Interesting article that I found written by Brennen McKenzie, DMV regarding just this very topic and addresses Dr. Bilinghurst.
Raw Meat and Bone Diets for Dogs: It’s Enough to Make You BARF
Some of the most rewarding interactions we have with our pets involve food. Most dogs respond with gratifying enthusiasm to being fed, and this activity is an important part of the human-animal bond. Providing food is also part of the parent/child dynamic that in many ways characterizes our relationships with our pets. Giving food is an expression of affection and a symbol of our duty of care to our pets.
Because of these emotional resonances, pet owners are often very concerned about giving their pets the “right” food to maintain health and, if possible, to prevent or treat disease. This has allowed the development of a large, and profitable commercial pet food industry that aggressively markets diets with health-related claims. This industry resembles in some ways the pharmaceutical industry. It is regulated by the FDA, and also by individual states, according to a somewhat Byzantine set of standards established by the FFDCA (the guiding document governing the FDA) and by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), a private organization made up primarily of state and federal feed control officials. Thanks to this regulatory structure, imperfect though it is, there is a good deal of solid science and research behind the products and claims the industry produces.
Like all for-profit concerns, the pet food industry also has its share of flaws. Some of these are relatively subtle, such as the probably unavoidable tendency for industry-funded research to come up with findings favorable to the funder’s products. Others are more serious, including rare but devastating instances of malfeasance. One example of the latter is the incident in 2007 in which melamine was substituted for wheat gluten as a protein source in pet food manufacturing, leading to the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands of pets who ate contaminated commercial foods.
And like “Big Pharma,” the pet food industry is often demonized by those who wish to promote unscientific or alternative veterinary medical treatments or theories. Anyone who has ever accepted a dime in research funding or a bagel at a conference (with or without cream cheese) from a pet food company is automatically an industry lackey whose opinion is worthless regardless of their credentials or expertise. This demonization of the pet food manufacturers is often used as a marketing tool for alternative nutritional theories and products.
One of the most popular unscientific notions sold to pet owners these days is that of feeding diets based on raw meat, typified by the BARF diet. According to the a leading proponent of this idea, Dr. Ian Billinghurst, BARF stands for Bones and Raw Foods or Biologically Appropriate Foods (though I confess other interpretations have occurred to me). Raw diets are frequently recommended by veterinarians and other who practice homeopathy, “holistic” veterinary medicine, and other forms of CAM. This is not surprising since, as you will see, the arguments and types of reasoning used to promote the BARF concept are also commonly used to defend other forms of alternative veterinary medicine. Let’s take a look at the arguments some BARF proponents make for this diet.
Some Inconvenient Truths
Now let’s have a look at the problems with this raw dog food marketing propaganda. To begin with, the concept of “evolutionary nutrition” ignores the simple fact that taxonomy and phylogeny are not destiny, nor do they reliably predict the specific details of a species’ biology, including its nutritional needs. Sure, dogs are in the order Carnivora, but so are giant pandas, which are almost exclusively herbivorous. Functionally, dogs are omnivores or facultative carnivores, not obligate carnivores, and they are well-suited to an omnivorous diet regardless of their taxonomic classification or ancestry.
Domestic dogs did branch off from a wolf ancestor, and current DNA evidence suggests this occurred some 100,000-135,000 years ago.2,3 Though the data are unclear as to what morphologic or ecological changes might have occurred following this initial divergence, and while it is likely that there was much ongoing genetic exchange between dogs and wolves even after they diverged, it is still the case that dogs have not been wolves for a very long time. However, a distinct phenotypic divergence of dogs and wolves followed the development of more sedentary agricultural habits by many human groups some 10-15,000 years ago, which placed new selection pressures on our canines companions.31 Since then numerous anatomic and behavioral changes that have occurred first as a result of living with humans and sharing our food. And even more dramatic changes have been wrought on dogs in the last about 3000 years as a consequence of intensive selective breeding. Domestic dogs exhibit many features of neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. They have smaller and less robust skulls and dentition, and numerous features of their skeleton, GI tract, and other anatomic structures are significantly different from wolves. 4-6
Of course, anatomy does not always correlate with function anyway. All humans have essentially the same GI tract from an anatomical perspective, but when someone who is lactose intolerant chugs a glass of milk, he or she may be treated to a visceral demonstration of the fact that anatomy doesn’t necessarily predict function. But in the case of dogs and wolves, the claim that they are anatomically identical with respect to what is an appropriate diet is simply not true. If you try to picture a pack of Chihuahuas bringing down and savaging an elk, the impact of thousands of years of artificial selection is obvious. Other breeds may be more like wolves in appearance, but they are none of them truly wolves. Dogs have lived with humans, eaten our table scraps, and been intensively bred for features we desire, none of which is likely to make them ideally designed for the diet of a wolf.
Of course, even if BARF advocates could demonstrate that dogs were functionally equivalent to wolves in terms of diet, the evolutionary nutrition argument would still fail because at its heart it is nothing but a form of the naturalistic fallacy.
The average life expectancy of wolves in the wild is considerably lower than that of captive wolves, and disease, parasitism, and malnutrition are important factors in the mortality of wild populations.7-9 Captive wolves live longest and are healthiest when fed — guess what? — commercial dog food! This is the recommendation of the leading specialists in captive wolf husbandry and medicine, and it is largely the result of evidence that the previous practice of feeding raw meat based diets to captive wolves led to poorer quality nutrition and health than the current practices. Certainly, raw meat and bones are often used as enrichment items or bait for husbandry purposes, but always with an awareness of the risks they pose, and never as the primary diet. 10-12
BARF proponents persistently confound ingredients with nutrients. They imagine that because wild canids get their nutrients from raw whole carcasses that this must be the only appropriate source of nutrition for all canids, including domestic dogs despite the fact they have been eating our cooked leftovers for tens of thousands of years. This is contradicted, however, by extensive research in canine nutrition and by the generations of dogs who have lived long, healthy lives eating commercial pet foods.
Which leads to the second pillar of the BARF argument, the safety and nutritional adequacy of commercial pet foods. Like all knowledge based on science, our understanding of the nutritional needs of dogs is incomplete and always evolving. However, admitting that we do not know everything is not tantamount to admitting we know nothing. The basic nutrient requirements of our pets are well-established by decades of research, and despite the claims of BARF proponents there is no evidence that nutritional disease are widespread among pets fed balanced commercial diets.
Commercial dog foods are formulated according to AAFCO standards based on extensive nutritional research. These foods are testing through laboratory methods for nutrient content before and after processing, and many are subjected to feeding trials to determine their digestibility and the adequacy of their nutritional content as fed to healthy dogs. These reference standards and limited feeding trials are, like the basic pharmacology and preclinical testing of pharmaceuticals, not perfect, and it is certainly likely that advances in our understanding of dogs’ nutritional needs as well as epidemiologic studies of dogs fed commercial diets will uncover changes that need to be made in the formulations of commercial diets. But the data we do have strongly supports the nutritional appropriateness of these foods. 13,14
By contrast, homemade and commercial raw diets are seldom tested for nutritional adequacy, and when they have been tested they have usually failed to meet known nutrient requirements. 15-18. The knowledge of established nutritional science concerning the adequacy of commercial pet diets, imperfect though it may be, is certainly superior to the near total ignorance of the nutritional adequacy of most homemade of commercial raw diets.
There are many specific criticisms of commercial dog foods made in support of the BARF concept, but there is little evidence to support most of them, and some are clearly false. There are far more than I can deal with in a reasonable space, but I will address a few of the more common of these claims.