The Cost of Living Crisis and Raw Dog Food

With the news headlines full of the cost-of-living crisis, I wanted to shed some light on what this means for dog owners that are feeling the crunch. I know that it's impossible to turn on the tv without the doom and gloom or rising costs and the implications to our day-today living.

Feeding a raw pet food diet has historically been touted as expensive vs more conventional feeds, such as kibble or wet tinned products. Context is very important here, as costings are not always what they seem on the surface.

People are often pleasantly surprised with the cost of feeding a raw diet once making the decision to switch their pet, not to mention what this means for their pooches’ health. Paleo Ridge recently conducted research into this to substantiate what we’ve always known.

We found that on average, wet food was 42% more expensive when comparing like-for-like. Often when feeding a wet or dry diet, more food is required to make up for the lack of natural nutrients. Raw food is significantly more bioavailable and nutritious than wet or dry diets with added synthetic nutrients. So less is needed to achieve the same (but in reality, better) results and health. It’s important to consider that whatever level quality of food you feed is comparable, as feeding a low end, cost focused dry or wet food will not be comparable to a high-end premium brand of raw food. Whereas, if you are already feeding one of the higher end brands of dry or wet food, this will be comparable, or even cheaper to feed a raw diet.

I’m only talking about complete & balanced diets, as DIY would be significantly cheaper still, but that road should be taken with caution as we would only recommend feeding a DIY diet if you’re very experienced and knowledgeable in raw feeding and canine nutrition to make sure you balance the ingredients properly.

One thing that’s important to consider when counting the pennies, is all of the other benefits that come with feeding a raw diet. In general and certainly in our experience of helping thousands of customers switch their dogs diet, is the health benefits that come with feeding a natural, species appropriate diet. Dogs are designed to eat a meat (protein) based diet, not a carbohydrate-based diet. With this in mind, you’ll expect less trips to the vets and certainly less health issues with your dog.

We hear customers stories regularly after having spent hundreds or thousands of pounds on their dog’s specific health condition, be it issues with ears, coat, poo’s for otherwise, for them to clear up miraculously in a matter of weeks following a switch to a raw diet. The stress and cost of these issues can’t go unmentioned when price is the topic of conversation.

In 2020, Paleo Ridge conducted a short survey to find out how many customers decide to reverse the switch to a raw diet and the result was impressive. We found that 99% of people that chose to switch to a raw diet didn’t go back. Given many peoples trepidation with switching to a raw diet, it’s important to remember that those that do make the change almost all stick with it. Taking everything into account, that’s an impressive figure to boast. I wager this figure would be much lower if the change caused a severe change in the overall cost of feeding our pets.

When it comes to ourselves, we humans fork out countless amounts of money on health related purchases. Whether it be gym memberships, new running trainers, or a ‘healthy’ diet package… We don’t seem to have any issues weighing up the benefit of our own health when faced with the facts and I don’t think it should be any different for our beloved pets. I have lost count of people’s heart-warming stories that tell of their dog falling ill and them doing everything in their power to get their pet back to health before finding raw and getting their dog back to good health.

Unfortunately, it’s still all too common for people to consider diet as a reactive measure, rather than taking the proactive approach and feeding what we know dogs should be eating. On the whole, it would cost significantly less to feed a healthy, species appropriate diet and have less trips to the vet, less medication, ointments, prescriptions or even worse, prescription diets! If cost is the main focus, feeding a healthy diet to prevent expensive trips to the vet for issues that diet can fix, should be top of the list of things to consider when counting pennies. At the end of the day, what price would you pay for your dog’s health?