I'll comment on a few things and go down the list in order:
"First, has anyone on here ever heard of APN?! Come on now, there are thousands of you out there feeding raw chicken, surely one of your dogs has been stricken down?!!!!"
I personally don't feed my dog raw chicken so I can't answer that question for myself, but APN is the most common type of canine paralysis in the US. Here, it often goes by the name of Coonhound Paralysis:
https://www.petmd.com/dog/conditions...ound_paralysis
I don't know anyone who has an afflicted dog, but one of my work colleagues was afflicted by Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which is the human equivalent. See
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-...s/syc-20362793 . Ironically, here is a quote from the Mayo Clinic:
"Guillain-Barre syndrome may be triggered by:
Most commonly, infection with campylobacter, a type of bacteria often found in undercooked poultry"
Now moving on the rebuttal's bulleted points:
1. "Around half of dogs normally have Campylobacter in their guts." This may or may not be true--the rebuttal doesn't purport to be scientific--but the Australian study found that dogs with APN had 12.4 times the likelihood for testing positive for Campylobacter as healthy dogs.
2. "There are so many causes of APN in dogs it's ridiculous." Umm, not really. In the US, APN was originally identified in dogs that had contact with raccoons. The state of the art at the time was such that they really didn't know WHAT about the raccoons caused the APN. The Australian study makes a compelling case that Campylobacter infection increases the risk of APN by a factor of 12.4 times. That's nothing to be sneezed at. The rebuttal argues that APN has been found to be caused by various other factors, such as vaccinations and Toxoplasma gondii infections. The Australian study looked at all of these factors, and many more. I quoted the odds ratios for these factors in a previous post in this thread, but to summarize, dogs that were recently vaccinated were twice as likely to have APN, as opposed to dogs that were fed raw chicken were 70 times as likely to have APN. As for Toxoplasma gondii, here is what the Australians wrote: "In a retrospective study investigating potential infectious origins, it was suggested that infection with T. gondii may trigger APN in dogs, 31 as previously reported in humans. 32,33 However, in a more recent study, only 1 of 14 APN dogs was positive for T. gondii Abs. 7 In our study, APN cases tested for N. caninum and T. gondii all were found to be negative." I kept the reference numbers in the quote because the rebuttal cites article number 31. That's a poster presented at an ACVIM conference in Dallas, TX in 2008. A more recent study from 2013 found that only 1 of 14 dogs tested positive for Toxoplasma gondii (cited as article number 7 in the Australian paper.)
3. "Poor sample size and poorer sampling methods." Sample size could always be larger in ANY study, but the methods of the Australian group are sound, and the results were overwhelmingly statistically significant. The rebuttal goes on to whine about the University of Melbourne Veterinary Hospital being "a veterinary university hospital that is presumably cash-sponsored by the dry food industry that most staff are on the dry food bandwagon and are thus appropriately terrified of feeding their pets any real food whatsoever. Can’t see too many of these dogs being fed raw chicken anyway!!!" The rebuttal exposes its own biases with statements like this. I can't really take statements about veterinarians being "terrified of feeding their dogs any real food" seriously.
4. "Might there be another reason dogs with APN shed Campylobacter shed in their faeces?" Perhaps, but the study ALSO found that dogs fed raw chicken were 70 times as likely to have APN as healthy dogs, and dogs fed other raw meats were 40 times as likely to have APN as healthy dogs, so there's that.
"Conclusion: Raw chicken is not linked to paralysis in dogs in any meaningful way." If by "meaningful" you mean scientific research conducted at a world class veterinary school and subjected to rigorous peer review, then you're quite wrong, my friend. All I can say is...
