Pottenger's Cats

"Ah yes, Francis Pottenger. I can’t remember what he was doing research into, but it was something completely different. He had two sets of cats, and I believe he had 450, in the end, in each group. There were two people feeding them. One can only imagine where he was keeping them. Anyway. He had these two groups of cats and one of the people feeding them was giving them raw meat and bone, and the other was cooking it. Francis Pottenger noticed that the ones that were on the cooked food were less healthy than the ones on the raw food. So that’s what the study looked into. For 10 years, he studied these 900 cats and found that the ones on the raw food absolutely blossomed: they lived longer and they were healthy. The ones on the cooked food did much less well. Part of the reason is that the cooking kills the taurine, which cats need. Nobody knows how much taurine cats need. There’s all this stuff online about how much taurine there is in a live mouse, or in this and that. There is no real recommended daily amount of taurine, but we know cats need it. There were also other enzymes and bacteria that were being killed when the food was being cooked. The book goes back to the 1930s but it was the first serious piece of evidence that processed dog and cat food, and cooked food, was not a good idea for the animals. It’s a wonderful little book and brilliant, in its way. I don’t think cats actually need very much raw milk. It’s probably more important to give them oils with omegas in them, but it was early days in the 1930s when Pottenger was doing his study. What we try to do at Honey’s is replicate a wild diet, using domestic ingredients. So we know people don’t want carcasses lying around on the kitchen floor, so we analyze, if a dog was eating a rabbit, what percentage of the rabbit is going to be offal and guts? We then try and replicate that in the food we make up. In nature, probably about 10-15% of what dogs eat is vegetable matter. We increase that a bit. This is partly because once a vegetable has been picked, it begins to lose its nutritional value. So you need slightly more of it to get to the total. But it’s also because the amount of food that your dog needs to eat is much smaller in volume than you realize. People were complaining that we were starving the dogs. Nutritionally the food was already balanced but we added extra vegetable because it makes people feel the dog is getting a decent meal, believe it or not. A little bit of milk, a little bit of egg, a little bit of cheese is probably also good, but only a tiny amount. Yes, they can digest the whole bone. They crunch it up and they swallow it. The acidity in the stomach rises when the bone is there and they have no trouble digesting it. They have a very short digestive tract compared to humans and very, very strong digestive juices, almost as strong as hydrochloric acid. So they have no trouble dealing with bone or with harmful bacteria. It’s vitally important. They get about a third of the nutrition from the bone itself and from the marrow, and the chewing of the bone cleans their teeth and exercises their upper body. And it keeps them amused. So the bone is fantastic all around. We give bones to a lot of rescue centers. Our food is expensive because we’re using human grade meat — we’re using organic and free range and wild meat. We do feed some dogs for free in rescue centers, but only about 15-20 of them because of the cost. We aim to make about 5 GBP per customer per month, so we’re working on a very small margin: our ingredient costs are often well over half the total price of the food. But we do have a lot of bones left over, so we give the bones to rescue centers. The rescue centers say that the dogs with the bones are happy because it gives them something to do. Otherwise, they’re just pacing around and bored out of their mind. I don’t think so. I think it’s because we never used to eat meat. We’re cooking partly for the flavour and partly because we’re trying to kill off bad things. Our stomachs aren’t actually designed to deal with raw meat. All bones are good for dogs. The thing is, an older animal will have harder bones, so there is a risk of a dog chipping its tooth. And some dogs are very greedy so they try to gulp the bone down really quickly, and that can cause a problem. But, basically, dogs can digest bones. Chicken bones are particularly soft, which is why we always suggest starting with a chicken bone, because the dog needs to adjust to the idea of its new diet. None at all, no. They can do, but not from our food. It would be more that they might pick up something in the park. There’s no risk from raw chicken. There are a few things, but they’re very rare. For example, if you were feeding a dog a wild pig, there is something that could be caught by the dog, but it’s now history. It’s not something that could happen in the UK today. A third of dogs have salmonella in their system anyway, and you can get salmonella off dried dog food. There’s more bacteria on a shopping trolley handle than there is on a raw chicken, just to put it into perspective. Yes, they do. I offered to go on television — when there was a television program about raw feeding — and eat our food, even though I’m a vegetarian, if they could get anybody from any of the big dog food companies to eat their food raw. They couldn’t get a single person from any of the processed dog food companies to come on and eat their food. So my challenge went unanswered."