About

I’m Anne.

Shortly after I was celebrating the success of curing my cat Duke’s IBD in 2002 with a home-prepared raw diet I’d learned about— thanks to a Yahoo e-group, feline nutrition pioneers Natascha Wille and Michelle Bernard, and an amazing Canadian cat mom named Lee Ellis—an unexpected turn of events led to my interview with a veterinary publication for clients about my experience. 

I was thrilled at the chance to share my story and spent hours on the phone with an interviewer sharing what I’d learned along the way: the countless false starts I’d had trying several recipes that included grains, attempting a cooked diet, battling doubt about my choice given all the admonitions against raw feeding, and my inability to secure advice from a trusted veterinary source on how best to evaluate the balance and safety of the raw diet recipes online.   

When the article was published and arrived in the mail, I saw that all my references to “raw diet” were expunged. Each was replaced (without running the copy by me ahead of time) with “veterinary supervised home prepared diet.”  

Veterinary supervised?  Not so much.  

The point of my story was that I could not—as many others could not—find a veterinarian to help with something so important. It was the gap between vets and clients on such a fundamental aspect of cat health that needed attention. There were sick cats who could be made well again if only we could rely on vets to help us understand what it means to feed well. In my subsequent exchanges with the author, she offered sympathy for my frustration but explained that a veterinary publication could not ‘in good conscience‘ implicitly or explicitly endorse a raw diet. She explained that the editorial board thus determined the safest decision would be to share my story but swap out “home prepared” and “veterinary supervised” for all references to a raw diet.     

In commiserating with a colleague and friend — a scholar in another field altogether who, over the course of his very long career, published many important books uncovering injustices and travesties in European century history — I said, “The deck is stacked too high against those of us trying to share this message. There’s no way to make a dent in the dominant paradigm that the pet food industry has the answers to help sick animals.“

His reply:  “Don’t go there.  Why give up so easily?  It may not happen overnight, but don’t underestimate the power over time of sharing a message that needs to be heard. It may be cliche, but one person can make a difference.  Two can make an even bigger difference. Add a few more and pretty soon a few folks will take notice.”

Point taken, but what to do?  Ooh ooh ooh!  I know.  Write letters.

With help from my then new friend and ally in the healthy feeding world, Dr. Lisa Pierson, I launched a one-woman letter-writing campaign to all the veterinary universities with nutrition departments in North America. It was quite an undertaking. I put together the original sources I’d assembled on my own, wrote a cover letter to each with an entreaty to please help all of us learn to feed our cats better, and snail-mailed off scores of information packages to each.  I recall the day I’d finally gotten all the separate parts of the package edited, printed off, collated, and sitting in neat little piles on the dining room table ready to assemble. I stared at all that paper wondering if I was nuts to even spend postage on all this. But I mailed them off anyway. Maybe in some way I’d spur some veterinary nutrition teacher to start shortening the too-long learning curve on this question.

I waited. And waited. And waited.

For some replies, that is. Days. Weeks.

Deafening silence ensued. The solitary response received came on slick letterhead from a nutrition department professor who politely opined that my cat’s recovery from IBD was almost certainly coincidental, had nothing whatsoever to do with the raw diet, and that my cat most likely would have gotten better on the right commercial diet. He also warned me to about the dangers of handling raw meat for my own health.

It was clear that writing to veterinary schools wasn’t getting me anywhere. Plan B? A website. I questioned the wisdom taking time I didn’t have to spare on a venture that would not only would never make a dime and was unlikely to ever to reach more than a few people.  I knew nothing about building a website. But I did it anyway. It was a sorry site, design-wise, but you have to start somewhere, right?  Fools rush in, especially with words like “coincidental cure” ringing in the head.