Preface
This original article written in late fall of 2002 was published by the Alaskan Malamute Club of Canada's official magazine the "Malamute Review", Nov/Dec edition of that year and by the Malamute Quarterly Summer 2003.

My BARF adventure was not a very good experience, I must say. Positive for me and the Mals in its outcome but a difficult, expensive and intensive experience. BARF folks are gonna hate me, but I have to admit I don't care anymore. I have finally learned that after having Mals since 1986 and the experiences I have had with them, both good and bad, I DO know what I am doing, I do have the knowledge and experience to know what to look for and to deal with it. THAT has been a long time in coming. The Mals have never been a problem, it has always been my sense of critical doubt about myself. I have hopefully moved that "critical doubt" from myself out towards others, and I don't mean that in a negative sense. But I do have to be more critical of what I hear from others rather than accept it all as Gospel, let alone truth.

Most people don't purposefully lie, but it is the truth as "they" see it. I have always been better able to take someone else's advice (their truth) than use my own common sense and experience (my truth). Anyway, the BARF experience as I said was not a happy one, I became very, very worried about a couple of my Mals as their weights plummeted and I have gone back to kibble with occasional add-ons like I used to do. Everything I experienced, poor coat, extreme weight loss, irritability, figityness (if thats a term) and other odds and ends nearly instantly disappeared when I went back to kibble. I tried to be objective, but of course that was difficult considering that these Mals of mine are out of Fraser, a loss I don't think I will ever get over.

I may be over protective and over cautious but not, I think, over zealous in what I did. I suppose that in my profession as a teacher I have come to be very skeptical of texts and instant dogma, of any variety, as they all have an angle that they profess NOT to have and an angle that is the RIGHT one to have. So when that got applied to what I was reading about Canine diet (BARF , kibble, mixed, cooked, not cooked, processed, not processed, requirements and harmful additives) and my subsequent discoveries of what individuals were doing I found what should not have been surprising at all! Everyone is different, has different reasons and aspirations and so different beliefs about what was right and not right. Many have real scientific proof, some have only hearsay, many are in the debate for the health of the animal and others for the profit, some have all the characteristics of a Cult and their followers! And I thought, one day as I looked at my most worrisome charge, Buddy, the poor dog doesn't even know what's going on, doesn't perhaps care and is completely at my mercy. I knew then and there I had to take charge. The following should ellicite an interesting response, either a warm rain of reasoned argument and discussion or a hurricane of anger...... but “the truth will out!”

BARF and the Guilty Conscience

What a bizarre voyage determining what your Mals’ diet should be! Contradictions, tons of contradictions. Lots of messiah’s though..........

I am getting very tired of Gurus - of any variety. Modern gurus, once they become gurus, stop thinking, a nasty consequence of notoriety. And these “gurus”, in some miraculous way, do indeed become “famous”, beyond all sense of reason - they become “popular heroes or heroines” of a world gone bad or at least not to be trusted. I have them in my profession as an educator - these folks who recycle old ideas spun with new “scientific” evidence and a tad of tweaking and call them novel “must do’s” or “the way”. They are skilled at making others feel guilty for not doing things their way, making them feel bad and making them feel as though they are doing less than they should. These people are in our Malamute world as well as they are in all things having to do with people. The funny, or sad, thing is if I were more courageous I would take all the following and expand on it ad nauseum, get it published and become a wealthy “guru” myself!!!

People we all know and love in Malamutes believe in what they are doing, and they have to as there is a lot at stake. If they are wrong then they are hurting their beloved dogs, the breeding program and their kennel name. So, they will challenge conventional thought and do what they think is right for their Mals for today and in the future. If they are right in their actions (meaning it works and their dogs are healthy), then they are doing the best thing in the world and believe it with near fanatical zeal. The assumption is that successful breeders (its up to you what and how to determine said success) must be doing not just something, but everything, right. For those of us less certain that we are “doing the very best” for our Mals, and are a little too open to external suggestion, the road to discovery of the “best way for me and my Mals” is fraught with pitfalls and dangers. My personal road has been pretty good except for the “ditch” called “The diet of the Alaskan Malamute”.

I have read a bunch of stuff, listened to a bunch of people and tried a few things myself with Malamute diet, and I must emphasize this, Malamute diet, not canine diet. Again, Malamute diet. Why the emphasis? One can’t really compare the diet of a Pyrenees to a Malamute to a Chihuahua. The Pyr for centuries has lain down in the high altitude grass of the Pyrenees mountains protecting sheep from wolves. They’re not traveling great distances, not protecting themselves from minus thirty temperatures and not expending a lot of energy generally. Malamutes did and do. So what is appropriate for a Mal will not be so for a Pyr and less so for the diminutive Chihuahua.

I have had Mals since 1986, have fed them nearly everything under the sun (except the neighbor’s very bad children who used to throw opened and emptied cans of food over the fence to my Mack and Kelsey so these miscreants could watch the Mals puncture the cans with their teeth). I fed kibble in those days and then one day I read that fateful paragraph in a pet book, on feeding alternative foods to cats and dogs, admonishing the owner that feeding kibble was the human equivalent of eating at McDonald's twice a day every day of your entire life, hardly nutritionally sound. I, having a guilty conscience as wide as the Nile, immediately felt badly for “what I had done to my Mals”. I began feeding all kinds of stuff to the poor critters blindly following what the authors had said regarding pet foods of the day. Not once did I ever ask the pet food makers, Purina et al, what their rebuttal was. I stopped doing the different feedings over time as I did not discover any “as advertised miraculous” change in my dogs - in fact it was quite the opposite. Obesity, poor coats, slavish devotions to their bowls all conspired to chase me back to kibble.

Do you remember when sugar was bad for you? “White death” caused hypertension and many other BAD things. So they invented Saccharine and Aspartame (known bad chemicals, even carcinogenic!). Now, today, after further study, sugar, in moderation, is a health food! Or do you remember when butter was the next thing to cardiac arrest, margarine made huge inroads into the food market and now saturated and polyunsaturated fats both are found to be good (better than good - essential!) and are found in, yup, butter. Butter is better than magarine, gee, who’d a thunk it! Ever had that edible oil product coffee creamer, because real cream would hurt you, and would suffer to drink your coffee even though it looked like an oil slick was on the top? We’ve all heard that Coca-Cola will kill you! It has caused cancer in rats! Of course it did, the rats drank the equivalent of 50 GALLONS a day! Water will kill you at that rate! Oh, but Coke will dissolve nails! Yes, and so will your own digestive juices. In fact so will water. So what am I getting at with all this? I’m not sure, but I THINK you can sense my frustrations. When do we believe in what we see, hear and read? Who is an authority? You? Me? A successful Malamute breeder (whatever that is these days)? A veterinarian, nutritionist, a person or a corporation? Nobody definitively knows anything about Malamute nutrition. Not the kibble manufacturers and not the BARF folks. Dogsledder friends of mine have a better idea, but even they have secret formulas and each one is different. Lots, if not tons, of anecdotal evidence abounds out there, but nothing for sure.

It all depends on each individual’s exposure to a certain “schooling” or “indoctrination” as to how they respond to any issue. For example, some people say that the vitamin E preservative, mixed tocopherals, of kibble is inferior, and so add there own vitamin E gel caps in their “natural” canine diets. I looked at the label of these things and guess where the vitamin E that you eat in your gel caps comes from? Tocopherals. Yup, “human” health food. Interesting, huh?

Processed food is a huge bug-a-bear for some “natural” diet folks. Vegetables are a major component of the “natural” diet. Okay, what do you feed? Pureed carrots, beets, romaine lettuce and anything else and lots of it. Everyday? How natural is that? (Can you say Big Mac?) I don’t hear of too many Mals running off to raid the neighbor’s garden for carrots or lettuce - let alone pureeing it! They’ll take out the neighbor’s sheep or goat, yes, but not the garden. Left to their own devices my guys eat the turf under the grass - the semi dirt and rooty stuff, not the greens. For greens they’ll clean out the dandelions. One of my books insists that the vegetables be partially if not fully cooked otherwise they are useless to the canine. They cannot process it in their system. By and large we DO have to process (cook) vegetables, is that biologically appropriate? Another contradiction. As to that goat, the Mals will eat certain parts to get over the thrill of the kill, but the rest they’ll “process naturally” by burying it and letting it rot. Meat, too, should not be too fresh! Fresh meat is harder for the system to break down and to utilise - as an aside, it is another reason we humans like “aged” beef rather than fresh. For pheasants and grouse you hang ‘em till they drop, then they’re fit to eat. So even in terms of human diet there are some similarities. And then, what about fruit?

Bananas? When did a Mal ever see a banana? Can they even digest it? Can they get something out of it? Apples, oranges, strawberries, etc., etc.... I don’t think apples and oranges are native to Alaska. I don’t see my Mals breaking free and knocking over the nearest fruit stand - so what is this biologically appropriate thing? Alfalfa? Oh, please. I take them for walks into wild raspberry country, do they feed till they drop? Heck, no. They smell the bear scat, pee, then carry on.

All of this stuff that I had learned went out the window with my latest burst of guilt when this spring I fell for the allure of the “Biologically Appropriate Raw Food” diet. I was all agog with the professed benefits. When I fed the BARF diet this spring (2002) my Mal’s weights crashed. Normal it was said, be patient it will pass. It didn’t. Detoxification it was said, be patient it will pass. It didn’t. Switch to beef or tripe. Far too expensive, even from the local abattoir! Feed more! I do, and still the weight plummets. The costs go up. I read more and tried more. Coats went haywire but then that could be the wonky year, too. They get more additives than a good Quarter Pounder with fries! Seaweed, brewers yeast, ascorbic acid, alfalfa, flax seed oil. And that in itself brings up a point: in a fever of disdain for the additives the kibble manufacturers add to their food, BARF folks feed “naturally” and then go and add a whole whack of additives, too! But, they use “natural” or “biologically appropriate” health food products is the line given. Well, I know from personal bitter experience with health foods that if you don’t know for sure what you are doing, even if you have a “professional” health food advisor, these so called “health” foods can be downright dangerous. The problem is no-one really knows about this stuff, those who do are considered as shamans and witch doctors, so little scientific work has been done. Look up the controversy over St. John’s Wort for an example.

“Biologically appropriate” - let me explore that for a minute. All the diets I have read about are general, made for the general, that is generic, dog or canid - even Billinghurst. Pekinese as well as Elkhound - makes sense to me(?). Comparisons are made to their wild cousins; wolves, coyotes and fox. All the “human made” “natural” diets are trying to emulate the diets of these critters. I think we need to watch a few more National Geographic specials. Well, depending on which part of the continent they live (even which continent) each area of feral canids eat a different biologically appropriate diet. Most often they are scavenging. Why don’t we throw in a handful of grasshoppers in the Mal diet? I saw the coyotes and fox eating nothing much else this summer!! Squirrels, gophers, mice, voles the occasional bird, say a dumb duck.

So, what is biologically appropriate? Chicken? From a chicken farm where thousands are grown together in very unnatural conditions and are fed a concoction to enhance growth. “Fit for human consumption” is the cry. Right, what's fit? The whole chicken before mechanical deboning? Or the guts and blood we never see at the store counter? Cow parts? All from cattle that have numerous injections for inoculation from disease to growth hormones. What is natural anymore? Seaweed? Brewers yeast? Ascorbic Acid? The problem here is obvious as there is no feral canid in our back yard, we have instead a domesticated dog that eats domesticated diets no matter how hard you try to be “natural”. I’m sure there are none out there ranching gophers for your Malamutes nor going to Alaska for the annual salmon run and hauling back a ton or two of half rotten spent salmon carcasses which I am sure the “real” malamute dog ate until he fell over from gluttonous exhaustion. We could approximate the feral diet, as our human ancestors did, thereby having domesticated the feral dog to such a successful degree that that is what we DO have in our back yard or at your feet as you read this. And oddly enough the feral dog lived longer on the domesticated diet - that's why he became domesticated! Not because it was particularly better but, rather, it was regular. Special dogs got better, special, domesticated diets and were healthier, stronger and lived longer than their wild cousins. And they were fed stuff that their cousins would never have had access to - rolled oats,beet pulp and tocopherals for example. So lets cut the cult aspect of the term “biologically appropriate” as we have not fed this for generations, eons in some cases, to our domesticated dog friends. The domesticated diet and more importantly non-natural selection, that is human interference in the natural evolution of the dog, has rendered the greatest change to the domesticated dog from the feral dog. I find this interesting.

Back to the BARF diet in my dog yard..... With one of my guys I was very worried as he begins to refuse to eat the stuff! A Malamute who won’t eat, for no apparent reason!!?? I have only had one like that in my experience and he died shortly after. I was advised by a number of folks, BARF and non BARF, to increase the fat, I did and the weight fell even faster. I check the analysis of the chicken food from the providers website. They say they are loath to put the analysis on the website as the assay does nothing and proves nothing about the appropriateness of the food. Yah, so? I don’t get it. Its exactly opposite to and for the same reasons that the kibble makers initially complained about the ingredients being on their bags! I continue on. Crude fat 55%, protein 32%. Humm. That was interesting as in any bag of kibble, yes, even the “health food” kibble like ACANA or the really expensive stuff up from California, the proportion is reversed and much less, say, 26% protein and 18 crude fat. In one of my canine nutrition books it says that protein is required for the efficient breakdown and use of fat by the body. Now, I find I didn’t need to up the fat to increase the weight of the dog, rather I needed to increase the protein - and substantially! The fat was already there, gobs of it. They weren’t exercising much as the daytime temps for much of June and July was in the low 30’s C. In the winter they’d burn it, in the summer when it was unnecessary the fat jetted right through them! We tried to increase protein with rolled oats, higher protein and lower fat, but that wasn’t enough. Adding huge quantities of animal protein was out of the question - too costly. By late summer/early fall in desperation, as I new winter was coming and they needed to enter it with something on their ribs - I cut the food with kibble. One and half weeks of half and half and the one Mal had reversed what took five months to put asunder. All my other skinny ones got half and half and now are back to their original diet from which I should have known better than to stray.

In my humble view it is NOT right that your Mal’s weight should crash. If it is the right thing it should balance, yes, but not crash. What I believe happened was they received too much fat, not enough protein and a whole bunch of other marginally useful stuff for a canine diet and particularly a Malamute diet. It does not seem to me biologically appropriate to be feeding a northern breed inordinate amounts of vegetables and fruit as a form of carbohydrate and protein. Garden vegetables are no more appropriate than kibble.

Too many bones, too much fat and not enough protein to break it down. In a field of percieved plenty they were, I believe, starving. Yes, northern breeds run on fat, burn it like we do gasoline, but in the right mixture with what they are doing - they must be revving their metabolism by working hard or staving off the cold and perhaps both! If they are not doing those things they need far less fat than protein! It is bad, the nutritionists say, for our own health to lose so much weight so quickly and so it is the same for our canine friends. Skinny Mals and skinny wolves and skinny coyotes die during the winter if they have nothing on them going into it. They are weak and vulnerable. Plain and simple. I know what the purists, on both sides, will say.

BARF folks will say I didn’t do it right. And they are probably correct, but I challenge them to tell me how they are doing it right. What is right? Are they canine nutritionists (let alone Malamute nutritionists), are the people they consult canine nutritionists? Can they tell me exactly what their dog needs, how much, why and from what source they are going to get it? Have you studied the Malamute in its native and natural environment to see what is biologically appropriate? I don’t think so. Each and every BARF person does their diet differently, particularly paying attention to what they can get cheaply for foodstuffs in their respective areas! Check on the web. Which diet is correct for a primitive northern breed as opposed to an ancient domesticated breed of the mid latitudes, such as the Saluki or Greyhound? All of them? None? I have heard nor read nothing from that community that convinces me that they really know. Everything has been done by trial and error. As I said there is plenty of anecdotal information, all extremely useful, but nothing definitive. My grandfather raced greyhounds in prewar Holland and fed them grains and the occasional whole rabbit or chicken and loads of horse meat - and he had the fastest greyhounds at that time, exceptional animals or great diet, I do not know. I have never had bad coats, except for Kelsey who had hypothyroidism, and I have never had a Mal refuse a meal of anything except the one I mentioned before. To me, if a Mal doesn’t eat there is something very, very wrong.

The kibble folks and the manufacturers will say, “See? Told ya we already make a perfectly balanced diet for your dog - easy and convenient too.” They have removed the water so that you don’t have to pay for the most plentiful substance on Earth, which has killed the canned food industry as most of the canned food was water. By weight the natural diet is also mainly water although some producers, Billinghurst for example, have caught on and begun dehydration, but that again costs more. The kibble manufacturers DO have nutritionists on board, an army of them, and I can’t believe that they are out there to deceive and kill our beloved pets with their food. Some manufacturers are definitely better than others, but it is plain economics that it is in their best interest to make a food that is good for their clients as they want their clients to buy more and the only way that they will do that is to do well on it and want more. “I have never heard of a dog dying of eating kibble.” Killing your clientele with your food is really bad for business, so it is in their best interest to make the best food possible. This is not the best reason for making anything, let alone food. But there still remains the question, is their product really made from the best food available? And not being a big believer in anything a major corporation tells me - I have many doubts and am sure they take as many shortcuts as is practical to maximize profits. BUT, nothing would destroy a kibble manufacturer faster than bad food - so by default they HAVE to provide a half decent product at a minimum. AND considering the size of the pet food market they can and do spend a lot of money on research and development to improve their product in order to gain the trust of pet owners so they can fleece them of their money in the end. Even McDonald’s is selling “healthier” food, salads and the like, to keep up with consumer demand. When my girlfriend and I go for “fast food” it no longer means “bad food”.

What really clinched it for me was walking into a canine “health food” store and seeing packaged Billinghurst BARF products. “Ah,” I thought to myself, “Even the guru can’t resist making a profit from this, with now his own “processed” “natural” food. I have the brochure and I ask myself can I trust this manufacturer any more than any other to have inside the bag what he says on the outside? If he has gone to this, then what about what he had written before? Just a little tumble down the credibility ladder. Kibble is not so bad after all, is it?

I have come to some conclusions through all of this and I hope to GOD that I remember them when the next pang of doubt strikes me. I DO NOT want to go through another spring, summer and early fall like this again anytime soon, let me tell ya!
1. Do what YOU think is best for your Mals.
2. Listen to others carefully, ferret through the maze of propaganda that exists on all sides, because NO ONE is 100% correct.
3. Watch your dogs carefully, see what they like best and perform best with. They will tell you and show you.
4. Do what you can handle with relative ease for yourself, as well, in terms of budget and safety. Remember it is both quality and quantity time you want with your Mal, not cooking time. And if you have to work to pay for feed then this play time becomes even more important than food prep time.
5. Challenge your Vet for the explanations - they are the expert and if s/he can’t give you the explanation go to another one who can, or will at least find out.

Struggles between reason and emotion, zealousness and the mundane, mass production and cottage industry, personal likes and dislikes are all part of this road. There is much fantastic information out there, from all angles and persuasions, much of it contradictory between the “experts”. Most of it extremely valuable.

Just remember one thing, be nice to both BARF and kibble people as they are both doing what they believe is right for their Mals. They are both right and we all have to see, with all things being equal (ie good quality BARF products or a good quality kibble as well as a sound caring home), that good genetics is a far stronger determinant of good coat, strong teeth, bones, conformation, movement and behavior than anything else.

Addendum

A few months after writing the above article a good friend gave me the following website address:
http://www.secondchanceranch.org/rawindex.htm
It has all the research and proof regarding the Raw Meat Diet I had been looking for. The stuff I never really got from Billinghurst, Pitcairn, the raw food suppliers or the practicing advocates of the BARF diet. I strongly suggest that you read it - it'll help put into words what you may already know by instinct. I dutifully began to read, then was completely engrossed and finally shocked and terribly saddened as I realised I may very well have been the instrument of the death of my beloved Fraser (BISS Am/Can Waterstone Meandering Fraser TT). For some time before he died I had in fact been supplementing his diet with raw chicken from the store. I came home from work one day and found him doubled up and in pain. He was rushed to the Vet and underwent emergency surgery. The Vet said he had a very bad infection, probably Pancreatitis as the Pancreas was grossly enlarged, and infection had spread throughout his abdominal cavity. The infection subsequently killed off the motility in his bowels and that finally finished him a day later. Unparralleled sorrow. Once I had believed what I read about BARF, it made some sense. I am now quietly angry at the lie. I am now not nearly as charitable to the BARF diet as I was in the article. I suppose I was probably trying to be nice to friends who still are practicing the BARF diet. I am no longer even minimally an advocate of the BARF diet. I'm trying not to beat myself up over this - well, not much. Fraser is gone and I do have his progeny. I just wish I had never heard of BARF.