Public Interest: Feeding Our Pets — 8 August 2002
(Edited
transcript)
Speakers: Kojo Nnamdi —
commentator
Tom
Lonsdale — Veterinarian & Author of Raw Meaty Bones
Tony
Buffington — Professor of Small Animal Medicine, College of
Veterinary
Medicine at Ohio State University
Susan
Chrissy — Director of Nutrition Services, Brookfield Zoo, Chicago
KOJO
NNAMDI:
From
WAMU — American University in Washington, this is Public interest — I’m Kojo
Nnamdi.
Purina,
Kibble, Iams, Friskies — for your pet there are plenty of food choices, but
before you pick up a can consider another option — raw, meaty bones. That’s
what veterinarian Tom Lonsdale thinks we should be feeding our pets, and in his
new book, Raw Meaty Bones, Lonsdale aims to start a revolution in
animal nutrition.
Did
you know that the global pet food industry is estimated to be worth 26 billion
dollars? That was last year. Or that the majority of research on pet nutrition
is funded by the pet food companies? Well, Lonsdale says he’s blowing the whistle
on the pet food industry and trying to convince pet owners to take their cues
from nature and not from big business.
But not everyone agrees with Tom Lonsdale. Many veterinarians argue that processed pet food is just
fine. ‘Nutritionally balanced meals —
most people in the world don’t eat that well,’ they say. Anyway, they also argue that there are too
many risks in handling raw meat. We will let you make your own decision as we
present you with the arguments on this edition of Public Interest. Joining us in our Washington studio, Tom
Lonsdale, veterinarian and author of the book Raw Meaty Bones: Promote
Health. Tom Lonsdale, welcome.
TOM
LONSDALE:
Thank
you Kojo.
NNAMDI:
Joining
us from the studios of WOSU in Columbus, Ohio is Tony Buffington, Professor of
Small Animal Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State
University. Tony Buffington, a welcome to you.
TONY
BUFFINGTON:
Good
afternoon.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, what’s wrong with commercial pet food?
LONSDALE:
Almost
everything. I can’t think of any
mitigating features.
NNAMDI:
Almost
everything?
LONSDALE:
Everything,
yeah.
NNAMDI:
Such
as?
LONSDALE:
Well,
primarily, the devastation those products cause to animal health, and you
mentioned how it’s a 26 billion dollar industry, so it’s doing a lot of harm to
a lot of animals.
NNAMDI:
Made
11 billion, they sold 11 billion dollars in pet food last year. How about the premium foods?
LONSDALE:
Well,
maybe if anything, they’re worse, because you’re paying more to injure your pet
to the same extent.
NNAMDI:
In
what way are they injuring our pets?
LONSDALE:
Okay,
well, broadly speaking, three ways that they injure our pets. We’ve got to accept that these products are
far, far removed from the natural. The
natural food should be whole carcasses ideally for carnivores. I mean, that’s their function in the wild to
catch whole carcasses. Now domesticated
animals are very, very similar, certainly in regard to their internal needs, to
their wild counterparts. So okay, we
set up the ideal, whole carcasses. Then
look at these artificial products which are either sloppy and out of the can or
dry, biscuit — like in the packet. Now,
straight — away we can see that the physical form of the food is far removed
from that tough, raw, meaty bone make — up.
NNAMDI:
Is
the texture of the food, the physical form of it just as important as its
nutritional value?
LONSDALE:
About
equally important, equally important.
NNAMDI:
Why?
LONSDALE:
Because
the texture of the food, in the natural state, is designed to clean the working
parts as they’re used. It’s a case of: ‘if
you don’t use it, you lose it’. And
that’s the case with the teeth and gums of our animals. So they absolutely need to be cleaning the
working parts and spending a long time at that. So, the natural food is the toothpaste, the toothbrush, and the
dental floss all in one go, and they give their working parts a real good
workout for several, possibly hours in the case of wild animals.
NNAMDI:
You’re
saying that what we consider ‘dog breath’ and ‘cat breath’ is not really the
natural breath of those animals? but the result of the processed pet foods that
they eat?
LONSDALE:
Absolutely
— because those foods fail to clean the working parts. The bacteria build up, the bacteria produce
gases. That’s what those noxious smells
are. They’re poisonous gases.
NNAMDI:
But
I grew up in a culture where what we considered dog food was you go to the
butcher every day and you buy some . . . raw, meaty bones. You cook those raw, meaty bones up and you
use them along with some scraps from the table and that was what was considered
dog food, but as I recall, my favorite dog’s breath wasn’t very pleasant,
either.
LONSDALE:
Absolutely
right, because you cooked your bones and as a consequence they didn’t do the
cleaning as the raw item does . . . If you watch the lions in the Serengeti on
the TV, there you’ll see them ripping and tearing. And the crunching sound is
really quite something to behold. And
the same ought to apply for our domestic pets in our domestic situation. So, the bones, number one, need to be raw,
and they need to be of a suitable size for the carnivore in question. So, if you’re talking about a pack of
wolves, or you’ll be feeding a caribou or elk or such like, and therefore
similarly if you’re feeding German Shepherd dogs or Great Danes or the like,
large lumps of raw, meaty bones should be the staple diet.
NNAMDI:
You
weren’t always so critical of commercial pet food. What changed your mind?
LONSDALE:
Good
point, yeah. And indeed, it came as a
real shock myself to find that for 15 years, the first 15 years of my
practicing life I have been recommending poison to my pets.
NNAMDI:
1972
to 1987?
LONSDALE:
Something
of that order, yeah. And what changed
my mind, I guess, was that I started to notice how ill the animals under my
care were despite the fact that I prided myself on the quality of what I
believed to be good veterinary care I was providing. Simultaneously, we started to become aware of the epidemic of
periodontal disease. This is the
technical term for the mouth rot that these animals suffer. The foul breath that the dogs suffered and
the ‘death breath’ that the cats have.
NNAMDI:
It
came to your attention, you said, because dentists and the dental industry in
Australia where you practice were demanding that more and more teeth be pulled.
LONSDALE:
That’s
right. They sought to exploit the situation for profit. Most of these merchants
in fact came from the States and Europe in fact, and they came over to Australia
and tried to persuade us to cash in on this epidemic of disease. And together
with colleagues of mine, we started to look at the situation, and realized that
it was untenable. That it was a readily
made, readily available and cheap option for prevention, and that this should
be employed first and foremost. We
looked into it some more and discovered vast other problems associated with the
artificial diets, including the chemicals they contain, including the fact that
bacteria build up in the rest of the bowel as well.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale is a veterinarian and author of the book, Raw Meaty Bones. We are talking with him in our Washington
studio. From Ohio, we are talking with Tony Buffington, Professor of Small
Animal Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State
University. Tony Buffington, what does
your research show about the nutritional value of commercial dog food? Is it in
fact making our pets sick?
BUFFINGTON:
Well,
in my experience, Tom and I practice in very different areas. I practice in a large urban area in central
Ohio, and it’s been my experience and I think the experience of most of my
colleagues that dogs and cats are living longer than they ever have been. It’s very rare to see what we would
recognize as a nutritional disorder in dogs and cats unless you count obesity —
which probably should be counted — and
so, we may be seeing a different population of animals, but that hasn’t been my
experience.
NNAMDI:
When
you say we should count obesity, why should we count it if in fact the pet
foods that you and others are recommending are nutritionally healthy for them?
Why are they eating so much of it?
BUFFINGTON:
Oh,
I think the same reason that humans in the United States are eating so much of
it. The rates of obesity in the pet
population and the human population in the United States are roughly parallel
with each other, because we have an abundance of readily — available, highly
palatable, inexpensive food.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, is your take on why our animals are obese, our pets are obese, based
on eating pet foods different from Tony Buffington?
LONSDALE:
I
think it is, and I’d like to just question Tony’s experience. He’s resorting to experience to say that
these pets are living longer. I’ve
never yet seen any objective figures to say that they are. I think that’s just a bit of a marketing
spin that’s being put out by the pet food industry. I don’t know that they are living longer, but in any event
they’re not living healthier. They are
in a very run down state and needing to go to the vet every couple of weeks,
often, just to get the shots, get the steroids, get the antibiotics. All those things, get the flea treatments
that they need, just to keep them in some semblance of reasonable health. Whereas
my animals, albeit maybe I have been practicing in a different area, but no
matter. The animals’ needs are the
same. My animals don’t need to come
back and see me every couple of weeks to get their jabs, to get their flea
treatments. They’re healthy, their
immune systems can cope. They’re doing
fabulously well.
NNAMDI:
Are
your animals getting obese?
LONSDALE:
No,
no, they regulate their intake. It’s
quite remarkable. I mean, often times
my female, something of a dingo — cross,
she just doesn’t eat for a couple of days at a time. She’s trim, taut and terrific.
And that’s how these animals ought to be. Not the obese . . .
NNAMDI:
So,
what is it about pet food, in your view, that makes them obese? . . . that
causes them to be unable to regulate their intake?
LONSDALE:
Well,
in fact, we’re speculating here a bit, because to actually know what the
mechanisms are would take quite a considerable amount of research effort. But I speculate that they tend to overeat
because they’re craving things that are not in the can and the packet — the
things that they so vitally need, not least they’re craving the desire to clean
their teeth and gums — they want to chew at things.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, what is your take on the raw meat diet? Is that, in your view, also
a healthy choice?
BUFFINGTON:
I
think it can be if it’s done carefully.
I come from a rural environment myself, and when I was young, we fed our
animals much the way that you describe and different places in the world do
that. For many of my clients, they have
difficulty finding the time to cook for their own families, let alone their
pets. So, I think it would be difficult
for people to take the time to ensure, over the long term, that the animal had
a balanced diet. Although, adult
sedentary, non-gestating, non-lactating dogs that aren’t reproducing can get
along on a wide variety of diets for a long period of time before subtle
problems would show up. As an example, just in our human experience,
osteoporosis often doesn’t appear until the 7th or 8th
decade of life, after 30 or 40 years of inadequate mineral intake.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, just as a side bar question that occurred to me — when you were
talking about the fact that people prepared pet food in much the way I
described earlier when you grew up, but wouldn’t it be more difficult for
people who have limited time to do that? Is there a relationship between the
availability of processed pet food and what some people would call or
characterize as the proliferation of pets?
BUFFINGTON:
Yes,
I think there is. People, when they move from rural into urban environments,
often take their animals with them. They are a source of solace in a new
environment. They love their animals. They
like having them around them. It’s not so easy to feed in the ways that maybe
more accessible in rural environments.
Pet foods provide a convenient, and at least as far as we can tell,
nutritionally balanced and complete alternative.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, your take on the number of pets and the availability of processed pet
foods?
LONSDALE:
Oh,
I think so. I think there has been a
terrific marketing drive on the part of these huge multi-nationals to encourage
people to keep multiple pets, in fact.
Not only more pets, but larger pets, because they have a larger appetite
for their products. And people are sold the complete package. The idea that, indeed, some of them,
marketing says that a life is not complete unless it’s shared with a pet. With
the implied assumption, of course, that the pets can be fed . . . the processed
wares on the supermarket shelves, which the TV constantly reminds everyone is
wholesome and good and health-giving, or least ways that’s what the ads say —
but of course that’s a complete inversion of the reality.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, you, I understand, have actually helped people to prepare their own
pet food according to certain kinds of diets. Tell us under what circumstances.
BUFFINGTON:
Well,
some people just want to do it, and I’ll help them do that. In other cases, animals, these are sick
animals that are under our medical care, have organ disorders that make it
difficult for them to consume commercial types of diets and there may not be
veterinary foods that are most appropriate for those animals. And so under some of those circumstances
they can and do cook for their animals.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington is Professor of Small Animal Medicine in the College of Veterinary
Medicine at Ohio State University. He
joins us from Ohio. In our Washington studio — Tom Lonsdale is a veterinarian
and author of the book Raw Meaty Bones, subtitled ‘Promote
Health’. You can join our
conversation at 1-800-433-8850. You can also email us at pi@wamu.org as we continue our discussion on food
for household pets. We’ll be right
back.
Intermission
NNAMDI:
Welcome
back to our conversation on household pet food. A conversation you can participate in by calling 1-800-433-8850
or by emailing pi@wamu.org. Tom Lonsdale, what about if I gave my dog a
bone to chew along with a can of pet food? Is that enough?
LONSDALE:
Sadly,
no. In much the same way that if you
put the right fuel into your car one day a week and the other six days was
adulterated fuel. You wouldn’t really
expect that one day of the appropriate substance going into the tank would in
some ways compensate for all the wrong stuff?
So, that pretty much is the situation with our pets. Sadly, though, well, I shouldn’t say
sadly. It’s a reality of life that the
pets in part carry their own mechanics with them, so that’s why they appear
to be okay as they drag themselves along the street. Their immune system is working overtime — their liver, their
kidneys, their heart. Seeking to
compensate for the wrong fuel going through their system. So, unlike your motor car, which is a
mechanical object, you put the wrong fuel in it, it stops, cloud of smoke, pops
and bangs, and you need to call in at the local service station. With our animals, unfortunately for them,
they can continue to prop themselves up.
They can continue to effect to be well, because that’s in the nature of
the carnivore, to pretend to be well even when they’re not.
NNAMDI:
Well,
maybe you’ve answered my next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Your argument in the book is that the
majority of household pets are in fact very ill and you just pointed out that
we may not know that when we see them.
You blame that on the way they are being fed, but the veterinary
establishment doesn’t seem to see this epidemic, as you would characterize it,
of sick animals. How can that be?
LONSDALE:
Well,
that’s a real worry, because if the trained, so-called animal care
professionals can’t see the obvious right under their noses, then there may be
something either to do with their vision or the way they’ve been trained.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington: an epidemic of sick animals.
Is that what you’re seeing?
BUFFINGTON:
No,
it’s not. It’s not what’s being
reported in the veterinary literature.
It’s not what we’re seeing. To the contrary, what we see the majority of
the time is very healthy animals.
Periodontal disease has been looked at. It’s been reported in the
veterinary literature to occur in around 5% of animals brought to primary care
veterinarians. One of the reasons I brought up, at the start of the discussion,
that Dr. Lonsdale may see a different patient population, although I know he
doesn’t practice in the same city I do, and people’s view of animal health and
disease often come from where they practice and what their perspective is.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale?
LONSDALE:
I’m
sorry, that’s a very weak argument and not true. And I’m really concerned that Professor Buffington talks about 5%
of animals with periodontal disease seeking primary care. Maybe that’s the number presented to the
veterinarian as a result of the owner being concerned of that disease affecting
the mouths of the animals, but it’s well—known that the figure is well up above
70%, and during the next break I think we might be able to collect some Mars
Corporation propaganda on that subject where they talk about a figure of
80%. 80% of our animals have this
disease at a level that warrants major treatment. In fact, the main reason for anesthesia in pets these days is to
get their teeth fixed. So I’m really
most concerned that Professor Buffington would come onto this program and try
and down play the issue. That’s not
fair.
NNAMDI:
Professor
Buffington, Tony Buffington, your turn?
BUFFINGTON:
I
think it may be a question of definition.
There certainly is calculus, which is the hard coating on teeth, and
inflammation of the gums, that is seen in a fair percentage of animals. Periodontal disease is a more serious
disease and as Dr Lonsdale well knows, there are different grades of the
disease. So it could turn out to be
very complicated, but what I can say is that as far as we can tell, looking at
the human literature, the prevalence of periodontal disease in dogs and cats is
no greater than it is in humans.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, you talk about a particular disease known as Foul Mouth AIDS. What exactly is that?
LONSDALE:
Okay,
interestingly, toward the end of their lives, a lot of these animals drag
themselves along and in the past people tended to dismiss this as a function of
old age. Actually, often times it’s not. It’s to do with the fact that they’ve
had a lifetime of being poisoned by their inappropriate diet, and also, the
build up of the calculus and the plaque and the disease in the mouths. How can we say this with such certainty?
Well, interestingly, and in retrospect, after we took the teeth out of a number
of these animals and changed their diet, they came back to life again. Like a puppy or a kitten again, the
astounded owners would report. So, this was really quite exceptional. Now what was happening simultaneously was
that the animals’ immune systems were returning to health. How do we know this?
Well, we took these sick, bedraggled animals and we took some blood samples,
and we simply sent them off to the laboratory — a laboratory with no vested
interest, no particular bias in this regard, and they reported back that the
immune system was way, way down.
NNAMDI:
White
blood cell count?
LONSDALE:
White
blood cell count right through the floor — 70% below of what it should’ve been. So then, a few weeks later, after the
bright, bouncy pets were put back, were thriving on their more natural diet,
even toward the end of their lives, those immune systems were checked out
again, again in a quantitative way. We
took the blood, sent it to the lab and got back wonderful results. Wonderful correlation, numerical
correlation, with what we could see with our eyes. So, I would recommend to Professor Buffington and the rest of the
staff at his university, to start looking at this aspect of things, and he may
well be staggered by what he finds.
NNAMDI:
Well,
what have you done with what you have found? Usually in these cases an effort
is made to make sure that the practice of veterinary medicine world-wide is
aware of this development.
LONSDALE:
Absolutely
right. And so, initially we published
one small paper and that was well received by a small group in Australia. Then expanded it to a rather more scientific
treatise on the subject. In the first
instance, it was rejected by the Australian Veterinary Journal,
but subsequently we aimed a bit higher, and got the paper published in the Journal
of Small Animal Practice, which is an august journal in the UK. We then
sought to take this information to a wider public and put out press releases
and generally sought to communicate these issues, with which the veterinary
establishment descended on me like a ton of bricks. They sent round an eight-page
character assassination to all vets in Australia saying what a terrible person
Lonsdale was.
NNAMDI:
What
do you think about that finding, so to speak, Tony Buffington?
BUFFINGTON:
I’ve
seen the paper. I haven’t seen it reproduced by anyone anywhere else so I think
it’s an interesting finding. Dr.
Lonsdale clearly has a perspective on this and someone always wants to be
cautious about interpreting results from people that believe very strongly in a
particular point of view. But I thought it was an interesting result and I
think there were 8 or 10 animals in the original study that I’d like to see
duplicated somewhere else. I’d also
point out . . . further to his comment about taking the teeth of some old
animals out and seeing them do much better.
We’ve certainly seen that on a fairly regular basis and interestingly
they do better on commercial foods just as he describes it on raw meaty bones,
so it could be the dental lesions and not the diet that cause so much of the
problem. One of the issues that I’ve
observed in my career as a Clinical Nutritionist is that all animals were
eating before they got sick, so the diet is always a suspect, but it doesn’t
always turn out to be the culprit.
NNAMDI:
Okay,
let’s go to the telephones and start in Cleveland, Ohio with Yasmin. Yasmin, you’re on the air. Go ahead please.
YASMIN:
Hi,
how are you today?
NNAMDI:
Fine.
YASMIN:
Good. I have a question in reference to raw meat
and bones. I give my dog carrots and
green peppers and a variety of vegetables for her teeth, but I’m a little
concerned giving her raw meat, considering about bacteria.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale?
LONSDALE:
Okay,
well, it’s interesting that you resort to vegetables for your dog’s teeth. At least we’re trying to do something here
for the health of the teeth and gums and that’s important. But you do know, nature’s blueprint for
fixing the teeth and gums and keeping them fixed is for the animals to eat
whole carcasses. Now, the nearest that
we can get to that for the most part is raw meaty bones. Now, there’s bacteria on all raw meaty
bones, that’s for sure. The raw meaty
bones that you take into your house to cook for your own dinner and the same
applies to that meat and bone that we give to our pets. But do you know, they are evolved to deal
with that, and it’s very, very seldom that the bacteria on raw meaty bones
creates a problem for the pets. If
anything, those bacteria act as live prey for the animal and supply a whole lot
of vital nutrients. Don’t worry too
much.
NNAMDI:
It
seems to me, however, and Tony Buffington, you can join this discussion
whenever you choose, that while it may not pose a problem for the pets in your
home, it might at times pose a problem if you happen to have children in the
home.
BUFFINGTON:
I
think it’s hard to assess the risk because this is such an unusual procedure of
feeding raw meaty bones and the like, so it’s a little hard to say. I can tell you that the lead article on the
front page of the Columbus Dispatch was about a woman dying of e. coli
from some hamburger, so the possibility of contamination and health risk from
raw foods is real.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale?
LONSDALE:
Well,
number one, this is not an unusual way of feeding at all. This is the way pets have been fed for
countless centuries and increasingly there is a resurgence, a renaissance of
this way of doing things, especially in Australia, but world-wide
generally. And here in the U.S. there
is a major raw feeding movement. The
people are not reporting that they and their families are going down with all
sorts of weird and exotic diseases. And
as the Professor rightly pointed out, food poisoning can arise from many
sources and does.
NNAMDI:
Joining
us now is Susan Chrissy. Susan Chrissy
is the Director of Nutrition Services at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Welcome.
CHRISSY:
Thank
you.
NNAMDI:
What
do you feed the animals at the Brookfield Zoo? Raw meat or dry food?
CHRISSY:
Well,
it depends, of course, on which animals that you’re speaking about, but I’m
assuming that we’re talking about the carnivores, like the wolves and the big
cats, and it truly depends on what they’ve evolved to eat. For instance, with a maned wolf, that animal
has evolved to eat a pretty vegetarian diet, so in fact we feed it a fair bit
of vegetables besides meat products.
There are a number of bears that are omnivorous or at least somewhere in
between vegetarian and carnivorous. We
try to feed our animals a combination of a manufactured dry diet but a lot of
times we do feed a raw diet. In many
respects we wish we didn’t have to do that for some of the reasons that were
brought up earlier, but those animals are really keyed in to raw meat diets.
NNAMDI:
Well,
you say sometimes you wish you didn’t have to.
Are there any health problems associated with raw meat at your zoo?
CHRISSY:
Well,
the raw meat usually comes like the consistency of hamburger, and so therefore,
we get plaque build up and we get dental problems unless there is some way that
we can make sure that that plaque isn’t built up. Sometimes it’s tranquilizing the animal and actually doing a
teeth cleaning, which we don’t like to do at all, but if it has more of a
crunchy diet that would certainly help in that respect. The other thing also is, microbial build up.
We had, it’s just, it’s not as clean a product as the dry, manufactured product
would be. We had the instance of a Sand
Cat, which is a very small, exotic cat, get an infection actually in its ear,
and that infection was from the meat-based diet that was eaten and it had
gotten its paw in that and scratched its ear, and that’s what we ended up
finding.
NNAMDI:
This
is Public Interest. I am Kojo Nnamdi. Susan Chrissy, bottom line, do you or do you
not recommend a raw meat diet for household pets?
CHRISSY:
I
would not recommend it.
NNAMDI:
Why
not?
CHRISSY:
Because
while there certainly are ways to make it nutritionally complete, I would worry
more about the microbial aspect of it, about the handling of it with the
people, having the animals have a raw meaty bone diet in the house, that was
already brought up. They do very well
on commercial diets and it just seems as though that would be the way to go.
NNAMDI:
Susan
Chrissy, thank you for joining us.
CHRISSY:
Thank
you.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, they do very well on commercial diets?
LONSDALE:
Her
misperception staggers me, staggers me.
I’m very concerned that a respectable zoo would be considering feeding
hamburger to Sand Cats. What a terrible
state we’ve come to. I went through a
couple of zoos, well, since I’ve been in the U.K., and I was shown into the
freezer where the food for their carnivores was being kept: whole rabbits, quail,
ducks, day—old chickens, rats, mice, guinea pigs.
NNAMDI:
Since
Susan Chrissy is no longer with us, we are going to have to call her back . . .
CHRISSY:
I
actually am, and we don’t feed hamburger.
We feed a diet that has the consistency of hamburger. But we also do feed the whole prey like you
were saying, but we don’t just… it’s not hamburger that we feed.
LONSDALE:
Interestingly
this particular zoo is a world leader.
It’s always difficult to keep exotic animals in captivity, but the best
way to do that, of course, is to mimic the way they live in the wild as best
you can, especially with respect to diet.
NNAMDI:
How
do you feel about what she said about household pets being fed raw meaty bones
and the dangers they’re in?
LONSDALE:
Well,
there are no dangers that I can think of that warrant the scare stories. There’s no dangers that warrant doctors of
veterinary nutrition advising the community not to feed those products. Just the opposite. Kojo, let’s be frank about this.
Once I obtain that realization I’d done so much harm to my pets. I switched it around completely. The difference is staggering, it remains
staggering. I have a commitment, as do
my colleagues, to do the right thing by the animals under our care. We are not . . .
NNAMDI:
Are
there precautions that people who have children or who have, say, a lot of
carpeting around their home, or the kinds of places where bacteria can lodge
fairly easily, aren’t there precautions that you would advise such people to
take?
LONSDALE:
Yes,
practical considerations always occur, and, in respect to the carpets of
people’s living rooms, the best thing there is to simply feed the pet
outside. And you don’t need a bowl, by
the way, you just throw the item on the floor.
Frozen, in my case. I don’t thaw
my pets’s food. I keep it in the
freezer. It keeps perfectly well. There’s no bacteria contamination
problems. It’s the same freezer that I
keep my own food in. And come the
evening time when the flies have gone to bed, I take out chicken carcasses or a
half a rabbit or a kangaroo tail such as I might be feeding her, and out it
goes, and she ‘hoes’ into that.
NNAMDI:
Susan
Chrissy, what’s wrong with that?
CHRISSY:
Well,
some of those things that you just mentioned are not nutritionally complete. A kangaroo tail is not a nutritionally
complete diet for that animal. But I
think that it might be fine if you do exactly what you said. You know, you take, you have a wide variety
of things, you make sure it’s nutritionally complete, you throw it out frozen
and your animal eats it right away. But
I’m not sure in the general public that that would actually happen. And I know in zoos, if we were to throw out,
on a nice hot summer day, an animal carcass, a lot of times it does sit there
with the flies before the animal even gets close to eating it. Even in the evening, and so it is really
difficult to predict.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, your take?
BUFFINGTON:
I
think a number of our clients, if they threw a raw carcass out the door it
would hit the door of the apartment across the hall. It’s just not terribly practical.
NNAMDI:
In
the urban environment, not terribly practical, Tony Buffington says. We are going to continue our
discussion. Susan Chrissy, thank you
for joining us.
CHRISSY:
Thank
you.
NNAMDI:
Susan
Chrissy is the Director of Nutrition Services at the Brookfield Zoo in
Chicago. We take your emails at pi@wamu.org or telephone calls at 1-800-433-8850. Our guests: Tom Lonsdale is a veterinarian
and author of the book Raw Meaty Bones. Tony Buffington is Professor of Small Animal Medicine in the
College of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State University. He joins us from the studios of WOSU in
Columbus, Ohio. We are going to take a
short break and we’ll be right back.
Intermission
NNAMDI:
Welcome
back to our conversation on pet food, I think I have an obligation to go right
to the telephones, because a lot of callers are waiting and we've gotten a lot
of email, so Scott in Pleasantville, New York, your turn Scott, go ahead
please.
LONSDALE:
Hi
Scott.
SCOTT:
Hi
how are you? My name is Scott, I'm not going to say the name of my company, but
I do manufacture a commercial grade pet food, but we do advocate raw feeding,
and personally I've ten thousand customers feeding raw diet to their dogs, we
do not advertise, we do not promote, they find us out of their genuine concern,
or, should I say their inability to help their animals through normal
veterinary practices or have spent a lot of money on their animal. We teach
them how to detox their animal through natural raw diet, very little grain, and
the animals bounce back and then providing a kibble along with raw food, and
what we found out is that, I'm chuckling every so often listening to you
gentlemen because, what we're dealing with here is consumers' comfort levels
and where they want to be and where they want their pets to be and there are
some horrible stories of, owners of cats and dogs, that have passed away in
their homes, and days to weeks later they find the animal there already eating
their owners, so the question of carnivore or the natural being of the animals
that come back and eat meat and bones is very there much in your face. So I do
attend the holistic veterinarian conferences here in America. I have a family
member that's a vet, and three family members that are vets and I learned a lot
through the eating around the dinner table, with these veterinarians.
NNAMDI:
OK
Scott, allow me to get a response, Tony Buffington?
BUFFINGTON:
I'm
not sure what I'd respond to, I guess lots of people do things lots of
different ways.
NNAMDI:
Yes
indeed. Scott, thank you for your call. We got an email from Mark, who said,
could you guest comment on the ash content of pet food, my dog had a urinary
tract blockage that our vet blamed on food with too high an ash content. Where
does the ash come from in the food and how can I determine the ash
concentration when it is not listed as an ingredient? Tony?
BUFFINGTON:
The
ash content is the mineral content of the diet, so the calcium and phosphorus
and potassium and magnesium and all the rest. If the ash content of the diet,
decades ago, used to be thought to be related to urinary tract health in
animals, although I'm sort of embarrassed, I thought that had gone away. But
the answer to the specific question, you can find out the ash content of any
commercial pet food manufacturer by calling the number that's listed on the
container or going to their web site.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, we've got an email from Shelley in Cleveland who said, my dog enjoys
many raw fruits and vegetables including red and yellow peppers, grapes, water
melon and broccoli, what is the view of your experts on feeding fruits and
vegetables to dogs.
LONSDALE:
If
they like it, may as well, but don't let it be the basis of the diet. We
recommend, say, between 60 and 80% raw meaty bones and then the remaining
percentage can be what you like, and cats and dogs will eat all manner of
things, including soil and bird poo and their own droppings and the droppings
of other animals, they eat some herbage of grass, such like, sure, a whole
range of things are suitable as additions to a predominantly raw meaty bone or
carcass based diet.
NNAMDI:
Monica
in Syracuse, New York, Monica you're on the air, go ahead please.
MONICA:
Hi
there, this is a wonderful topic. I have a four year old Lab, who has been
suffering from allergies for about three years. I've tried everything from
medications, steroids, processed hypoallergenic foods that cost me about $80 a
month. His hair loss was so severe at one point that people thought that he had
the mange. I had decided I was going to switch to a raw diet about three months
ago just to see if I could get any relief. I now feed my pet raw beef, not
hamburger because I'm afraid of the risk of e. coli and I cook
brown rice. I supplement this with vitamins and minerals and I now feed my dog
for about $40 a month. After two weeks of starting this diet, I could not
believe the results. His fur grew back in, his coat was shiny, he had no more
flatulence which I'd have to say was unbearable before and the inflammation of
his skin has gone down dramatically. I would never go back to feeding a
processed food, no matter how expensive it was, no matter whether the vet wants
me . . .
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, how often do you hear that?
BUFFINGTON:
Actually,
I do hear that occasionally, and it seems to be completely unrelated to what
the new diet is. I've heard exactly the same thing from people switching from
one manufactured diet to another. I've seen people that were feeding
unbalanced, home prepared diets, switch to commercial diets. So I don't think
that there's any way to predict how those things are going to come out,
frankly. Allergies are a very complex immune disorder that nobody understands
very well, so what she says doesn't surprise me, but I don't take it of
anything, as evidence of anything but its occurrence.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, you on the other hand, seem to take it as evidence based on your
experience and study that diet is the root cause of this.
LONSDALE:
Root
cause — absolutely! And that obscurantist reply that we just heard was not in
the best interests of the pets and the pet owners out there, I'm afraid to say.
We really need to be much more straight forward and say, yes indeed, the reason
the skin is hanging off these animals like an old sack is because of their
diet, and we see this, not just in the odd case, such as Monica's, but across
the board, across the globe. And we really do now need to start addressing this
matter, and dealing with the people who are selling the stuff, that brings it
about. We should not be in the business of just deflecting the criticism, as
we're now hearing from some quarters.
NNAMDI:
Monica,
thank you for your call. Tony Buffington, Tom is very critical of a lot of the
research that's carried out on pet nutrition, and you have done a lot of
research that was funded by the pet food industry. Have you ever felt any
pressure to have your results come out in a certain way?
BUFFINGTON:
Oh,
yes. I have and I think that . . .
NNAMDI:
How
do you deal with it?
BUFFINGTON:
Well,
I resist it. But I think that's a huge issue in academia, now in all departments
of the university, because of funding problems with the states where money
comes from private institutions, money often comes with strings attached, as
you may know. Novartis gave University of California at Berkley 30 million
dollars and then wanted a seat on the research council. So that's a general
problem, I know that the Ohio State University has lawyers that are
specifically involved in managing relationships between researchers and
companies to try to minimise the possibility of that kind of pressure being
applied to investigators.
NNAMDI:
Well,
in that case I get back to Tom Lonsdale's previous issue and that is: he
implied that you weren't simply saying what you know to be true, about the
reason that the allergies on Monica's dog disappeared, because he feels that
veterinarians know it to be true, that it's the diet, and you're just not
saying so.
BUFFINGTON:
I
can only relate to you what my experience is, and it's not Tom's.
NNAMDI:
Tom?
LONSDALE:
Well,
maybe Professor Buffington can look again, because he's missing so much, and
alas, sadly, he and his peers are responsible for the training a whole lot of
next generation veterinarians as well. So presumably, they're training them
with this blinkered, myopic view of things.
NNAMDI:
On
to Susan in Syracuse New York, speaking of training, Susan you're on the air,
go ahead please.
SUSAN:
Yes,
hi, thank you for taking my call. I was turned onto a raw meat bone diet by a
very reputable breeder of Newfoundlands and it's amazing the results that
they're getting, you're not just talking one animal, we're talking a massive
breeding population, where they're not having skin problems or hair problems.
My comment really was the fact that, people aren't realising that most
vets are actually subsidised by the manufacturers of these processed foods, and
then they really promote their basis for promoting these particular products
rather than raw meat. They don't get any funding for that, like there's no kick
backs involved. I had a question for Dr Lonsdale. What would you suggest for
people that don't have the time to actually prepare a raw meat diet?
LONSDALE:
Well,
I think, it doesn't take much time to throw out the raw meaty bones and then
the table scraps component, well that's what you're scraping off your plate at
the end of the day anyway. So once we gain recovery of the raw food industry
that, alas, has gone into abeyance over the last 150 years. Once they come back
to the fore, then there'll be plenty of outlets where you can get the
appropriate food for your carnivore and then giving it it's food takes no
effort at all, because you give it, for the most part, frozen or straight from
the refrigerator. Doesn't need to take preparation, on the contrary, there
should be no preparation, the animals have their own processing system. Once
again, it's a case of use it or lose it, so give them lumps of raw meaty bones,
in large pieces.
NNAMDI:
Tony
Buffington, can you respond to Susan's charge that, the reason that
veterinarians who receive funding for research by the pet food industry, don't
advocate raw meaty bones is because there's no money in it.
BUFFINGTON:
I
can't respond to that, I don't know exactly . . . that wasn't exactly what I
heard, what I thought she said was that, primary care of practice veterinarians
don't recommend that. What we teach our students is to look at the health of
the animal, just exactly as Tom says, and if the diet . . . if the animal is in
good physiological health, which can be determined in a variety of ways, then
the diet is probably adequate. Now it can take enormous efforts to find small
deficiencies in . . . more humans in
the United States, likely have them based on USDA information, than animals do,
because of the quality of the human diet in the US, which is arguably among the
better ones in the world. So those kinds of things can happen, but we teach our
students to look at the animal and if the animal looks good and doesn't have
the problems that one of the callers suggested about flatulence or
inappropriate faeces and those kinds of things, foul mouth that Tom talks
about, that needs to be looked into. If none of those things are present then
the diet's probably satisfactory.
NNAMDI:
This
is Public Interest, I am Kojo Nnamdi. Susan still there? Did I miscalculate
what you said earlier Susan?
SUSAN:
No,
I just want to comment about that, then how do they explain the fact that there’s
more and more vets are seeing skin problems and unexplained illnesses, ear
problems and all sorts of things that they're not addressing?
NNAMDI:
Tony?
BUFFINGTON:
I
don't believe that to be the case, although you may have information that I
don't.
NNAMDI:
OK,
thank you very much for your call Susan. We got an email from David who says: ‘I'm
a cat owner, I know about some of the problems with supermarket brands such as
high magnesium content, but my vet, who recommends Science Diet, though he
doesn't sell it, says that studies show that animals live longer when fed the
premium brands.’ Tom Lonsdale?
LONSDALE:
Well,
I've yet to see those studies and to know that they're valid, but interestingly
of course, most of these studies compare one artificial concoction with
another. Never do they set up a study where animals are fed on nature's menu of
raw carcasses or raw meaty bones and then compare their artificial concoctions
with that. If they were to do so then they'd see staggering results.
NNAMDI:
Tom
Lonsdale, you gave me a copy of a UK based publication called Veterinary
Times and on the back of it there's an ad for some kind of dentist sticks,
but at the top of the ad it says, ‘80% of dogs over the age of three have gum
disease’. The point of giving me that was to refute what Tony Buffington said
earlier?
LONSDALE:
Yes,
he wheeled out the figure of 5% — I mean that's woeful. And that figure that
you've just quoted there Kojo, is from the Mars Corporation, makers of the Pedigree
line.
NNAMDI:
So
wouldn't it be in their interest to claim that there's this much gum disease,
so that people will buy their product? How do we know they're telling the
truth?
LONSDALE:
Oh
because that's consistent with so many other papers and articles, that says
that indeed a high proportion of animals have this shocking disease. It's
interesting, they tell the story against themselves, because the reason that
the animals have that, is because they've been feeding on their canned and
dried products. They're now coming up with a further artificial quasi-cure,
in the form of a bone-shaped biscuit, to allegedly clean the teeth, but of
course it doesn't work. Interesting that they use the bone shape and they
recommend feeding in order to clean the teeth. Precisely my point, the animals
need to feed on the right food to keep their working parts in good order
and the rest of . . .
NNAMDI:
Well,
why do you have credibility about the 80% figure and no credibility about the
treatment they recommend?
LONSDALE:
Well
because, I think commonsense would tell you Kojo, that if you try to clean your
teeth with a biscuit, well you'd be in a pretty sorry state after six months.
NNAMDI:
That
80% figure seem high to you Tony Buffington?
BUFFINGTON:
It
depends on what we mean by dental disease. If we mean, if there's a little bit
of calculus or gingivitis, that's about what the figures are in most children
and adolescents. Is it possible? Certainly! But if we're talking about
periodontal disease, or damage between the ligaments that hold the teeth into
the bone, then the statistics that I reported were just those that were
published by the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
NNAMDI:
And
we've got an email from Susan, Tom Lonsdale, who says, ‘We've avoided giving
our pets any bones since we lost a beloved Golden Retriever in the 1970's. The
vet told us that the sliver of the bone had pierced the dog's intestine and
caused a fatal infection. By the time the injury was noticed it was too late.’ Is
this not a danger?
LONSDALE:
Could
be. I don't know about the bone that Susan fed in the 1970's. It could well
have been a cooked bone, often times, they're the culprits implicated in these
unfortunate disasters.
NNAMDI:
Indeed,
accidents do happen. Tom Lonsdale is a veterinarian and author of the
book, Raw Meaty Bones. Thank you for joining us, and Tony Buffington is
professor of Small Animal Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at
Ohio State University. Professor Buffington, thank you too for joining us.
NNAMDI:
Public
Interest is produced by John Haas, Terry Cross-Davis, Sam Gallant. Diane Vogel
is the managing producer. Today we had special help on this edition of Public
Interest from Fay Reefe-Pasarou. Our engineer is Jonathan Chary-Durien on the
phones. This has been Public Interest. I’m Kojo Nnamdi.