About five years ago, I wrote an article for our newsletter that addressed this very question. In that article, titled “What’s The Deal With Raw Meat?”, I talked about how folks have been feeding raw meat to pets for decades, and that most of our customers feed raw dog food — some for as long as thirteen years. Five years have passed since that article was written and we remain strong advocates of raw pet food. In fact, we have yet to hear of a single negative digestive reaction to fresh, raw meat.

We recently had the privilege of sitting down to talk about dental hygiene for dogs with one of Minneapolis’ top certified dog trainers and dog behavior specialists, Maureen Haggerty, otherwise known as “The Canine Coach”. Q. What do you recommend people do when it comes to doggie dental hygiene?

Years and years of marketing have perpetuated the greatest pet nutrition myth of all – the belief that it’s totally appropriate for a dog or cat to eat nothing but cooked, processed, preserved pellets day after day. But in reality, the first pet food was only created to profit from by-products and ingredients deemed not fit for human consumption. The resulting pellets are great for convenience sake, in that they require very little effort to feed.

The following article, reprinted from the September/October 1999 issue of Pet Food Industry Magazine is a response to a letter from Dr. Sharon Machlik that deemed the feeding of raw foods risky in the May/June issue of the same magazine.