In raw feeding, a common question, especially for those experiencing heartburn, is whether meat can be cooked or even heated. There is a fear that something might be lost or that something might become at least useless, even dangerous. The short answer is that heating or cooking meat doesn’t matter at all.
Feeding meat to a dog changes its body composition compared to, say, dry food. It’s a reasonable fact, though not 100 percent. Whether it matters, again, depends on the dog and what it does.
We bought XXL-sized chops from a well-known but smaller meat company from our area in Finland, close to Helsinki metropolitan area. They were about an inch thick. I’m definitely not a gourmet chef, but I can make reasonably edible food. Sometimes even good. Those chops’ relatives failed miserably.
Those who practiced Barf feeding once discovered that bones are food for dogs. An Australian who turned to alternatives, and briefly worked as a veterinarian, Ian Billinghurst, developed it into a business for himself and managed to create the modern dog-keeping culture’s worst and most widespread feeding mistake. As a result, we now have a market for minced meats with bones.
In feeding dogs, organs play an important role alongside meat. This doesn’t even depend on the feeding method, as organs are visible in both dry foods and meat-based raw feeding, at least in advertisements. Still, it’s not always clear what the term “organ” actually means.
There are a few eternal memes in dog feeding. Chicken bones kill, the dog is an omnivore, or the calcium to phosphorus ratio is the most important thing. None of those are true. The belief in the high phosphorus content of meat is also not true.