diseases in animals

Question
On autopsy of old-aged animals which lived their natural raw diets in the wild, is arthritis found? Bone loss found? And dental caries found?
Thanks!

Answer
Even though I am a holistic veterinarian and recommend feeding a raw meat/pureed vegetable diet to dogs I am not a great researcher. I did a little research and found that monitored wolves do show arthritis. They are prey to a lot of viruses. While the studies say they have a lot of parasites, I question the studies. If they are studying wolves with limited range that is likely to be true, but in the true wild they probably did not have significant parasites (I know that is true for horses who rarely graze in the same place).

I do know that often wolf teeth wear down, maybe before they would get caries. Some researchers have found caries, others find very few.

Bone loss is not routinely studied in domestic animals nor, as far as I know, in wild wolves.

I think your best sources would be dr. Jean Hofve (www.LittleBigCat.com) as she has done a lot of research.

Also Beth Taylor and Steve Brown, who have written books on raw feeding, including some studies on wolves.

Hope this was helpful to you