Feed your dog/cat a homemade raw diet. This one has been so thoroughly disproved it's not even funny, but the myth just. won't. die.

I'm an animal trainer who has worked with a variety of species, including big cats and wolves. I used to believe in the raw diet for pets thing because I had a bad experience with a very special animal I had worked with.

I had a bird that was basically the perfect companion. She was funny, smart, affectionate, etc. She knew how to change the channel on the TV and would change it to something with birds on it and then talk at the birds on the TV. She loved popcorn and I had trained her to do all kinds of neat stuff, including chase people on command as an "attack birdy".

She died as the result of contaminated pet food. Chinese bird seed got her very sick and there was nothing we do could. It was hard to watch her die. So, working with all these other critters I noticed that they often fed them raw meat as a part of their diet.

I became distrustful of commercial pet food and ate up the raw dog food stuff. After all, my wolves ate raw deer forleg and my lions ate entire carcasses.

It's kind of funny because there is this huge naturalistic fallacy in animal training that has been debunked called Dominance Training. The whole idea is that you should "train your dog like a wolf". I have spent my career debunking this idea because it's wrong and harmful, yet here I was falling for a naturalistic fallacy of my own.

Dogs are not wolves. I know this. I have seen the differences in their behavior with my own eyes, and explained the differences to uneducated people who were under the impression that dogs are behaviorally similar to wolves. Yet, I'm not immune from being dead wrong.

I'm glad that I'm a skeptic by heart, because when people presented me with evidence that I was wrong, I did my research and changed my mind.

I hope that in the future, when you see clients that believe this bullshit, you remember that they aren't trying to piss you off and just try your best to explain to them why the idea is wrong. Usually when people believe weird stuff like this, it's because they had a bad experience or they are fearful.