Discovering BARF
Dr Ian Billinghurst B.V.Sc (Hons), B.Sc.Agr, Dip.Ed.
AT THAT TIME, I believed the years studying Agricultural Science and teaching had been an enormous waste. In hindsight, the knowledge gained in that first degree, the teaching experience and the studies in education all helped shape my unique approach to things veterinary, particularly regarding nutrition and disease. That early education fostered an understanding of the fundamental role that sound nutrition - translated today as evolutionary nutrition - plays in health. This concept dominates my writing, lecturing and research as well as my day-to-day veterinary practice.
Since 1976, I have worked full time as a veterinary surgeon. Although city born, my reason for becoming a vet was to work with cattle and horses. However, fate, God or the universe had other plans. Shortly after graduating, I abandoned my dream of being a large animal practitioner. Family responsibilities pushed me to the Southern suburbs of Sydney where I established a small animal practice. Since that time, events have kept me treating mostly cats and dogs and I must admit, a surprising number of horses. Right now, I am in general veterinary practice in Bathurst, New South Wales Australia. I still treat mostly cats and dogs, some horses and the occasional bovine and budgie.
After being in practice for about six years, I decided to heed the advice of my veterinary training and feed my own pets, as I was advising my clients at the time, a scientifically formulated complete and balanced commercial product. I wanted to make sure my dogs stayed in the best of health. This was mainly because as a family, we had started to breed and show dogs. I knew they had to have the very best. I was determined that from now on, I would do things properly.
My veterinary training had taught me that a diet based on raw meaty bones and household scraps was a very poor way to feed pet cats and dogs. We had been taught that commercial pet food was the ultimate in pet nutrition. I selected the very best brands of commercial pet food, and I looked forward to fantastic results. How wrong you can be!
Over the next four to six months, my own animals - who were supremely healthy - began for the first time ever to develop the same range of problems that my clients' pets were suffering. However, the sad truth is, I failed to notice. It was only in retrospect that I put this picture together. It took two years of watching my pets' health deteriorate before I realized something was wrong. And that realization did not hit me until AFTER I stopped feeding commercial pet food and witnessed an incredible transformation.
At that time (1984), I had begun to study acupuncture and was being introduced to a broad range of complementary healing practices including whole food nutrition. This led me to read a book on pet nutrition by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. Her book was an inspiration. I did not agree with everything she had to say, but her words made me realise that my old method of feeding, using bones and food scraps was probably much closer to an ideal diet for pets than the approved veterinary method of relying on commercial pet food. A glut of lamb on the market at that time made it easy for me to make the switch. For the next few years, my pets were fed mainly lamb - together with general household food scraps.
However, we did not have to wait years to see results. The change in our pets was immediate and dramatic. We were amazed. Like most people experiencing this incredible improvement in health, we had not realized the extent to which our pets' health had deteriorated on commercial pet food. And there was another pleasant surprise. Apart from being simple and easy, we discovered this method of feeding was also very cheap compared to commercial products.
By now, it had become clear to me that commercial pet foods, not only did not promote good health, they produced positively bad health. This dismal failure of commercial pet foods to keep my pets healthy forced me to read what ever I could find on the topic of nutrition. I needed to understand nutrition both at a fundamental level and also at a very practical level. I was also looking for answers to the question - "Why does commercially produced pet food cause health problems?" I eagerly devoured books by Pat Lazarus, Dr's Pitcairn and Belfield together with numerous others on human nutrition. Eventually I realized a very simple truth. Raw meaty bones and vegetable scraps - which had never produced the ill health I had seen in my pets fed commercial food - were very close to the evolutionary diet of cats and dogs. No cooking or processing to remove the "unwanted" or "unnecessary" bits. No adulteration with chemicals. No massive amounts of cooked grains. The evolutionary approach to nutrition was obvious and common sense. It was also good science.
Clearly, small animal nutrition was one area where my veterinary training had let me down. I had to re-think the way I answered the question, "What should we feed our cat/dog?" This is the most common question vets are asked.
In-Practice Research
Having witnessed first hand the health destroying attributes of commercial pet food together with the health promoting benefits of an evolutionary diet, I had no option but to share this information with my clients. I began to hand out simple diet sheets to any client who was interested, mostly the owners of young pups and people whose pets had severe or long term health problems.
The results were consistent and seemingly amazing as over the next few years. We had the wonderful experience of clients extolling the virtues of this way of feeding. We watched as puppies on this regime grew beautifully and trouble free. We were astounded as sick pets experienced the same dramatic improvements in health that ours had, with many animals becoming totally drug free.
Most noticeable among the problems that cleared up were skin and arthritic problems. However, we saw improvements across the broad spectrum of health issues that we encountered on a day-to-day basis. Over a period of several years, this included incredible improvements in reproductive health, and also in orthopedic problems in young dogs of the giant breeds. Problems such as Hip and Elbow Dysplasia.
Evolutionary Nutrition
By now I realized that most of the disease problems I was seeing in cats and dogs were due to nothing other than poor nutrition. I could see most of those diseases did not have to occur. They could be eliminated with correct nutrition. To me, this was both a revolutionary thought and an incredible revelation. I wanted to tell everybody! The only problem I could see was that my fellow vets would not accept this feeding philosophy because they rely heavily on ill health in their patients for their daily bread.
By the mid to late 1980's, these revolutionary thoughts on nutrition and disease in cats and dogs had taken over my thinking. I had become obsessed. By the end of the 1980's, I had spent years questioning the owners of both healthy and unhealthy pets about their pets' diets. I was told continually that healthy dogs lived and thrived on raw meaty bones. In Australia at least - Raw Meaty Bones were the major contributor to health in both cats and dogs. It was commercial dog foods that were the major cause of ill health.
I should point out that during our undergraduate years; I and my fellow veterinary students accepted the proposition that disease in cats and dogs was inevitable. Rather like human beings! We accepted without question the idea that disease was not something that was in any way preventable. There were a few exceptions such as the small number of diseases we vaccinated animals for, and a limited number of specific deficiency diseases. Those aside, our training did not involve looking for the root cause of disease. Our job was to diagnose disease and begin treatment using surgery and drugs.
It was not part of our training to seek out basic - for example nutritional - causes of disease, and follow that up by using sound management such as dietary regimes as a preventative measure. The idea of trying to prevent the vast majority of the diseases we see in cats and dogs via nutrition was unheard of.
In contrast, the concept of disease prevention via nutrition was - and is - well accepted in farm animals used to produce meat, milk, wool and eggs.
Disease prevention via nutrition is still considered a strange concept in small animal veterinary circles. However, by the mid to late 1980's it had become obvious to me that those - never discussed - basic causes of disease had their roots in poor and inappropriate nutrition. I was also aware that while most medical practitioners and veterinary surgeons had no idea of this concept, many of the patients and clients of those two healing professions, had begun to embrace this approach to health for themselves, if not for their pets.
Spreading The Word
The word had to be spread! And who better to spread it - I thought - than my fellow vets. I penned an article in a newsletter circulated by the Post-Graduate Foundation in Veterinary Science of the University of Sydney. I explained to my colleagues my experiences with this evolutionary - revolutionary - diet. I outlined its enormous and far reaching implications for our patients' health. This article reached every vet in Australia.
During the next year (1986/87), my thoughts were greeted with almost deafening silence. I received phone calls and letters from about ten vets - all of whom wholeheartedly agreed. However, it was obvious that I was not about to set the world on fire by talking to vets. Being a slow learner, I tried once more. The next attempt was a paper circulated at a Post-Graduate conference dealing with small animal and equine nutrition in 1988. This too passed without comment by the profession. I was totally ignored.
Was I ignored because my ideas would reduce patient numbers and therefore income? Not at all. I was ignored because my ideas did not fit into the current mode of thinking. The current dogma was - and still is - that small animal nutrition is something left to the experts employed by pet food companies. That the "so called" super premium products are the pinnacle of pet nutrition. And if the manufacturers of super premium pet foods and prescription diets don't know the answers, then it would be impossible for any one else to know. On that basis, my thoughts on the matter did not deserve a moment of their time.
However, from my point of view the message was too important to let die. Since the vets could not be convinced, let alone tell pet owners, I would have to educate the pet owners directly. This required a book. The aim of the book was simple. It was to free pet owners from the tyranny of only being able or allowed or trained to feed their pets commercial pet food. I wanted them to know that there was a healthy, simple, cheap and viable alternative. I was also aware that most books on nutrition are deadly boring, difficult to understand and highly impractical. I was determined that mine would be easy to understand, highly practical and hopefully entertaining.
There was so much to tell! And not one of the books I had read was saying what I was experiencing, particularly with regard to the importance of bones. I could not find one book which promoted the feeding of raw meaty bones. All the books on so-called natural feeding relied heavily on grains. Only the book by Levy mentioned bones and it specifically warned against feeding bones.
'Give Your Dog A Bone' Published
Because cats and dogs have different food requirements, cats are obligate carnivores while dogs are omnivores with a carnivorous background, I decided they each needed their own book, and that I would write the dog book first. Thus was born "Give Your Dog a Bone." This book was launched at a three-day Bichon Frise conference in western Sydney on the 17th November 1993. The book was advertised in all the canine breeder magazines throughout Australia.
"Give Your Dog a Bone" proved an instant hit, with many breeders adopting its ideas. Since that time, it has been making steady inroads into the minds of breeders and dog owners throughout Australia and around the world.
By 1995, "Give Your Dog a Bone" had found its way to England where it developed a steady following due to the enthusiasm of a dedicated group of dog lovers called the "Canine Health Census" (now called the "Canine Health Concern"). This culminated with an invitation for me to be the principal speaker during a four seminar lecture tour in England in September 1997. The lectures were held at Birmingham, Bristol, London and Manchester. The seminars proved an outstanding success. They were well attended and began a strong movement of raw feeders in England. They also attracted interest in the United States.
By 1997, "Give Your Dog a Bone" was beginning to take off in the United States. Following the success of the English tour, I was invited to present an even more extensive series of seminars across the United States. The venues for these lectures included Seattle in Washington, Dallas in Texas, Orlando in Florida, Hartford in Connecticut, Richmond in Virginia, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, Chicago, Toledo in Ohio, Bellingham in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and finally Honolulu Hawaii. These one and two day seminars were held in October, November and December of 1998.
The American tour proved an enormous success. It was during this US tour that I released my second book, "Grow Your Pups With Bones." This new book has formalized the concept of BARF. BARF is an acronym that stands for Bones And Raw Food. It also stands for Biologically Appropriate Raw [or Real] Food. I wrote this book for breeders and the owners of large dogs. It covers feeding to prevent and treat skeletal disease in growing pups and feeding for breeding. I am pleased to report that like my first book, it is selling brilliantly.
As a result of the US seminars and the increased book sales, a quantum leap has been made in increasing the awareness of the American dog feeding fraternity regarding raw feeding. People who feed their dogs according to this BARF philosophy have become known as "BARFERS."
There are now numerous Internet sites that deal with feeding our pets raw food. There are groups of people - numbering in the thousands - who discuss the issue daily on the net. My E-mail is constantly jammed with people requesting information and help with feeding their dogs according to BARF principles and by those wanting to buy my books.