Category: The Animal’s Key

Often people who have done any research about the health or healing of their animals are shocked to find out that their vet discourages them, or even outright tells them they are putting their dog’s life at risk by feeding a natural, species-appropriate raw diet.   The vet will often launch into a tirade about dangerous bacteria and will even at times go so far as to threaten the dog or cat owner that they are abusing their animal by offering real food.   

Sadly some people will fall victim to this abusive gaslighting and misinformation campaign and trusting that the vet has their pet’s best interest at heart.  They will bend to the demands of the vet and will put their dog or cat on the path to chronic disease by going back to what the vet considers safe foods that the vet just so happens to sell conveniently in their office.  

What most people don’t realize is that the AVMA, the American Veterinary Medical Association, which licenses all Vets allowing them to run their business has made an official statement that raw foods are not recommended. Specifically “AVMA discourages the feeding to cats and dogs of any animal-source protein that has not first been subjected to a process to eliminate pathogens because of the risk of illness to cats and dogs, as well as humans.” This means in order to keep their veterinary license a vet must comply with the AVMA in all its decisions or be at risk of losing their license. 

To some this might seem logical, the AVMA being the medical organization in charge of making policy decisions that are uniform. Many people believe that the AVMA has the best interests of our pets in their hearts, so why shouldn’t we follow their advice. Many often even mistakenly believe that these organizations are subject to strict and thorough scientific rigor.   

However, the AVMA sponsors that fund and influence all their policy decisions include: Hill’s, Zoetis, Elanco, Merck, Purina, The Farmer’s Dog and many other companies that sell cooked and heavily processed foods that would suffer from the loss of business should vets inform their clients about how to create health through proper feeding.  The vet, the pet food company, and the pharmaceutical company only profit when your animal is sick.  Raw food not only competes with their dog food sales but it also threatens their investments into pharmaceutical poisons and vet offices.

This means that decisions are made based on the bottom-line profitability of the industry and its industry partners, NOT the health of your pet.   Your vet only gets paid when your pet gets sick and stays sick.   The industry only stays in business if your pet gets sick and stays sick.  

Vets come out of vet school with tremendous debt, little to no nutritional education, and a desire to open a business, which requires additional capital.   The pet food and pharma companies know this and so they offer funding with the stipulation that the vet uses their products and sells their disease-causing foods.

The vet is visited regularly by the industry reps from their pharma sponsor or pet food sponsor.  Often these are one and the same. The consolidation of business means that many of the pet food brands we find both in the grocery store and the vet offices are owned by just a handful of multinational corporations, such as the Mars corporation which owns the Banfield Veterinary Hospitals, VCA Animal Hospitals, BluePearl Specialty and Emergency Pet Hospital.  Mars also owns common pet food brands like IAMS, Pedigree, Nutro, Royal Canin, Cesar, Temptations, Whiskas and many others.  

The AVMA has a huge conflict of interest and as with all corrupt organizations the AVMA bases its decisions on what furthers the agenda of those that fund the organization.    

Many raw food companies have brought this to the public’s attention and the courts, such as the Answers Pet Food company response found here – https://catcentric.org/resource-center/regulations-and-policies/avma-anti-raw-policy-response-pet-food-manufacturer-answers-pet-food/

To reinforce my points above I would like to share an excerpt from “Why some vets are still suspicious of raw feeding” by Jonathan Self, of Honey’s Real Dog food:

“….Which brings me to a fascinating question. How is it that so many vets are still suspicious of species-appropriate feeding? Not a day passes here at Honey’s HQ without us hearing from a dog lover looking for a practice which will support rather than criticise their decision to raw feed. The fact is dogs may have been eating raw food for millions of years, but a massive percentage of highly educated and compassionate vets simply won’t countenance it.

The reasons for this are various and complex.

To begin with, there is a perception amongst some veterinary professionals that there is not yet sufficient scientific evidence to support raw feeding. This perception is encouraged by the big pet food manufacturers, who have massive marketing budgets to support their anti-raw stance.

Happily, there is more and more research showing that a natural diet is both nutritionally adequate and safe. At Honey’s we contributed to this research in the form of a two-year study, which we called 𝑅𝑎𝑤 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑜𝑓 (please do ask for a free copy) and I can also recommend Conor Brady’s 500 page 𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐷𝑜𝑔𝑠: 𝐷𝑟𝑦 𝑜𝑟 𝑅𝑎𝑤? 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝐵𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑏𝑎𝑡𝑒, which contains over 1200 references.

Then there is the practical side of things. It takes a vet seven years to qualify, after which he or she will probably spend a year or two gaining experience in someone else’s practice before, possibly, starting up on their own. If and when they do set up on their own, they will have to invest heavily. Building a surgery is far from cheap and insurance is particularly expensive. They won’t ever become rich, either. Last year, the average GP earned around £120,000, whereas the average vet earned around £41,000. Bear in mind that their seven years of study must also be paid for. Indeed, student debt is a huge problem for the majority of vets. They are, by the way, also in one of the most stressful professions, with a high incidence of depression and suicide.

There are two highly profitable sectors that exploit this situation.

The first is the pharmaceutical industry. The behaviour of pharmaceutical manufacturers need not concern us here, except it is worth remembering that it is not in their commercial interest for dogs to be healthy.

The second is the pet food industry. Ever since pet food was invented by James Spratt in 1860, manufacturers have been persuading vets to endorse and sell their products. Today, pet food manufacturers provide vets with financial support in the following ways:

-​They pay commission to vets for selling food via their surgeries;

-​They pay vets to carry out research, attend conferences, write papers and so forth;

-​They support the larger professional bodies;

-​They subsidise the costs of education for vets undertaking training and professional development.

Understandably, vets want to support the people who support them (in this case the big pet food manufacturers). Moreover, until the growth of the raw food movement, they had no reason to doubt what they were being told, especially as the pet food industry employs thousands of so-called scientists.

Vets can be forgiven for their lack of knowledge about raw feeding for another reason: they are taught very little about canine digestion during their studies. Colleges rarely devote more than a day to the topic and the lectures are often sponsored by the big pet food manufacturers. You can guess how impartial such lectures are likely to be. To the best of my knowledge raw feeding isn’t on any veterinary college curriculum in the UK or, indeed, the world.

Another problem is that a tiny percentage of vets and scientists genuinely believe – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – that raw feeding is dangerous. These vets and scientists spread fake news and put their names to very dubious research. Because they use medical terminology and publish learned papers, some other colleagues believe what they say. The Raw Feeding Veterinary Society and other organisations work hard to correct these false claims. Nevertheless, some innocent vets are taken in.

As an aside, I could say a lot here about why so much medical research is not to be trusted but will save it for another day. One of the problems with the way in which the majority of not just vets but also doctors are trained is that they are taught not to question ‘scientific research’. What they are not taught is to be open-minded, use common sense, listen to their instincts, consider anecdotal evidence or – crucially – take a holistic view of medicine. A very good example of this in human medicine is the lack of training in nutrition.

The good news? Although some vets are not yet convinced of the benefits of raw feeding, the situation is changing. I doubt there is a veterinary practice in the country that doesn’t now care for several raw-fed dogs. As a result, vets are seeing the benefits for themselves. Moreover, new, genuine research comes out every year in support of species-appropriate diets, and this must help, too. Crucially, those who raw feed are part of a movement. A movement which, I believe, will come to dominate the whole pet food sector.”

As you can see, there is both an intentional push to keep the public misinformed and a push to keep the vets themselves uneducated and misinformed when it comes to dog and cat nutrition.   

Most vets would be completely unwilling to sacrifice their financial well-being to support a feeding method that will put them completely out of business.   They are far too heavily invested financially to make this type of sacrifice and more than willing to accept what the industry tells them to avoid having to face sacrificing their entire livelihood and walk away from a profitable career with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and no other way to pay it off.  

Additionally, many pet owners who choose to educate themselves on raw feeding also choose to avoid the toxic veterinary practices that are typically accepted as normal or desirable by the kibble-feeding public.   

When a dog or cat owner realizes that the food is poisonous and creating disease in their companion, this naturally opens their eyes to all of the other poisons our beloved dogs and cats might be coming into contact with.  

When we finally wake up to this reality it is not long after that we recognize that the vet is not a health industry, it is a disease for-profit business with practices that are contrary to healthy outcomes for our pets. 

Many raw feeders have seen firsthand their pets being slowly killed by the vet they trusted with their health. Often they experienced the trauma of seizures or rapid death from antibiotics, saline fluids, and anti-inflammatory meds, or they witnessed the slow and painful degeneration of steroids and heart medications or the organ-destroying properties of a wide variety of medications.  

This means that naturally those who raw feed are far less likely to ever walk in the door of your vet’s office.   First, because they are not creating disease which requires any sort of veterinary interventions, and second because they want to avoid any injections or ingestion of poisons into the body which are a requirement of participating in the disease industry.   

This means that most vets will rarely if ever see a raw-fed dog and they have no personal experience to draw from.   They only see the dogs whose owners believe in the disease-for-profit system and who participate in all the disease-for-profit methodologies from feeding the disease-causing foods to forcing the symptoms-suppressing poisons and toxic injections.  

Vets seem to believe they are stuck in a false dichotomy of either A:  Take our poisons and pay us, or B:  Don’t take our poisons and kill your dog.  They seem to have little or no awareness of choice C:  Correct the diet, remove the cause of disease and watch the animal return to pristine health on their species-appropriate diet.  

The vets often mean well but they are only able to go as far as their training takes them and since their training is to become a salesperson for the disease industry, everything they learn is only going to teach them that which supports maintaining the disease-for-profit business at its most profitable.