Raw and Cooked Diets For Dogs

Many dogs that do poorly when eating a commercial diet, improve dramatically when being fed a home-prepared raw or cooked diet. The ‘magic’ doesn’t have anything to do with the food preparation so let’s explore the mystery.

A true allergy is an immune system response. The body incorrectly identifies an otherwise harmless food as the enemy and reacts in various ways, usually with some inflammation. This is why skin flare-ups are common. The immune system has a memory like no other. Once a food has been deemed an enemy, the immune system will always react to it. The form in which the food is offered makes absolutely no difference. You can cook it, feed it raw or extrude it into kibble but you can’t fool the immune system.

So why is it that the dog who chewed paws and scratched himself all day long, may suddenly stop this behavior when fed a home-prepared diet? Like his owner, a dog can have an allergy or an adverse response to just about anything you can think of. If you look at the ingredient list on any of the commercial diets, you’ll see far more than one protein source. The dog may have been reacting to anything on the list, including the form of a mineral. For instance, our Zoey never tolerated calcium citrate or carbonate but did well with calcium lactate. Something as simple as having calcium carbonate in a commercial formula would cause her colitis to flare up and she’d be rubbing her chin along the carpets until the skin folds infected.

Home-prepared diets, raw or cooked, are not magical. They allow us to take control over the ingredients being fed and more often than not, the dog’s reactions calm down. In this way, the ‘magic’ of a home-prepared diet may not be what’s in it, but rather, what isn’t.