If you do a search on raw food or barf (bones and raw food) here, you'll find a lot of discussion of the pros and cons of this particular diet. It can split people strongly. We have raw feeders here, people who would never even consider it, and some who do a mix. There are a lot of options for feeding if someone is trying to avoid grains besides going raw. If you are feeding raw it is extremely important to either feed a commercial raw or read widely on dog nutrition -- just giving raw chicken or beef for example is not a nutritionally safe diet for a dog. In addition there are considerable health risks to humans from handling raw diets too casually, especially if there are children, elderly, or immuno-compromised individuals in the household, so it is extremely important to handle the food hygienically and clean thoroughly and keep a raw dog diet separate from human foods stored in the same area (as you would any raw meat
). I very occasionally feed a little raw -- having read a lot on both sides I feel there's too much clinical evidence of risk and I had one dog come close to an emergency-room run because of a raw chicken wing, so I won't feed an all-raw diet myself though I did at one time. Others have had no problems even over a long period, and feel they see benefits from such a diet.
Dogs split from wolves a very long time ago and have been eating a diet strongly influenced by human diet for 10s of thousands of years -- quite a long time for evolutionary shifts in what the gut manages, so I am pretty unconvinced by the argument about wolves, especially as commercial or home prepared raw diets are pretty far from what wolves eat anyway. Keep in mind too that one thing that rarely gets mentioned in the wolves v dogs and food discussion is that wolves in captivity, fed a diet a lot closer to a commercial dog diet, live about 3-4 times as long as wolves in the wild eating their 'all-natural' diet.
In short, this isn't a diet to take on without knowing well what you are doing and do be aware of the possible risks, which have been documented in several studies. As with many things with our dogs, there's a need to weigh risk v benefit and decide one's own comfort zone. The starting point is definitely being as informed as possible so we can make those decisions.
I have one article here that looks at both sides:
http://board.cavaliertalk.com/showthread.php?t=8947
