Raw Feeding Still Uses Pet Food Thinking – And It Shouldn’t
I spend a lot of time reading about raw feeding for domestic dogs, and something about many of those discussions never quite sat right. While the raw feeding movement is often described as returning canine nutrition to a more natural, primal state, much of the debate still falls back on an audit framework built for commercial pet food, which treats nutrition as something to be designed and validated in isolation — ticked off on paper against nutrient tables, as if meeting those targets fully defines the quality of the diet.
Even where people reject kibble, they can continue to think like kibble formulators — assembling diets according to ratios and predefined targets (e.g. an 80/10/10 formula) and treating the result as a standardised product. This way of thinking was built within a regulatory and commercial pet food framework. In the United States, AAFCO uses “complete and balanced” to refer to foods intended as a pet’s sole diet and substantiated against defined nutrient standards.
Image: Hill’s dog food can label by Vincentdavis, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
The problem with this is that it treats food as something that can be separated from how it is actually fed. A large meaty bone and minced meat may look similar when reduced to nutrient categories, but they are not the same food. One requires ripping, tearing and chewing — an instinctive behaviour central to dental and oral health, on which other aspects of health depend — the other does not. Once food is reduced to numbers on a page, that difference disappears, even though it is central to how carnivores are adapted to feed.
We don’t treat our own food this way. Imagine if every spaghetti bolognese or steak dinner we made ourselves was checked against the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s dietary reference intakes (DRIs) and had to be justified before we could even start cooking. Yet this is increasingly how feeding dogs is expected to be understood.
This isn’t a claim that nutritional adequacy doesn’t matter. The point is that much of the language used to discuss it has been shaped by the commercial pet food industry and reflects a culture in which responsible feeding is expected to sound technical, validated, and complete — and that culture can trap raw feeders inside the same framework they are trying to move away from.
Raw feeding is not a single, unified approach. Different strands have developed their own methods and assumptions. Some raw advocates effectively translated raw into a new kind of product logic: the right percentages, the right ingredient mix, the right formulation. BARF-style popularisation, for instance, systematised raw feeding and framed it in template-based, percentage-based, and comparative terms, which pulled raw feeding back into the same evaluative language and frameworks used by commercial pet food companies.
Others approach raw as a rejection of that entire framework and a return to carcasses, chewing, oral health, prey structure, and husbandry. Raw meaty bones writing pushed in this direction. The argument here is that modern pet food belongs to the wrong system altogether — one that replaces carcasses with soft, processed substitutes and removes the need for ripping, tearing, and chewing.
The fork in the road, then, is not simply kibble versus raw. It is raw translated into product logic versus raw understood on its own terms: instead of asking how to make raw imitate a packaged food, it asks what kind of food a carnivore is built to consume and what practical conditions make that feeding succeed or fail. A carcass-native model doesn’t ignore nutrition; it relocates it — focusing on the kind of pieces you feed and how they are eaten in practice — not just a diet that looks right on paper. Changing ingredients, then, is not enough. The framework itself must change. Otherwise, raw feeding remains trapped inside the same product-based way of thinking it claims to reject.