah.
In dogs, so, . Dogs are omnivores, and dogs can live on a vegetarian or vegan diet because again, let's go back to the notion that they need nutrients, they need, you know, and we can get nutrients from a non-meat based diet for dogs because they have the ability to get them all from a plant-based diet, but it's very difficult to formulate a balanced diet for every dog, withholding meat. So, For instance, at the moment at Tails.com, we provide meat-based diets.
We don't do a vegetarian or vegan option for, for dogs. We are seeing a rise in the popularity of that in dogs and cats. .
A huge topic ethically, you know, is it better that we're not producing, meat for pets, arguably, but some vegetarian or some plant production is, is just as harmful to the environment and so on. Can it be done? Yes, it can be done.
Do dogs have a biological need for meat? If you think about it in way of preference and their evolution, yes, they do, because it is a natural part of their diet. And should we deny that to them on the basis of our belief systems?
I'm not sure. I'm not, you know, we all have our opinions on that. But my, my bottom line is, yes, it can be done in dogs, because dogs are omnivores, but it's not easy to do.
And that's absolutely a no go for people to do at home without kind of nutritional qualifications. Can it be done for cats? Arguably it can.
There are companies out there that are producing vegan diets for cats, and they're using synthetic forms of the two essential amino acids for cats, which are taurine and arachaddonic acid. I personally and anecdotally have seen two cases of vegan-fed cats that were not doing very well, one of which really didn't do very well and ended up being put to sleep. The owners were insistent not to change the diet.
The, I won't say anymore for client confidentiality. But the cat, needless to say, was, receiving meat from neighbours and probably rodents and birds, but on a very infrequent basis. So I, I think this, it's a huge kind of hot potato topic.
It, it can technically be done. I don't know if I would kind of be too comfortable with it, especially for cats. I did warn you that it was a hot one, but that's the last one for like a hot potato.
That's it. Sean, thank you so much. Folks, thank you so much for joining us.
I, I, if we were in an auditorium, Sean, I'm sure you would get a thunderous round of applause. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, Bruce, but I, I would just say, I'm all open for debate, professional and respectable, respectful debate. So I'm very happy, tomorrow, for instance, to put on our tails veterinary.
Facebook page. If anyone wants to jump on there and have a discussion, I'm more than happy for open public discussion on any topics raised. I'm sure there are a few people who haven't been happy with some of the points I've raised tonight.
That's just the nature of the beast, but, Tails.com veterinary on Facebook is our our Facebook page, reaching out to the veterinary community, rather than the kind of just dog owner and community. Unfortunately, there's always loonies with everything.
It doesn't matter whether it's pets or nutrition or religion or cars or whatever else. So we just philtre those out for you tonight, Sean. So yeah, good luck to you on your Facebook page.
Alright, thanks Bruce. Folks, that's it for tonight. And thank you for attending.
Thank you for all your comments or most of your comments. And Sean, thank you for your time. We look forward to having you back on the webinar vet at some time.
