Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for Your Pet Food

Log on to TikTok these days, and you might find a broad-shouldered mastiff gnawing on a raw lamb head for breakfast. Or a pure-bred Bengal cat enjoying an “affordable” meal of freeze-dried goat and quail yolk. Conversely, it could be a rescue dog dining on whole dried quail, blood sprinkles, and a rabbit head—or a chocolate lab named Bear, with a quarter of a million followers, who savors raw beef trachea, goat lung, beef eyeball, duck foot, chicken heads, buffalo chunk, goat kefir, and myoglobin.

Social media influencer pet owners posting gory, niche pet food video content to farm likes and comments don’t necessarily represent the average consumer of raw pet food. But their rise to the top of the TikTok algorithm has real-world effects, as influencers enter into lucrative partnerships with raw food companies, and companies in turn use pseudoscientific health claims to promote their products. (“Did you know that the grains, chemicals, and byproducts in commercial pet food are killing your pet?” reads the website of Monarch Raw.)

As a result, a whole host of start-ups have brought conveniently frozen, freeze-dried, and dehydrated raw meat to your local Petco, cumulatively building an industry now estimated to be worth $3.1 billion. While the market is not new, as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decimate the FDA and attempt to normalize a less regulated and more hazardous food system, raw pet food—and the conspiracy-fueled wellness universe that drives it—is poised to become more mainstream than ever.

It might not be immediately obvious what is so bad about feeding pets raw meat: After all, weren’t they once wild animals? Most pets who eat raw diets “will do fine,” said veterinary infectious disease specialist Scott Weese. On the other hand, he added, “some won’t.” The dogs and cats we keep in our homes and backyards have been domesticated for a long, long time, and their digestive systems are different from their wild forebears’. Like paleo dieters, raw pet food proponents appeal to evolutionary wisdom to guide their food choices. But the reality is that natural selection can kill.

A carnivore diet isn’t great for human health, despite what the Liver King would have you believe. And even when it’s your pet eating raw meat, humans are at risk: Raw-fed animals shed pathogens even when they don’t seem sick. In recent months, the dangers have increased for all species. In December of 2024, at least five cats in Oregon and Los Angeles died of bird flu after consuming packets of Northwest Naturals and Monarch Raw pet food. Agriculture departments in Washington and Oregon announced another recall in February after two cats died of bird flu found in Wild Coast’s boneless free-range chicken formula. In Colorado, 11 cats came down with the flu after being exposed to raw poultry or pet food, ten of whom died; the “prey-based” Savage Cat Food has been linked to bird flu there and in New York.

Both wild and domestic cats are especially vulnerable to bird flu, and the virus can penetrate far beyond the respiratory tract to cause seizures and hemorrhages. Research from the University of Maryland shows that about two-thirds of house cats infected with the current strain will die—and every new infection increases the possibility of the virus’s becoming more transmissible to humans.

The FDA’s chief veterinary officer, Tristan Colonius, had been leading an investigation into the recent bird flu outbreak among pets. Then, on April 1, the Trump administration fired him, along with the vast majority of the Center for Veterinary Medicine’s leadership team, at least 130 of its employees, and 10,000 other Health and Human Services workers.

“The FDA has a zero-tolerance policy for pathogenic bacteria in any pet food,” said Amy Zalneraitis, a cofounder of the company WeFeedRaw, which started in 2009 as a DIY, door-to-door operation and now offers customers a monthly subscription plan. But that “zero-tolerance” policy was enforced unevenly even before Trump started hacking apart the federal government. While the FDA could in theory shut down a particular manufacturer, such a decision “is very rare and takes a huge amount of evidence,” said Laura Goodman, an infectious disease researcher at Cornell University. In 2023 and 2024, products from the raw pet food company Darwin’s tested positive for salmonella and for salmonella and listeria, respectively. Both times, the company refused to recall the affected foods, accusing the FDA of “flawed regulatory decision-making” and claiming that cooking or high-pressure processing would destroy most of their product’s “vital enzymes and vitamins,” which they claim can prevent arthritis, diabetes, and kidney disease.

While bird flu has sent raw food onto headlines in recent months, the raw pet food industry has long had to balance its obligations to a sometimes absolutist core audience with efforts to reach the mainstream. Steve Brown was one of the first people to mass-produce raw pet food in the US. The company he founded in 1998 (and sold in 2014) remains a major player in the industry, and he continues to stand behind what he calls an “ancestral” diet. At the same time, he has harsh words about “prey model” partisans who feed their pets whole dead animals, often with the fur still on. “It’s a cult,” he said. “They don’t want to look at science.”

Other start-ups and stalwarts like Stella & Chewy’s, Instinct, and WeFeedRaw tread a similarly fine line between dogma and expansion: continuing to rely on dubious claims about the benefits of raw meat, even as they embrace pathogen-reduction technologies like high-pressure processing and move away from what WeFeedRaw’s Amy Zalneraitis called the movement’s “severe and draconian” origins. On social media, WeFeedRaw promises that raw diets can “help slow down the aging process,” fearmongers about the pseudoscientific “leaky gut syndrome,” and suggests “detoxing” your pets with broccoli sprouts to prevent cancer. Most of their posts, though, emphasize smaller-scale claims, such as less smelly poop (a natural outcome of a low-fiber diet) and improved allergies.

“There have been very few controlled studies that actually verify these claims,” said researcher Laura Goodman, “and many, many studies pointing out all of the hazards associated with the raw products.” In 2014, the FDA found that 8 percent of raw cat and dog food samples contained salmonella and 16 percent contained listeria, compared to essentially none of the cooked food. In a smaller study from 2024, raw pet foods were found to be contaminated with strains of salmonella and e. coli that are resistant to antibiotics of last resort.

Health authorities warn consumers not to kiss their raw-fed pets, or let their pets lick them, but anyone who knows dogs and cats knows that can be quite the challenge. A 2022 study showed that pets can and do transmit antibiotic-resistant bacteria to their owners. In Canada, a yearslong outbreak of extremely drug-resistant salmonella associated with exposure to raw dog food sickened 44 people and hospitalized 13 from 2020 to 2024. In the UK, four people were hospitalized and one died in a 2017 e. coli outbreak linked to raw pet food. Given the risks, it’s not surprising that the FDA, CDC, and American Veterinary Medical Association all discourage feeding pets a raw diet.

Even before mass firings hit public health, the FDA was on track to miss deadlines for congressionally mandated food safety deadlines. Now, officials have plans to end routine food and drug inspections altogether. With less testing, “there’s going to be greater risk” for contamination, Goodman said.

It’s not surprising that pet food safety has ended up on the chopping block, given RFK Jr.’s affection for raw milk and laissez-faire attitude toward infectious disease. In July 2025, his once vice-presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited Raw Farm, LLC—California’s largest raw milk producer—and posted a laudatory video from its barn. On December 3, the state recalled every single one of Raw Farm’s milk and cream products after multiple tests came out positive for bird flu—including both of its raw milk–based pet food products: raw kefir and raw milk “meal toppers.” RFK Jr. asked the company’s CEO to join the new government as an adviser. Then, in January, five cats in LA died of bird flu after being fed Raw Farm’s milk.

Although Jordan Peterson and the other human carnivores have fueled RFK Jr’s recent rise to power, another subset of people have been advocating for the healing power of meat since the Clinton era. Australian veterinarian Ian Billinghurst kicked off the raw pet food movement in 1993 when he published Give Your Dog a Bone, a book that laid out the scientifically dubious principles still ubiquitous today: namely, the ideas that nutrients in regular, dry kibble are indigestible and even poisonous; that pet dogs’ digestive systems are much the same as wolves’; and that raw meat can prevent everything from allergies to epilepsy to cancer in domestic animals.

In recent years, Billinghurst’s recommendations have become increasingly extreme, as he has espoused a ketogenic diet for the treatment of cancer in both dogs and humans—sometimes in lieu of chemotherapy and radiation. Much like RFK Jr., Billinghurst exploits existing resentment toward Big Pharma to encourage a much broader skepticism of science at large. Because most research is funded by the pet food and pharmaceutical industries, his website claims, following scientific advice will generally result in “devastating” damage to pets’ health.

Most consumers, though, don’t start off so doctrinaire. Instead, they try raw food because of the belief that unprocessed food is superior, because the veterinary care system has failed to resolve their pet’s health conditions, or just because they want their pet to live as long as possible, and they believe eating raw will make it happen.

When Kiki Knopp’s cat Gandalf was dealing with skin and gastrointestinal issues, she told me, she was willing to try anything, and raw food helped. She thought it might help prevent urine crystals in another cat, and she liked the idea that it replicated what their ancestors might have eaten. Plus, she had 11 animals—she breeds and shows Cornish Rex cats—and eating raw made them less gassy. Everything seemed to be fine.

Then, in early February, Gandalf became feverish. Knopp called her vet right away. When the bloodwork came back Saturday, it seemed okay, but something else was wrong: Gandalf was looking a little wobbly. Things only got worse from there. Knopp was syringing water into the cat’s mouth every day, trying to keep her hydrated, but Gandalf had stopped eating and was unable to walk. “I knew by Monday night that I was going to lose her,” Knopp said. She scheduled home euthanasia for the next morning, and slept on the couch, listening to two of her other cats’ fast, labored breathing. “That was when I really started panicking,” she said.

Knopp was at the vet with the other sick cats when she got a call from the Oregon Department of Health, asking her to turn over her pets’ bodies for bird flu testing. She called her pet store, and learned that a December batch of Wild Coast Raw’s chicken formula had been recalled due to contamination with bird flu—the batch that she’d been feeding her cats.

In January, before Trump’s rampage across HHS, the FDA announced that it would require that manufacturers of dog and cat food account for bird flu risk in their food safety plans. Many of the companies affected by the recent spate of bird flu cases were already using a smorgasbord of pathogen-reduction protocols—some more established than others. Wild Coast used lactic acid, which can help extend shelf life but doesn’t replace cooking. Savage Pet used an ozone treatment, which can help target surface contaminants, said Scott Weese, but is not a well-validated way to eliminate pathogens throughout a product. Northwest Naturals, meanwhile, used high-pressure processing, a technology that has become increasingly popular among the biggest raw food companies. (At its best, HPP can substantially reduce many pathogens, although it hasn’t been proven to eliminate this latest avian flu strain. An investigation into the Northwest Naturals batch failed to turn up additional evidence of bird flu, and the company has terminated the recall.)

When she got off the phone with the Oregon Department of Health, Kiki Knopp saw her cats’ X-rays. Both had pneumonia, and one of her cat Sekhmet’s lungs, she said, was “solid white.” Within the hour, she was driving them to intensive care. One died. Another was hospitalized for six days. “I take better care of the animals than I take care of myself,” Knopp said. And raw food had been working so well for her cats that she hadn’t been too worried about the risk of food-borne illness. But bird flu has changed that.

Knopp isn’t anti-raw—she would go back if the flu weren’t an issue—but right now, she’s telling everyone she knows to stop feeding it to their pets. Sometimes people are receptive, she said. Sometimes they’re so used to tuning out people who tell them raw food is dangerous that her warnings just sound like more noise.

There’s been one change, at least, since Knopp and others lost their pets—last month, Wild Coast announced that it had begun fully cooking its poultry recipes. It’s unclear if other companies will follow suit. When I reached out to the FDA for more information, my e-mail bounced back with an away message: “I’m no longer part of the Office of Media Affairs due to the recent reduction in force.”