Who has more health problems – raw or dry fed dogs?

Methods

Summary

Study design: This is a retrospective study using computerised medical records of dogs that are eligible for inclusion in this study. 

Methods: Eligible dogs will be those that are part of the Wylie Wellness Plans: dogs on the Total care plan (TCP) being fed raw food will be compared with dogs on the Wylie Health circle plan (HCP) being fed dry commercial dog food. 

We were hoping to be able to match the dogs by breed, age, sex and neuter status but this has proven to be impractical in terms of the number of unmatched dog data we would lose.

The original intention was to evaluate data for one calendar year but, after some discussion, we decided to try to get data for four years. However, due to the disruption of the Covid pandemic, visits to the clinic in 2020 and 2021 were sporadic and purchase of food from the practice was inconsistent; this means that rather than use four years worth of incomplete data, we have opted to only include data from 2022 and 2023. 

Dogs in the Wylie HCP are a combination of those fed raw and other foods, meaning that we have had to select only those dogs not being fed raw for comparison to the raw fed TCP dogs. 

For each visit that the dog presents to the vet practice over the two-year time period we are abstracting the breed, gender, body weight, date and reason for visit and any laboratory testing. We will also be recording the type(s) and brand(s) of foods being fed. The costs of all visits will be recorded as what would have been charged if the dog was not on one of the wellness plans.

Data abstraction has been much more difficult than we imagined as we have had to export eight different tables of data and match up the selected dogs eligible for inclusion with the dogs in the additional tables. Having said this, significant progress has now been made with accumulating all the available data into a format that can be used in the analysis.