Feeding Your Pet the Right Way

In the United States, most of us think that ''people food" should not be given to dogs or cats. For half a century, pet food manufacturers and veterinarians have convinced us that because commercial foods are designed in laboratories by people with academic credentials and because their labels contain long lists of nutrients and claims of being "scientifically balanced" and "nutritionally complete," they are superior to anything our animals might otherwise consume. Table scraps, raw food, human food, and supplements that might disrupt commercial food's precisely controlled distribution of vitamins and minerals are particularly frowned on.

		We're so used to these notions that most of us accept them without a second thought. But all along, some pet owners have taken a different approach, and in recent years their murmur of protest has become a rallying cry.

		What are these eccentric people feeding their pets? Just the things that the experts say will kill them: home-prepared human foods, fruits and vegetables, raw meat, unpasteurized milk, raw eggs, andworst of allraw bones. If their dogs and cats don't die from indigestion, botulism, Make that almost any veterinarian. Members of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association, an organization that reflects the surging interest in natural therapies, believe those animals are eating exactly what Mother Nature intended. While writing The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care, I interviewed holistic veterinarians and animal health care professionals nationwide. When I asked them about specific illnesses, they offered many different therapies, for each had a different approach to health and healing. But when I asked them why America's pets have so many problems, each blamed the same two factors. "Commercial pet foods," they all said, "and annual vaccinations. That's why our pets are so sick." The debate over pet foods is ongoing, from the source and quality of their ingredients to their use of chemical preservatives, colors, and flavoring agents. Only a few premium brands contain foods suitable for consumption by humans; almost all are made from such questionable raw materials that they have been the subject of lengthy exposés by veterinarians and investigative journalists. The meat and other ingredients used in pet foods, their large proportion of grains, the safety of widely used preservatives, and the end result's digestibility and nutritional balance are serious concerns, but according to a growing number of experts, none of these is the most important issue. For that, they say, we must consider an experiment conducted half a century ago at a human health clinic in California. The Pottenger Cat Study In 1932, Francis M. Pottenger Jr., M.D., was a mainstream physician, author of medical journal articles, and president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association. Dr. Pottenger noticed that the health of his clinic's Page 3 resident cats, which appeared to be well fed on a diet of raw milk, cod liver oil, and cooked meat scraps, had in fact declined. This observation inspired him to embark on a ten-year study conducted according to the most rigorous scientific standards of the day, during which 900 cats were studied and complete records were kept on 600. All of the cats were fed scraps of the meat served at the sanatorium, which included beef, lamb, and poultry muscle meats; bones; and organs such as liver, tripe, sweetbreads (the pancreas and/or thymus), brain, and heart. All of the meat was organically raised and of the highest quality. The cats were housed in large outdoor pens near a stand of eucalyptus trees on the side of a hill overlooking the San Gabriel Valley. Each pen had an open-air enclosure 12 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 7 feet high screened with chicken wire so the cats had adequate sun exposure. A trench 18 inches deep was dug inside the enclosure and filled with freshly washed sand. The cats were protected from inclement weather by a roofed area with a wooden floor and bedding material. A caretaker removed bones and uneaten food daily, and cleaned and refilled the water containers. Periodically, he removed the cats' buried excreta from the sand for composting in piles labeled according to the cats' diets. The cats were fed a diet of two-thirds meat, one-third milk, and small amounts of cod liver oil. One group received both raw meat and raw milk, and this was the only group to reproduce generation after generation of healthy kittens with broad faces, adequate nasal cavities, broad dental arches, strong and correctly shaped teeth and bones, excellent tissue tone, good quality fur with a minimum of shedding, and an absence of gum disease. These cats were resistant to infections, fleas, and internal parasites. They showed no sign of allergies and were gregarious, friendly, and predictable in their behavior patterns. Miscarriages were rare, and litters averaged five kittens, which the mothers nursed without difficulty. Some cats received raw meat and pasteurized milk, others received cooked meat and raw milk, and some received canned, condensed, or sweetened condensed milk with raw meat. None was fed everything cooked: they all had Page 4 either raw milk or raw meat with the other portion of their diet cooked or pasteurized. All of the cats in these groups suffered from nutritional deficiencies. The cats fed cooked meat developed skeletal and dental deformities; heart and vision problems; thyroid imbalances; infections of the kidney, liver, testes, ovaries, and bladder; arthritis and inflammation of the joints; and inflammation of the nervous system with paralysis and meningitis. Their second and third generations had abnormal respiratory tissues. Female cooked-meat cats were so irritable that some were named Tiger, Cobra, and Rattlesnake, while the males were docile and passive, a sexual role reversal not seen in the raw-food cats. Vermin and intestinal parasites abounded, skin lesions and allergies appeared frequently, and adult cats died of pneumonia or infections of the bone while kittens died of pneumonia and diarrhea. The cooked-meat cats had serious reproductive problems, including sterility, miscarriage, lack of maternal instinct, and difficult labors with high infant mortality rates. Many females died in labor. The cats fed raw meat with pasteurized milk showed similar changes, and those fed evaporated milk showed even more damage, while the most marked deficiencies occurred among those fed sweetened condensed milk. Because the health of each new generation was adversely affected by its parents' inferior diet, the cooked-food kittens had even more problems, and there were no fourth-generation kittens in the cooked-food groups because the third generation died before reproducing. Had antibiotic drugs been available, these kittens might not have died of pneumonia and other infectious diseases, in which case the experiment could have continued through longer chains of deformed offspring. One of Pottenger's most exciting discoveries was that the health deterioration caused by cooked foods could be reversed, although it took four generations to completely restore to perfect health those cats whose predecessors consumed cooked meat or pasteurized milk. As Pottenger demonstrated, our pets have problems because their Page 5 parents and grandparents ate cooked food, and these problems increase as a result of the cooked food they consume. By changing from cooked to raw foods, an animal's health may improve even though its skeleton and teeth will not be transformed. Although his cat experiment was the largest and most ambitious, Pottenger also studied the effects of cooked or heated food on other animals, including guinea pigs, chickens, and cattle. In every case, he found that the absence of raw food, or what he called fresh factors, made the difference between perfect health and serious illness. The Pottenger cat study is thoroughly documented in the book Pottenger's Cats, published by the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. According to editor Elaine Pottenger in the book's introduction, the experiment is often misrepresented. She explains, "One author of a popular book states that 200 cats died of arthritis. Indeed, this did not happen. Another author states that the cats were fed sprouts and survived in full health for four continuous generations. Again, no such experiment took place, and yet this misinformation has been reported in over a dozen or more different articles and books." Perhaps the most widespread misrepresentation of the study is that the cooked-food cats received both cooked meat and pasteurized milk, a distortion that has encouraged many to conclude that feeding at least some raw food improves an animal's health. Although this may be true, nothing in the experiment supports that conclusion, for Pottenger's unhealthy cats received raw meat with their pasteurized milk or raw milk with their cooked meat. Pottenger was not the only scientist to test the difference that cooking makes. When Sir Robert McCarrison fed monkeys in India their usual diet cooked instead of raw, the animals developed colitis. Their autopsies revealed gastric and intestinal ulcers. O. Stiner in Switzerland cooked the food his healthy guinea pigs had been eating raw; they developed anemia, scurvy, goiter, dental cavities, and malfunctions of the salivary glands. They developed arthritis as well after pasteurized milk was added to their daily fare.