By The Numbers: What A New Canadian Study Says About Who Feeds Raw
By The Numbers: What A New Canadian Study Says About Who Feeds Raw
Meet Xavier. He's a titled Canadian Rottweiler, raised by one of our longtime wholesale families, and he eats real food. We think that's a good excuse to talk about a study that just came out of the University of Guelph — actual peer-reviewed research on who chooses raw feeding, and why.
The Study
Researchers at the University of Guelph's Ontario Veterinary College surveyed 433 dog owners and published their findings in Frontiers in Veterinary Science this past May. Not an industry blog, not a brand-funded white paper — an actual academic study, examining what separates raw feeders from everyone else.
Who's Actually Choosing Raw
A few of the findings held up statistically:
- Households earning over $100,000/year were nearly three times as likely to feed raw.
- Owners who shop primarily on price were significantly less likely to.
- Raw feeders were far more likely to shop at pet specialty stores, and to supplement their dog's diet — especially with fish oil.
- Intact dogs, and medium-sized dogs specifically, showed the strongest association with raw diets.
The Surprise
Two results didn't go the way the researchers expected. Graduate-level education actually came out as slightly less associated with raw feeding, not more. And questions about how bonded an owner feels to their dog — a common industry assumption, "raw feeders just love their dogs more" — didn't predict the diet choice at all. Both groups, raw and cooked, overwhelmingly call themselves "pet parents" in roughly equal measure.
What did predict raw feeding, more than anything else in the study: simply believing raw or homemade food is less processed and more natural. Not sentiment. Not income alone. A belief about the food itself — which is really just a knowledge gap the rest of the industry hasn't closed.
This isn't a study about smarter owners or better ones. It's about people who looked into what's actually in the bag or the tub, and made a different call. Xavier's people did. So did ours.
Read the science behind why we never had to change our own recipe when the DCM scare hit: Courtroom Watch, and Heart, Taurine, and Why We Never Changed a Thing.
