FAQ
Honest answers to the five objections that keep dog owners from going raw.
Safety, cost, prep time, vet pushback, and where to actually buy good protein — answered below.
Raw feeding is a deliberate switch, and the people who do it well do it because they worked through these five questions first. Tap any question to expand the answer. If you'd rather read the long form, each answer links to the relevant post in our reading hub.
Is raw dog food safe? Won't my dog get sick from bacteria?
Healthy dogs handle raw meat the way healthy wolves handle raw meat — stomach acid in the low pH 1–2 range kills most pathogens, and a short cooked-vs-raw transit time means bacteria don't sit in the gut long enough to colonize. The actual risk to humans is the kitchen handling you already use for chicken: wash surfaces, wash hands, don't leave thawed meat on the counter for hours. Dogs fed balanced 80:10:10 also eat more biologically appropriate fat and calcium ratios, which shows up in cleaner stools within a week — so the digestive system is doing what it's built for.
The "balanced nutrition" half of the safety question is the one that actually derails people. If you feed raw chicken thighs without bone and without organ, you create a calcium deficiency within months. If you mix in veggies, you waste the protein. The 80:10:10 target exists because it's the ratio that lets one formula handle any adult dog without supplementation.
Is raw feeding more expensive than kibble?
Per pound of finished food, raw is cheaper than mid-tier kibble and about the same as premium kibble. The reason it feels expensive at first is that you're feeding ~2–3% of body weight daily — so a 50 lb dog is eating over a pound of raw food a day, and the monthly total adds up before you adjust to the new baseline. Kibble owners who feed "free choice" don't see the math the same way.
The honest comparison is per-calorie and per-month, not per-bag. Run your dog's numbers through the portion calculator and the monthly figure falls out — most people are surprised that the gap to mid-tier kibble is small once you account for the fact that raw replaces treats, dental chews, and most supplements.
How long does prep and storage actually take?
If you're buying pre-ground complete raw (which is what we ship), prep is "move a bag from the freezer to the fridge tonight" — about thirty seconds a day. Defrost takes 12–24 hours in the fridge; serve the next day. Total active handling time per day for an adult dog lands around two minutes. There is no chopping, no measuring bone dust, no organ math.
Storage is the only real operational question. The portion calculator gives a monthly bag count for your dog, and that number tells you exactly how much freezer space to plan for — it's the part of "raw is inconvenient" that has a concrete answer. A chest freezer in the garage handles up to a 70 lb dog without thinking about it; apartment dwellers do fine with a small upright.
Why does my vet say raw feeding is bad?
It is not usually because your vet has looked at your dog's situation. Most veterinary nutrition training in the last thirty years is built around commercial extruded diets, and the "raw is dangerous" talking points come from peer-reviewed work on home-made raw diets that are not balanced — which is a real and important problem, just not the one you're considering when you buy a pre-balanced commercial raw product like the one we ship. The other thing vets flag is the calcium-phosphorus ratio, which we ship at 1.2:1 by design.
The productive move is to walk in with the starter checklist already done: protein choice, transition schedule, bag count per month, and a copy of the nutrition panel from whoever you're buying from. The conversation shifts from "raw is dangerous" to "here's why this specific product works for this dog," and that's a vet conversation worth having.
Where do I buy quality raw protein?
The honest answer to "where do I buy" depends on whether you're buying whole cuts to grind yourself or buying a pre-ground complete ratio. Whole cuts come from a butcher you trust to tell you what animal and what farm — that's a sourcing project that has its own rules. Pre-ground complete raw skips most of that work because the supplier has already done the bone-in grind and organ math for you.
When you evaluate any raw supplier (including us), the test is: can they tell you the protein percentage, the fat percentage, the calcium-phosphorus ratio, and the farm or co-packer the meat comes from? If they can't answer those four questions, the price isn't the real price — you're paying for unknown nutrition. The reading-hub starter checklist lays out the rubric for evaluating any supplier.
Still on the fence?
Run your dog's weight through the portion calculator and see the monthly bag count, cost, and prep time for yourself — that answer is the last one that matters.
Start with a starter box