Raw pork

[Mollycat]

I am currently looking more closely at a home prepared diet for CKD Molly because renal diets are proving expensive and unpopular. Madam won't eat organ meat or bones, making this more challenging, until recently, when Felini brought out Felini Renal. Molly loves raw pork mince, which so many sources say should not be fed to cats. So I have spent the morning looking for some truth or at least enough science to allow me to come to a conclusion I am happy with. And being that kind of person, I thought I'd share.

Felini, which is German and is only labelled in German, have helpfully provided their leaflet in English and that is available here https://www.futterado.de/english/ but the key point in the pork research was Do not feed raw pork or wild boar. Why?

The answer is the risk of transmission of the Aujeszky's virus, also known as Pseudorabies. According to DAERA (Northern Ireland) there is a long list of symptoms in pigs and for all other species including cats and dogs the list runs very simply - 1 Neurological signs, 2 Death. Not nice. Dig a little further and the UK and Northern Ireland are Aujeszky-free zones and have been for some years, and as a Notifiable Disease we would know very quickly should anything change. So why the different advice in Germany?

It seems the simple answer is wild boar, which presumably means the warning also applies in Poland, France, indeed most of mainland Europe. But in the UK and Ireland where we do not have wild boar, Aujeszky-free also means no real risk of infection by wild to domestic pigs. It's not any kind of superior food standards here compared to the rest of Europe, just the absence of wild boar.

So hopefully anyone wanting to feed pork to their pets, raw or cooked, has a starting point from which to do your own research and draw your own conclusions. Molly will continue eating raw British pork for now.

[Ruth B]

I hate to have to say this, but there are Wild Boar in the UK.

My parents used to live in Monmouth and help out on the Dean Forest Railway, and the Forest of Dean is one of the areas in the UK that has Wild Boar. I believe the New Forest and some other areas of the South East may have populations as well.

The Wild Boar in the Forest of Dean, the population i know most about, were introduced about 20 years ago, when they escaped from a Boar farm, I believe animal rights orgaisations have also released animals into the forest as well. Technically they are not true Wild Boar, but are Feral Wild Boar as they are descended from Domestic Wild Boar, but you still don't want to mess with them. I'm guessing they probably don't have the virus as the Forest is well managed with famers keeping sheep free roaming through out it. so any sick or dead Boar would quickly be spotted and should be reported to the Forestry Commission. I know the Boar are also culled and the meat sold, so I would have thought they would have to keep a close check on things for that.

I know there was the old adage that you only should eat pork when there was an R in the month, which when you think about it takes out May, June, July and August, the hottest months of the year, i've heard it linked to tapeworm, which used to be endemic in pigs, and to the pork going off while it is hung, so I could see there being something in it.

[Mollycat]

Oh now I did not know that, I did hear of discussions considering reintroducing them and wolves to some parts but did not think there were any at all here. I stand corrected, thank you Ruth.

Yes I was always brought up on the tapeworm mantra but why would pork be targetted when beef is also a host? Unpleasant as a tapeworm lodger might be though, it is treatable. This virus sounds quite vicious.

[fjm]

Aujeszky's virus was last seen in the UK in 1989. It is a notifiable disease, like Foot and Mouth, and as it is not endemic the risk of UK pork being infected is extremely low, I would think. Trichinosis is also pretty rare these days, although I am another who grew up with the "never eat pork rare" mantra because of it!

[Ruth B]

The Boar can be considered more of an invasive species that a proper reintroduction. I know they have reintroduced Beavers to some areas, and there has been talk of reintroducing Wolves for years, I went to a presentation on it when I was doing my degree 30 years ago. The other one they are talking about and i would love to see is reintroducing the Lynx to the UK, and while i would love to see them here again, I do think we need to work hard on preserving the Wildcat, before we loose that one.

[Mollycat]

Funnily enough I was thinking it might not be too clever when you look at how deer need to be managed in the absence of predators to add boar to the mix. I can't help thinking once we realise we messed up let's stop doing any more damage but I'm not convinced undoing what we've already done is sensible. I'm no expert, it just seems logical to me. When boar and wolves last roamed free there was a tenth of the human settlement, and so much more of the island was good habitat for them. I don't know, we've made such a dreadful mess and it's not improving.

[Ruth B]

Done correctly, with thought and planning, it can work. The Beavers are an excellent example, they were released in a carefully picked locations and monitored closely. Even some of the local farmers who had reservations about their reintroduction have admitted that they have actually help a lot with water management, evening out and slowing the flow down to prevent both floods and droughts. Both Mink and Boar have been released by Animal Rights Activists and both have been a disaster to wildlife.

Currently Boar and Deer populations have to be culled annually to prevent the boom and bust population trends that come with an uncontrolled population. i've nothing against culling and will quite happily eat boar or venison steaks when I can get them, but in the end a naturally balanced predator and prey ecosystem can actually be better for the species. We hear so much about farmers having problems with wild animals in other countries, and we need to seriously look at some of the options that have worked in those countries to protect the livestock before we ever consider reintroducing wolves or lynx here, and maybe we could also come up with some new ideas that might help everyone live alongside nature.

Of course, we can't for get that we might have a small population of medium to large cats already living in the UK, while a lot of the sightings of ABCs are obviously misidentification, there are enough that can't be explained away to make me wonder if they are already here. The Forest of Dean has had a number of sightings over the years, makes me wonder if there is already a cat or two snacking on raw pork in the country.