The Schnauzer Forum

A common reason given by people, including vets, who oppose feeding dogs a BARF or raw meat/veg diet is that it poses a high risk of causing or spreading bacterial infections. There have been very few actual studies carried out to confirm this fear and, on the other hand, it is rare to find owners who do raw feed their dogs who are anything but enthusiastic about doing so. Recently an extensive worldwide online survey of (16,475) raw feeding households (from 81 countries) was carried out by a team at the University of Helsinki and this has been published in the Vet Record:

https://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/conten ... /vr.105122

Although the report is a bit heavy going in places, it is worth reading in full for anyone interested in the findings. They also noted that the only known reports of transmission of salmonellosis from pet food to humans was via handling dry dog food:

"To the authors’ knowledge, there are no reported outbreaks of human salmonellosis from commercial raw pet foods, but association with commercial dry pet foods and treats have been reported previously.......A study by Lambertini and others...showed that Salmonella can survive 19 months in dry dog food"

The results as summarised in Science Daily reveal that the incidence of bacterial infection transmission is extremely low / rare and that it is also of course worth bearing in mind that proving any infection to be undeniably from the raw dog food and not other scavenged items, infected human food etc. can be tricky.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 104102.htm

Quoted from the latter publication:

"In total, 99.6% of households feeding their pets raw food did not report any pathogens being transmitted from the raw food to humans. The time the responding households had been feeding raw food to their pets ranged from several weeks to 65 years, with 5.5 years as the mean value. The reported cases of illness covered whole time frame that raw food was consumed in the household."

Thanks for the interesting article. I have to say that switching to raw was the best thing I ever did, especially for the dogs. Never had any cross contamination or bacterial infections and I have been feeding exclusively raw for nearly 8 years now.

If anything, we are probably more conscience of what we are doing hygiene wise when working with the raw food than we were with dry food. Treat the raw food the same way we would any raw meat in our kitchen.