What Other Veterinarians Say About Manufactured Pet Foods

From the British Journal of Small Animal Practice

"A growing number of vets state that processed pet food is the main cause of illness and premature death in the modern dog and cat. In December 1995, the British Journal of Small Animal Practice published a paper contending that processed pet food suppresses the immune system and leads to liver, kidney, heart and other diseases. This research, initially conducted by Dr. Tom Lonsdale, was researched further by the Australian Veterinary Association and proven to be correct."

Tom Lonsdale, DVM *

"Raw meaty bones promote health."

"Dingoes and feral cats keep themselves healthy by eating whole carcasses. The closer you come to this ideal for pet dogs and cats the better."

"As the natural pet food industry increases, so the artificial industry, together with its harmful effects, should go into decline... No more slurping of canned stew, no more rattle of dry pellets; instead, the sounds of nature, the crunching of raw meaty bones."

Dr. Ian Billinghurst, B.V.Sc.(Hons), BSc.Agr., Dip.Ed.

"The sad truth is that prepared pet foods help provide patients for vets."

"As a veterinary student in the early seventies, I found it hard to understand why Aussie vets had fewer and simpler dog and cat diseases to deal with than the Americans. ---- There was a simple explanation. At that time, more than seventy percent of Aussie dogs were still fed raw bones and scrapes. They were still pretty healthy. American dogs had been eating processed food and no bones for decades. They had developed a wide range of problems. Their vets had been forced to develop a complex set of diagnostic and therapeutic tools to deal with them. I need not have worried. Our dogs' disease problems are increasing on a par with their increasing consumption of processed and cooked foods. We Aussie vets now have to be as good as our American counterparts to deal with them. There are many reasons why the commercial pet foods have never been close to a dog's natural diet. Those reasons include the fact that they are based on grain, and that they are cooked."

Dr. Richard Pitcairn, DVM

"...When I began to suggest the feeding of raw meat I found animals becoming more healthy even without other treatment. Indeed, I have frequently had the report that people find their animals become healthy when they make this change and diseases for which they were hoping to have treatment (on a waiting list) have disappeared. Since that time, other veterinarians have told me similar things about the use of raw meat. I do not have numbers but I think the veterinarians recommending raw meat in the US are in the hundreds. My experience, albeit clinical and not based on studies, is that my patients have improved health on a raw diet. Furthermore, I have not seen significant parasite problems. Dogs and cats, being carnivores by nature, are meant to eat raw meat and do not have a problem doing so."

"Although we have come to accept commercial foods as being normal or natural ways to feed animals (and indeed ourselves), in fact they are not. They are simply what we've gotten used to in the last few decades. But nothing we can produce commercially ever can rival those mysteriously complex foods manufactured for eons by nature itself."

Christina Chambreau, DVM

"Meat should be raw. Cooking destroys enzymes and denatures the proteins rendering them less digestible to cats and dogs."

"Dogs and cats need raw meat to be really healthy and even the best processed foods cook their good ingredients, & most commercially available foods, even the expensive ones, use the cheapest ingredients (that means dead, diseased and decaying meat & by-products)."

Dr. Wendell O. Belfield, DVM

"Their pets may have diarrhea, increased flatulence, a dull hair coat, intermittent vomiting or prolonged scratching. These are common symptoms associated with commercial pet foods." In 1981, as Martin Zucker and I wrote How to Have a Healthier Dog, we discovered the full extent of negative effects that commercial pet food has on animals. In February 1990, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John Eckhouse went even further with an expose entitled "How Dogs and Cats Get Recycled into Pet Food".

William Pollak, DVM

"Health is an inevitable by-product of natural raw foods for our pets."

"Survival is insured by commercial food; nothing more; not health, not the robustness for life."

"The results of a clinical trial suggest that 74.7% of common diseases in dogs and 63% of common diseases in cats can be eliminated without medical intervention over a period of one year with proper diet modifications and an understanding of the healing process as exhibited through healing episodes. Approaching disease from the perspective of health is the most powerful means of eliminating disease. Poor fuel makes for little momentum in life. The commercial food we are feeding' is the disease we are treating - so treat on and on, curing one disease after another, again and again."


Dr. Randy Wysong, DVM


”Nutrition is serious health business. The public is not well served by exclusively feeding products from companies without any real commitment to health... or knowledge of how to even achieve that”.

"Recent studies have shown processed foods to be a factor in increasing numbers of pets suffering from cancer, arthritis, obesity, dental disease and heart disease".

Dr. Charles E. Loops, DVM

"The best diet is a raw food diet."

"Science Diet & Hill's dog & cat food products are not good diets. They use chemical preservatives that have been shown to cause problems in some animals & they use by-products, which are words on the ingredient label that need to be avoided at all costs. This generally means food not utilized for human consumption."

Dr. Donald Strombeck, PhD, DVM

 "If salmonella really is a problem, ( when it comes to feeding raw meat to pets) then we should be just as concerned with processed pet food". "Salmonellae has been found in commercial pet foods, something the public never learns."

* Tom Lonsdale, an Australian vet and author of the ground-breaking book Raw Meaty Bones: Promote Health, regarded the ‘pandemic of periodontal disease in pets’ as a major cat and dog health issue, calling the canine condition ‘Foul-mouth AIDS”, because he saw the bacterial proliferation in dog’s mouths as suppressing their immune systems, leading to a host of health problems. For his advocacy, he was expelled from the Australian Veterinary Association, not unlike the co-author of this book, Dr. Michael Fox, who was all but fired from The Humane Society of the United States. (For details, see Dr. Fox’s books Dog Body, Dog Mind,  Cat Body, Cat Mind.)