Raw meat-based diets for dogs are increasingly popular but raise welfare considerations around nutritional completeness, pathogen risk, and food safety.
Raw feeding welfare encompasses nutritional adequacy, food safety, and specific risks from raw bones and meat. Dogs fed nutritionally incomplete raw diets over extended periods develop preventable deficiency conditions including metabolic bone disease from imbalanced calcium and phosphorus. Pathogen contamination of raw meat causes gastrointestinal disease in dogs and zoonotic risk to household members, particularly immunocompromised individuals and children. The welfare risk from raw feeding is not universal - well-formulated commercial raw diets address most nutritional concerns, and many dogs thrive on them. The welfare obligation is ensuring that any raw diet is nutritionally complete, pathogen-managed through sourcing and hygiene, and avoids the specific risks of cooked or fragile raw bones.