As the founder of Nurturing by Nature, I have dedicated my life to ensuring that pets receive the best possible nutrition through high-quality raw pet food produced to human food standards.
My personal journey began when I started to question the unrecognisable ingredients I was seeing on the side of the pet food I was feeding. Naturally interested in wanting the very best for my pets, I started to research these so-called healthy, scientific diets, and my findings were quite shocking. Many, if not all, of these highly priced, extravagant-claiming pet diets were actually made up of many ingredients, often grains, fillers, and additives that are heavily processed to form a food! Further research into these ingredients then took me down a completely different line of investigation, as I started to question the integrity of said pet foods... but that is for another time.
Choosing to back my own research and learnings from a like-minded veterinary professional I was working with in veterinary practice, I founded the belief that a raw pet food diet was the most natural diet for our pets. After all, although domesticated in recent years, they have evolved naturally in the wild, hunting, killing, and eating their bounty without cooking it themselves. There are no ovens in the wild!
Then one day, my Boxer dog developed a cancerous tumour on his back leg, and it was at this time that I decided it was time to make the change, follow my research, and start feeding him a raw pet food diet. Sourcing ingredients from the butchers, supermarkets, and local markets, I began making raw pet food with ingredients I recognised and a freshness I could see. Fred, the Boxer dog, instantly started to thrive, and it was clear that the changes I had made to his diet were making a huge improvement to his overall health.
The raw dog food diet was simple. I created a base meal around the lowest-cost ingredient: raw chicken. Then, over time, I added as much variety to the diet as I could when it was available—beef, lamb, fish, and pork. I would also vary the different meats, offals, hearts, and muscle meats to balance the different nutrients in the raw pet food diet. If and when available, I would sometimes add vegetables too, but I did not believe these were essential. These were the founding principles of the raw pet food diet that I created: fresh, human-grade ingredients, fed with variety and supporting a complete diet over time, without the focus being on designing a complete meal. Nurturing by Nature was founded.
The results I had the pleasure of witnessing will always be memories that live in my heart. At the time, pet owners would often come to me as a last resort. Their pet had been eating every scientific pet food known to man, but still, they had health issues, and by chance, they found themselves at our door. With trust placed in me and my diet, we worked together; often, my role was supporting the owners through emotionally difficult times. In my founding days, these events were common, and we supported many a pet owner and their pet in discovering a raw diet and a path back to health through a more natural diet.
Over the years, as my knowledge continues to develop, I've seen an increasing number of big brands make exaggerated claims about their mass-produced, extruded, and cooked products, attempting to undermine the true benefits of raw pet food. If it is cooked, it cannot be as good as raw! I also question the integrity, knowing that potentially the real reasons for the design of these products lie within the financial business practices, rather than optimal pet health. Products are designed to use waste materials or even just to improve shelf life.
Warning!!
It does seem to be the trend of the industry, sadly, as now I also know that some raw pet food companies are selling subpar products, deceiving pet owners with false assurances of quality. Just because it's pet food shouldn't mean that it is not of food quality! But as customers watch their pockets and some manufacturers choose the race to the lowest possible prices, some elements of quality have to give. It is just not possible to have high-quality raw pet food at a low cost. Good quality ingredients cost money and require robust processes to be maintained so that the integrity of the ingredients is preserved.
This blog aims to educate you, the pet owner, on how to navigate these waters and make informed decisions for your pet's health.
