I would like to offer some personal insight into this but in no way intend to suggest that any comments above are “wrong”; I just want to provide a view into the prism of how a licensed professional may look at advising consumers. As a preamble, if a selected food works for the dog, and if that dog is in good health, i.e. not suffering from symptoms of improper diet such as excessive anal gland secretion, inconsistent stools, on-set of periodontal issues, skin issues, weight control variations, lethargy, where symptoms are not backed by medical testing, etc, then great.
But, …. as a licensed professional in a different industry, I can tell you the reason why any licensed professional will not advocate to a consumer for doing something that requires a certain threshold level of knowledge to implement it. It is one of professional LIABILITY. I become more and more convinced every day the reason veterinarians recommend a scientifically-balanced commercially manufactured diet is the liability for the vet to suggest anything else is unlimited – period. For example, I would not “recommend a person go build their own wing on a house” or “recommend a person change their food intake to a personal menu” but I would recommend a set of plans designed/sealed by others and or hiring a licensed individual to do the design work and I would recommend an industry professional be consulted before recommending something as vague as “raw diets are good so go do it”. That would invite a level of criticism that licensed professionals are not insured against.
Raw diet is primarily a matter of nutrition science and design; if I were a vet, my initial position would advise a non-professional against a raw diet as a matter of practice. We peeled this back on the pet food manufacturing side with the consultants or nutrition experts internal the manufacturers (which is where the liability is for commercial dog food) and found that our Vet “switched” to become supportive of a raw food diet when our nutrition data was presented and was customized to our dogs and when when combined with a Vet’s prescriptions to treat ailments that now are gone and there is scientific data to back it. It should not surprise anyone reading this post, that our Vet could not say “stop doing that when problems vanished.” The vet knew we had crossed over a threshold and were not coming back. This may surprise you but I would never recommend to anyone to just go do a raw food diet after what I have learned, unless, (1) using another professional’s complete diet with the data to back it up and or (2) doing it yourself … which is a huge commitment to an entirely new level of commitment to control the input data, measure the output data to know with certainty (=/- say ~3%) of what the data is showing.
I hope this provides a more full picture of the why a vet would not “openly advocate to consumers” to go do something that would most likely be FAR worse than buying commercially prepared and manufacturer-backed balanced dog food.
