Being new on this forum, I thought I would share my opinion on raw food.
I have used it myself -sometimes for prolonged periods of times- and it undeniably has positive sides, the main being having full control on what your dog eats and avoiding unnecessary processing (if dog's digestive system doesn't required meat to be cooked, why bother?).
My main point of disagreement is the so-called ancestral diet: wolves eat raw meat only, dogs evolved from wolves, hence dogs should eat the same as wolves. If I apply the same train of thoughts to ourselves, I obtain the following: primates are frugivores (fruit eaters - they do occasionally eat meat but it's quite rare) humans evolved from primates (around 99% of genes in common, very similar to wolves and dogs) hence humans should eat fruit. Despite the recent vegan and vegetarian currents, I still believe that humans are true omnivores and veganism is more of an ethical issue rather than a true nutritional requirement... or at least the scientific community hasn't reached an unanimous agreement on the topic.
The point is: humans differ in living habits from any other primate on one main topic. At some point in the last 20000 years we learned to farm the land and herd some animals of pacific nature and use their products as source of food (milk, eggs, meat) or general protection (wool, leather), basically finding a replacement for the energy consuming activity of hunting.
Very similarly, contemporary dogs' living habits differ from wolves on one main topic: they scavenge rather than hunting (it's no surprise that before genomes were mapped, dogs were thought to be closely related to coyotes, given they are both scavengers of the canidae family). This change happened even before humans learned herding: some estimates go as far back as 50000 years, when humans were nomads and used dogs' enhanced senses as warning against predators, giving them food leftovers in exchange -again, a species found a way to replace the energy consuming and risky activity of hunting, using another natural talent.
This post is becoming too lengthy for an easy reading so I'll cut to the conclusions: even though wolves (particularly gray wolves - canis lupus) and dogs (canis familiaris) share a very large amount of their genome, evolution played a massive role in transforming dogs in a way that raw meat is not a strict nutritional requirement anymore. I repeat, there are positive sides like keeping control of what is being fed (particularly useful for dogs with food intolerances, like in my case), and it is a great, easy way of providing calcium via raw bones. But aside from that, is really more of a personal choice rather a real benefit for the dog.
All this is my humble opinion and I am entirely open to pacific debate
