I just wanted to let everyone know that I have a guest post out today on the Science-Based Medicine blog, Raw Meat and Bones Diet for Dogs: It’s Enough to make you BARF. I have followed SBM for a long time, and I consider it the premier site for reliable, scientific analysis of alternative medical approaches, so I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to bring science-based veterinary medical information to a wider audience, and to illustrate the relationship between unscientific approaches in both human and veterinary medicine. Hopefully, if the response is positive I’ll be contributing additional articles in the future.
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An excellent article on SBM from an area that I suspect skeptics tend to have limited exposure to.
I attended an event by Canine Health Concern in the UK recently – advocating the dangers of vaccines and promoting homeopathic nosodes – the resources on your site would have allowed me to prepare a little better that I did!
I thought it was you! Great stuff – many thanks!
Great post!
A fair amount of this stuff seems to have originated with Francis Pottenger and his notorious cat experiments of the 1940s. I was put onto the subject by a family member who happens to be a bit wacked on the topic. I was curious enough to get a copy of Pottenger’s Cats, a digest of his papers. I was later able to track down a copy of Pottenger’s original cat paper, in which he explains that cats fed cooked food develop heritable deformities caused by damage to their “germ plasm.” Granted, this was a few years before Watson and Crick, so Pottenger had an excuse; not so his modern disciples.
JRE,
Yes, Pottenger’s study comes up often in discussions of raw diets. Though not bad for his era, his work with the cats is pretty sloppy by modern standards, and there is not enough information in his published writings to determine crucial things like whether there were differences other than cooking between the food the two groups received, whether the groups of cats themselves were different in terms of condition, health, age, sex, and all sorts of other relevant variables. And even from the information that is out there, it is clear that neither group received an adequate diet, especially in terms of taurine, not discovered to be an essential amino acid for cats until after Pottenger’s time. So his work cannot legitimately be regarded as scientific evidence in favor of raw diets, though it is often cited as such.
Well, I think the response was positive, skeptvet, and would love to see more of yours and David Ramey’s vet articles on SBM. Likewise, I’d love to see more of the SBM regulars contribute to the comments, as it seems many of them have pets and an equal number of questions!