Quote: Alyssa Myracle

Kibble has to be rehydrated before it can be digested.

It takes how ever long it takes a stomach to rehydrate kibble.

Raw is full of liquid, and needs no rehydration.

Oh, and chalk one up for this as being a major factor, based on the long period the kibble sat, unchanged, in the stomach.

 Quote: Angela Burrell

Because raw meat has high levels of bacteria. If is is slowed down significantly in its travels by the presence of very slow digesting kibble, the bacteria has time to marry and raise its family ...

Right. It's colonizing that leads to food-pathogen illness. In humans, there is plenty of time to colonize: looooooong system.

In dogs, there are a couple of huge protective elements: their very caustic stomach acid (so I would take a dog who had to have antacids off raw) and their speedy transit time.

I don't want to screw up the acid or the speedy transit, both built into the design for processing raw food.

Now I get it! I love learning new stuff from you guys! Thanks.

http://www.carnivoreconservation.org/files/thesis/childs_sanford_2005_msc.pdf

Sorry Jo. It had been a while since I had read it, and I had forgotten exactly what it contained.

They did analyse digestion rates, but all foods tested were dry foods.

After reading this, I can remember where my conversation with the curator abruptly ended. Most of his argument for feeding a commercial dog food was all the problems that seemed to plague these maned wolves when fed a "carnivore diet". Several times in the article they refer to an ALL RAW MEAT diet. He quit emailing me when I asked him to describe the "all raw meat" diet that was causing so many of the problems he had seen. Guess I got annoying.:smile:

I went ahead and posted the article.

For anybody that reads this, remember that this is about Maned Wolves. It is a different animal than what our dogs are. I don't see anything in this article that should change the way anyone feeds their dog.

The whole study is still interesting to read.

I was amazed at how little these researchers knew of feeding a raw diet. A lot of the info seems flawed, IMO, but I don't have a degree or any research to back up my hypothesis.

Its funny how they are plagued by diarrhea with all their commercial diets, but for some reason stools firm up with whole prey.

I'd also like to see what the result would be with their cystinuria problems if fed an appropriate raw diet. Not saying I could fix it, but it just doesn't seem like a good raw diet has gotten a fair shot.

PHEW!!! Rant over.

Sorry again, Jo. Thought I had something.

Thanks all!