Raw Feeding:
Why We Chose a Different Path

For us, it started with Tango.

Tango began eating a balanced raw diet at six weeks old. That was thirteen years ago, and raw feeding has been part of how we care for our dogs ever since.

It wasn't a decision we made because raw feeding was fashionable. I had just started down a much bigger road of asking what I could do to keep this extraordinary dog healthy and beside me for as long as possible. Food seemed like one of the most obvious places to start.

I kept coming back to a simple question: if nutrition matters so much to human health, why wouldn't the quality and processing of the food we feed our dogs every day matter too?

That question changed the way I looked at a bag of dog food. Instead of asking only whether it met a nutrient profile, I started asking what the ingredients were, where the nutrients came from, how heavily the food had been processed, what happened to it during extrusion, and what the dog's body actually had to do with it after it was eaten.

Raw feeding and throwing raw meat in a bowl are not the same thing.

This distinction gets lost constantly.

A balanced raw diet is a formulated diet. Dogs require appropriate amounts and relationships of protein, fat, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, trace nutrients, and energy. Calcium and phosphorus matter. Micronutrients matter. Life stage matters.

A bowl of muscle meat is not a balanced raw diet. Neither is meat with a handful of vegetables and a multivitamin tossed on top.

When people point to nutritional deficiencies found in poorly constructed home-prepared diets, that's a legitimate criticism of poor formulation. It isn't evidence that fresh food itself is nutritionally incapable of supporting a dog.

The question that interests me most is processing.

Most conventional dry dog food is produced by extrusion. Ingredients are ground and mixed, exposed to heat, moisture and pressure, forced through an extruder, cut, dried, and commonly coated after processing.

Extrusion has enormous practical advantages. It produces shelf-stable, convenient, relatively inexpensive food that can be manufactured consistently at scale. Those benefits are real.

But convenience and biological equivalence are not the same question.

Processing changes food. Heat and mechanical processing can alter proteins, starch structure, lipid chemistry, vitamin concentrations, digestibility, and the physical food matrix. Manufacturers can compensate for some losses through formulation and supplementation, but that still leaves an interesting biological question: does a dog's body respond differently to minimally processed food than it does to extruded food?

The emerging canine research suggests that it does.

Digestibility is one place we can see the difference.

Controlled feeding research comparing fresh diets with an extruded diet has found higher apparent digestibility of dry matter, protein, fat, energy, and other nutrient fractions with the fresh foods studied. Dogs consuming those fresh diets also produced less fecal dry matter and excreted fewer calories in their stool.

That doesn't prove that every fresh or raw diet is superior to every kibble. Formulations differ enormously. But it does challenge the idea that all nutritionally complete foods behave identically once they reach the dog.

If more of what goes into the bowl is digested and absorbed—and less leaves the dog as waste—that is biologically interesting.

The metabolic response may be different too.

Recent intervention research has begun comparing metabolic responses in dogs eating raw food with those eating kibble. In a 2025 dietary intervention involving 46 dogs, researchers reported different changes between the groups in measures including glucose regulation, cholesterol, body weight, and the triglyceride-glucose index.

The kibble-fed dogs showed increases in several metabolic measures during the study, while the raw-fed group showed decreases in several others. That does not mean the study proved raw feeding prevents metabolic disease or extends life. It didn't.

But it gives us a reason to keep asking the question rather than assuming processing is metabolically irrelevant.

Research comparing minimally processed food with extruded kibble has also reported differences in post-meal glucose and gut-hormone responses. Again, these are physiological differences—not yet proof of better lifetime outcomes—but they show that the form of the food can influence what happens after the dog eats it.

Then there is the microbiome.

The gut isn't simply a tube that extracts calories. It contains an enormous microbial ecosystem involved in digestion, metabolite production, intestinal barrier function, and communication with the immune system.

Studies comparing raw-fed and kibble-fed dogs have repeatedly found differences in gut microbial communities and metabolic products. A 2024 study, for example, identified substantial differences in the microbiome and dozens of circulating metabolites between raw- and kibble-fed dogs. It also reported differences in intestinal immune-related markers.

We should be careful here. Different does not automatically mean healthier. Microbiome science is still developing, and researchers cannot yet look at every microbial difference and confidently label it good or bad.

But once again, the important point is that the diets are not biologically interchangeable. The dog's intestinal environment appears to respond to them differently.

What about long-term health?

This is where I think both sides of the raw-feeding debate sometimes get ahead of the evidence.

There are observational studies reporting differences in clinical and biochemical measures between long-term raw-fed and kibble-fed dogs, including some potentially favorable findings in raw-fed populations. Those studies are valuable, particularly because long-term randomized feeding trials are difficult and expensive.

But observational research has an unavoidable problem: people who feed raw may also exercise their dogs differently, manage body condition differently, use different preventive-care practices, choose different breeds, or make many other lifestyle decisions that affect health.

So I don't think the science currently allows me to say, “Feed raw and your dog will live longer.”

I do think the evidence allows us to say something more meaningful than “there's no evidence raw is better.” There are documented differences in digestibility, metabolism, microbial populations, and biological responses between raw or minimally processed foods and extruded diets. Some of those findings are potentially favorable, and they deserve serious research rather than dismissal.

There is a risk we shouldn't pretend away.

Raw animal products can contain pathogenic bacteria, including Salmonella and Listeria. Commercial raw foods have also been found to contain pathogenic and antimicrobial-resistant organisms.

That matters both for the dog and for the humans sharing the household. A dog does not necessarily have to look sick to carry or shed an organism.

We manage raw food like raw food. That means cold storage, clean preparation surfaces, hand washing, clean bowls and utensils, sensible separation from human food, and attention to sanitation and feces. Households containing people who are immunocompromised, very young, elderly, or pregnant have additional reasons to take these risks seriously.

For me, acknowledging that risk doesn't invalidate raw feeding. It means raw feeding comes with responsibility.

Thirteen years changes your perspective.

After thirteen years, raw feeding isn't an experiment in our house. It's simply how we feed our dogs.

That doesn't make our experience a randomized clinical trial. I know the difference between personal experience and scientific evidence, and I don't want Field Notes to blur that line.

But experience matters in another way. Thirteen years of preparing food, watching body condition, monitoring stools, adjusting diets, raising dogs, caring for aging dogs, and paying attention to how they respond teaches you to look closely at nutrition.

It also teaches humility. Not every dog is the same. Not every raw diet is good. Not every kibble is bad. And a feeding philosophy should never become more important than the health of the dog standing in front of you.

Why we still choose a different path.

I don't feed raw because I believe nature magically makes everything safe or because anything manufactured is automatically bad.

I feed a balanced raw diet because I prefer feeding recognizable, minimally processed foods; because I want control over the ingredients going into my dogs; because I believe the degree to which food is processed is a legitimate nutritional question; and because thirteen years of living this way has given me no reason to return to feeding highly processed dry food as the foundation of their diet.

The science is catching up to some of the questions raw feeders have been asking for years. We now have evidence that fresh, raw, minimally processed, and extruded diets can produce different digestive, metabolic, microbial, and physiological responses.

We don't yet know what every one of those differences means over an entire canine lifetime.

But “we don't know everything yet” is not the same thing as “food processing doesn't matter.”

For us, that's reason enough to keep asking better questions—and to keep choosing the path that makes the most sense for the dogs beside us.