Dr Ian Billinghurst (pioneer of BARF) speaks on raw feeding and pet health

David D'Angelo 163 0

Dr Ian Billinghurst is a renowned Australian veterinarian and advocate for raw feeding.

Many pet owners worldwide have heard of BARF – Biologically Appropriate Raw Feeding – and we can thank Dr Ian Billinghurst for that. Ian pioneered BARF, and at the turn of the century it quickly became a hot topic amongst pet owner communities (very much so in America).

In this podcast I cover some of my key questions, not only on raw feeding and BARF, but on how many of us feed our pets and view pet feeding in general.

Listen to the podcast with Dr Ian Billinghurst

More podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• YouTube
• Spotify

Further information

• Make sure you read Dr Ian Billinghurst’s excellent book Give Your Dog A Bone.
• If you want to truly learn about raw feeding and the health of your pet, I highly recommend joining the Billinghurst Institute. To learn the most you will need to pay for the advanced courses, but in return your pet will be all the more healthy for it.

Transcript

Introduction

Hello. I am David D’Angelo, author of PetFoodReviews.com.au.

In the podcast today, I speak with doctor Ian Billinghurst, the esteemed Australian veterinarian who pioneered the BARF diet, biologically appropriate raw foods, and wrote the book Give Your Dog A Bone.

Ian has many, many years experience in feeding pet carnivores, cats, and dogs. Feeding our pets a healthy diet is easier than we think, and we can learn a great deal from what he has to say.

Has raw feeding become overcomplicated?

As a kid growing up in Australia, we thought very little about the meats and offcuts we feed our pets. That was before kibble became the norm. These days, raw feeding has taken a different turn involving complex calculations, spreadsheets, and weighing every morsel.

My first question to Ian was his opinion on this.

Raw food.

Has this become insane? Well, in many ways, yes. It’s become overcomplicated. Feeding raw is feeding a very complex material. Once you cook it, of course, which is the opposite of raw, it has become destroyed and no longer has that original complex complexity your animal requires.

So, yes, raw feeding has become complicated in itself though in the way people offer it. Now, by feeding raw food itself, which is a complicated piece of material, that’s very simple. But if you try to follow nutritionism, where you are trying to feed every nutrient you think an animal requires, then that becomes insane because you cannot do that. We don’t know what nutrients they require in total. We don’t know how they work with the body’s mechanisms, But we don’t have to know it.

This is the joy. You don’t have to drive yourself mad saying, have I fed every nutrient? You just have to feed the right foods. The nutrients follow. Now, let’s turn it around.

Insane? Let’s say Sanity is in, and the sane person says, I don’t have to know about all those details of nutrition, I just have to feed the right foods, and they will contain the nutrients. So, yes, let’s turn raw food has become insane around to raw food now follows sanity, and we just feed the food, and the nutrients automatically happen in the way they’re supposed to. We don’t have to know about all that complexity. We don’t have to know about that insanity.

Discussing different types and styles of dog food

My next question to Ian was about the many ways we can feed our dogs today. Raw food, dry food, wet food, BARF, air dried, freeze dried, and more.

A lot of people talk to me or ask me about feeding their dog, funnily enough, because that’s, the business I happen to be in. And they asked me what my recommendations are. And I have to say always, done properly, the gold standard is DIY.

Do it yourself because you are in charge, and you can make the choice of what foods that you feed your dog or your cat, if it’s whatever the case may be. So the DIY is the absolutely gold standard when it’s done properly. And the important point is when it’s done properly. It’s based on an understanding of evolutionary food choices, and that’s what we’re after, evolutionary food choices. Now I I guess second to that would be a pre prepared commercially produced, raw food.

Usually, in patty format. That’s the simplest way. Now here you lose some control because you don’t make the choice. Your choice is to choose that brand, and choosing that brand’s important too. Because if you have an understanding of evolutionary nutrition, you can look at the way that brand is produced, the ingredients they use, their philosophy, whether it’s based on evolution or whether it’s based on things like AAFCO, which are actually spurious, and I talk about that in other places, particularly during the in the DIY course.

But the point is that you don’t have as much control if you’re buying commercially produced raw food. Now, there are other forms as well. There’s air dried and freeze dried.

Now, freeze drying is a process, it’s a process called sublimation, and it uses very high vacuums. It’s said that 97% of the nutrients are retained. I’m not sure who makes that call and on what basis. And there is no doubt that freeze drying is something that is not an evolution based form of preservation. Air dried, I guess, is. But, having thought about air dried, what do we lose in that formulation or in that way of producing pet food? Well, usually, it’s actually at a fairly high temperature, and that temperature does destroy some nutrients.

So if if you’re asking me what is the best way, it’s the DIY way, do it yourself, as long as you understand the basic principles of producing evolutionary type foods at home. If you understand that, you’re on your way to producing the best possible diet for your dog. And, of course, we, talk about that in my DIY course. This is the ultimate pet food course, in fact, for people who want to know exactly the right way to feed raw and do it at home. So that’s that’s my answer to that question.

How should we achieve variety when feeding our dogs, whether a commercial food diet or raw diet?

What is the best way to go about feeding our dogs?

One of my biggest gripes with pet feeding is how most pets have fed the same kibble for every meal each and every day. We’ve been led to believe this is the best option for the health of our pets, but when we consider our own diets, we know that not to be true.

Variety is important. It helps us balance our own diet.

I asked Ian how we can achieve variety in a raw diet.

One of the enormous benefits of doing this yourself is that you are able to fulfill one of the basic tenets of raw feeding under the evolutionary paradigm, and that is providing wide variety and wide flexibility in what you feed. So you you have great flexibility in what you can choose, and your ability to choose becomes quite broad. Now this is what this is in comparison to feeding a pre prepared commercial product. Because when you feed a pre prepared commercial product, you are absolutely tied to what they put are prepared to put in the food.

Now sometimes they use bones, and sometimes those bones are in a format that you you would be happy with, just ground up bones. Sometimes they don’t. They just add a calcium supplement because they think that replaces bones, which, of course, it doesn’t. So there’s all sorts of problems begin to emerge when you trust somebody else to produce the food for you. But what you can do, of course, is feed different products from different commercial producers.

But that becomes pretty complicated, doesn’t it, to go about looking at all their products and choosing which ones you’re gonna feed this week and and so on and so forth. Another way to go at it would be to choose the best product you can find and then supplement it with foods that you, buy yourself. So you partially do DIY and partially, a product such as a raw BARF patty made by some commercial company. And in those circumstances, what a lot of people will do is, say, feed raw meaty bones at one meal. If they’re feeding two meals a day, for example, they’ll feed the raw meaty bones such as chicken wings, necks, and so on.

They might feed some large bones throughout the day so the dog has the eating exercise and ability to take the cartilage off the end of big bones and clean cleaning teeth, of course, and that the other meal would be a patty, so produced by the pet food company. But again, the all of this even even the choosing of pet food companies that you’re going to use is very much dependent upon your understanding of the raw paradigm. So once again, this is something I’ve been at great pains to, teach people over the years, and a lot of that’s also in the DIY course that we produce. So let me emphasize once again that if you want really great flexibility in feeding your dog based on, what’s in season and what’s locally available, and you want that variety, which is such an important part of the raw paradigm, making sure that every nutrient your dog requires is going to be available, then go the DIY course. If you’re able, you have the time and the inclination to do that, it is the gold standard.

How to feed raw on a budget

I often recommend pet foods which seem expensive, especially when you compare those pet foods to kibbles made mostly of grain or other carbohydrates, which I see as inappropriate for the health of our pets. Many pet owners struggle with the ever increasing cost of commercial pet foods, and that leads me to my next question. How can we feed raw money budgets? Of course, for many people, feeding their pet is a major issue in terms of costs. So how do you go about this when you’re on a budget?

Well, most certainly, buying dry food or canned food is expensive, and it’s expensive in terms of the end result. So we we put that one aside completely for the moment. But what about you’re on a you you wanna feed raw, but you do have a budget. How do you go about it? Well, you have to source in the very first instance.

This is most important. A source of raw meaty bones at the right price. Because they will form the bulk of the diet that you feed either a dog or a cat, particularly a dog. And feeding a dog on a budget, you can I’m gonna use the term get away with, and I and I use that term advisedly because getting away with feeding mostly raw meaty bones is actually highly close to the evolutionary situation for your dog. Dogs are scavengers.

And they’re scavengers. And this is what I discovered very early in my veterinary career and my career as a raw feeder. But and this is why I wrote my my first book was called, Give Your Dog a Bone, because you can feed the bulk of the diet as chicken wings and necks, and you’re providing the vast majority of nutrients your dog requires. Now if you can then throw in some organ meats, some crushed up raw vegetables, and simple things, like yogurt or other some other fermented food and just a few added things like, kelp powder, or or in some cases, if you can get hold of it, I think it’s called in America, alfalfa meal, or in Australia, I’m not sure you can even get it. But but the kelp powder is probably the best as a source of micronutrients.

If you can feed that and you can find sources of that, you have got yourself a complete and balanced diet. And then you just use variety. So you find different forms of raw meaty bones from young animals. So it it might be, the breast parts of lambs. It it might if you’re in Australia, particularly it could be root tails, if you can get hold of them.

Everything that is a raw meaty bone that is from soft that is soft and from young animals, but apart from chickens, anything you can find, that is if that’s the basis of the diet, you cannot go wrong. So that’s the way to approach feeding on a budget. Just and again, it’s a matter of understanding just how simple it is when once you understand the principles and the basics of feeding raw, that you can go about it in a much cheaper way than, say, buying commercial pet food because a commercial raw is always going to be much dearer than what you produce at home. And if it is advertised as very cheap, I’d be very careful of it because I’d be worried that if it was a cheap raw pet food commercially made, I’d I’d look very carefully at the ingredients. But, again, DIY is still the best way to go if you’re on a budget.

Are prescription diets the best solution, or is raw the best prescription diet?

People are often surprised to the reasons why I’m against most veterinary endorsed prescription diets. I tend to find these less than ideal. The ingredients are often inappropriate, high carbohydrates, and the products as a whole don’t tend to be an ideal solution. So can raw be a better option? The people have asked me, what about prescription diets?

Can you feed them using raw? And of course, you can. Well, let me give you a huge secret here. Most animals that are fed prescription diets from their vet, because their animal has some specific disease process, I found very early in my career that the vast majority of those problems are much improved, and sometimes completely improved, simply by switching to raw. So raw becomes the prescription diet.

Now beyond that, when we have very serious conditions, such as a particular form, say, of oxalate stone in the bladder or or or cystine or whatever, then you sometimes have to modify that diet. And you modify it in various ways. But the commonest way of modifying most most of the raw diets that I’ve ever used over the years was to simply add more crushed vegetables to it. That has an enormous benefit to to kidney failure, to to cancer, to arthritis, to liver failure, a whole host of problems that arise because of processed pet foods, and that’s where that comes from. You see, what you’re doing with prescription diets, you’re simply prescribing a food that is going to overcome the problems which essentially were caused by the wrong food in the first place.

So by switching over to real food, most of the problems are solved. And it’s only occasionally that you have to make very specific changes. And most of those changes, as an animal gets into older age, when you’re feeding processed pet foods, which are full of carbs, which promotes inflammation, which lack so many essential protective nutrients found only in raw whole foods. Simply by switching them to real food, you are prescribing a diet that’s going to overcome the problem. Now the we do in the course, but not for pet parents so much, although I do talk to it to some degree, talk about this, for the basic course of people who are doing and I’m I’m sorry I’m persisting in in the course, but it really is what my focus for my professional life has been.

It’s in my books, of course. Just my my first, my very first piece of, advice, if you want a prescription diet and you are currently feeding processed pet food, and this is let me assure you, this has been the basic cause of the degenerative disease, whether it’s kidney failure, inflammatory bowel disease. That’s another one. Whatever it is, cardiovascular disease, simply by switching to real whole raw food based on evolutionary principles, you’re gonna see an amazing difference. And that’s my that’s my best, information on prescription diets for the average pet parent out there.

And I include myself in that because I’m a very average pet parent, and I’ve watched my own pets. This was many years ago when we did switch our animals to process pet foods just to see what would happen. We thought it might well, it won’t explain why at this point. I do it the I do it other in other points, but when we put them back on real food, their health just was went was astronomic, the difference. It was amazing.

So that’s my take on prescription diets, folks.

Is it safe to feed raw?

Many people are afraid to feed raw over concerns of safety. Some vets advise against feeding raw for this very reason. Are there real concerns, and can raw be fed safely?

The short course on food safety with raw.

People worry about three things, bones, bugs, and balance. Okay. If you’re worried about bones, grind them. If you’re worried about bugs, don’t. Because if you follow all the food safety rules that normally apply to handling raw food for humans, then you will have no problem with bugs for your pet.

Balance. If you have follow the evolutionary principles of feeding food in evolutionary balance, then you will not have a problem with nutritional balance because you’ll feed the nutrients we know about, the ones we don’t know about, and the ones we don’t as yet know to be essential. So if you wanna know more about that, this whole because this whole area of food safety is enormous, then I suggest you do the course if this is your concern. Because I cover all this in enormous detail. And, just be assured, the way that when you feed raw, you have another extra layer of safety.

And this is the layer that you’ve been looking for. It’s the safety from degenerative disease. Because you are now safe from the terrible foods that produce the degenerative disease, which is probably one of the reasons, one of the greatest reasons that many people switch to raw because their dog or their cat has developed a degenerative disease. So, no bugs to worry about. Well, there’s no there’s no worry about bugs.

There’s no worry about bones. There’s no worry about balance. And you are now producing a diet that’s going to defeat degenerative disease. How good is that?

Raw feeding groups make raw feeding sound very complex. But should it be?

I’m sure if you’ve joined a social media group on raw feeding, many will be adamant you must conform to strict ratios, you must weigh ingredients, and tick boxes on highly complicated spreadsheets.

My final question to Ian was his opinion of these complexities.

We have we have on the Internet literally hundreds, maybe thousands of people who coach other people about feeding raw. Now that is great. I could not have wished for anything more when I wrote Give Your Dog a Bone all those years ago because such people did not exist. Now they do.

However, what these people do not understand, and this is the sad part, is the very basis of raw feeding. They think raw feeding has to be based on AFCO, FEDIAF, NRC, National Research Council. AFCO is the American Association of Feed Control Officials. FEDI AF is I have no idea what it actually stands for, but it’s a similar body across Europe. And NRC, National Research Council, which has looked at, all the nutrients currently known to be required for dogs.

Between them and AFCO, let’s just stick with those two for the moment. Fair enough, of course. There is a very limited range of nutrients that we know about, and there is some speculation as to how much of each of these nutrients must be fed in order to avoid deficiencies. And on that basis, they use spreadsheets and computers to work out a nutritional program for dogs, and they sell these things on the Internet. Now that’s fine.

Everybody has got to make a living on this. This is great, but it’s unnecessary. Absolutely unnecessary. If you feed and I’ve said this before, so many times, and so many times, but I’ll say it again. If you feed the foods an animal evolved to require, then you’re going to feed every nutrient it requires.

And these foods actually work with the dog’s homeostatic mechanisms. So that there is no problem if you feed those right foods with a nutritional balance and the nutrients the dog requires. The dog stores some of those nutrients, and the cat, of course, or all all mammals we’re talking about here. We do not need computers and spreadsheets and or gurus to feed raw. All we need is an understanding of what foods to feed.

You feed the right foods, the nutrients follow. Let me say that again. Feed the right foods, and the nutrients follow. And, again, I’ll say it. The nutrients we know about, the ones we don’t know about, and the ones we don’t yet acknowledge as essential.

That’s genuinely complete and balanced. And it’s why raw it’s the secret of raw. It’s why it produces health because you are producing the feeding the nutrients in the right way that the animal can actually use.

That’s all, folks. I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast with doctor Ian Billinghurst, the pioneer of BARF.