Hello Pack!
We shared a video recently from Planet Paws about having harder conversations with your vets about diets. As Rodney Habib pointed out, when we as human’s go to the doctor we talk a lot about our diet. What we are eating, not eating, the vitamins we are taking, water amounts we are drinking. All of these things play into disease prevention and living a healthy lifestyle. Why are we not talking to our vets about the same things for our dogs? Why does our diet discussion with our vets include what bag of kibble (processed food) are we feeding our dog’s? After that, there’s really not much else that’s discussed about their diet. Potentially switching from one bag of processed food to another. I like to refer to this as the burger king, McDonalds, Chick Filet and Wendy’s swap.
One of the biggest comments we hear from vets who do not support raw feeding is “dogs will get sick from salmonella.” Well, we hope to provide you with a few key talking points to help you discuss this and do not be scared to do so.
First, let’s talk stomach acid in the dog. A dog’s stomach has a pH of 1 to 2 and salmonella needs anywhere from 3.8-9.5 to survive. During the process of digestion, the pH can even go lower than 1.0! That would make a very hospitable environment for most things. The other benefit of a highly acidic environment is a fast digestion too. When you are feeding your dog’s raw meat and bones they will be broken down in about an hour.
This brings us to the next point of how long of an incubation period that salmonella needs and it’s much longer than a dog’s gut allows. By the time the dog digests and eliminates it’s about 6-8 hours and salmonella needs around 8-72 hours.
Here are some articles that talk about salmonella and dog’s a bit more;
Now we don’t want this to be something where you go and start a negative discussion with your vet we want this to be positive, a conversation. Believe it or not most of our vets in this country don’t receive much education in raw diets. They are taught nutrition as the commercial diet. Just as we continue to learn more for how to care for our dogs better we should start the conversations and remember to be persistent.
Let’s all continue to work together as a community of raw feeders and share information with one another.
