Adding goat milk to pet food: The latest raw food fad?

Cereal with milk for pets

The basic trend is relatively simple. The topper, or sometimes just goat milk itself, is poured over the top of dry kibble in order to moisten it and provide additional nutritional benefits, with blogs and retailers promoting goat milk as the universal milk. Goat milk toppers are increasingly available from specialised websites and major retailers, such as Petco. But some pet nutritionists are sceptical of the myriad health benefits attributed to the feeding of goat milk.

The popularity of goat milk toppers seems to originate in the work of Ian Billinghurst, an Australia-based veterinarian and author, who is often cited by those promoting the benefits associated with feeding goat milk. Although he himself did not pioneer the trend, Billinghurst said his 1993 book Give Your Dog a Bone on raw pet diets included a discussion of milk that compared goat milk to cow milk, and pasteurised milk to unpasteurised milk. However, the comparison was “a very minute part of what I spoke about, and I don’t think I ever mentioned goat milk again except in the context of raising puppies”.

More digestible?

Nevertheless, readers of Billinghurst’s work apparently latched onto the idea that goat milk was a more digestible, ‘complete’ food for their dogs, and demand for goat milk products grew. Primal Pet Foods, a US-based pet food manufacturer that also cites Billinghurst’s BARF (biologically appropriate raw food) diet as part of its inspiration, introduced its own raw goat milk product in 2014. Goat milk remains one of their most popular offerings, according to Kyle Frautnick, senior director of marketing for Primal Pet Foods. The ongoing success led the company to introduce four flavoured goat milks in 2020, with options such as organic blueberry and pumpkin spice.

Hydration benefits

Goat milk, Frautnick said, offers a simple solution to pet owners looking to ‘upgrade’ basic kibble diets by adding hydration and nutrients missing from conventional dry kibbles, without having to switch to a fully raw diet. “Hydration and moisture are important to a pet’s diet,” Frautnick said, “and we saw an opportunity to launch a product that would be beneficial not only to our raw feeder base of frozen and freeze-dried raw products, but also to expand our audience to traditional feeders of canned and kibble.”

While multiple blogs promote the idea of health benefits tied to goat milk, veterinarians question that the goat milk itself is responsible. Billinghurst said the benefit derived from adding goat milk to kibble likely had less to do with what is in the milk, and more with what is not in the pet food.

“I would suspect there is some truth to it, putting real food over something dogs are not designed to eat,” he said. “We can only guess at the benefits it may be supplying, but we can guess it’s better quality protein and better quality fats, particularly if it’s raw.”

Raw risks

But Richard Hill, an associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida, cautioned that raw goat milk can contain potentially harmful bacteria, including salmonella and listeria. Using goat milk to add hydration to dogs’ diets is unnecessary, he said, because dogs naturally increase their intake of water after a dry or canned meal. Research into whether dry foods are problematic for cats is ongoing, he said, because cats do not necessarily drink as much water as would be available in a wet meal. But there is as yet no objective data to say whether cats require a supplement like a goat milk topper.

While goat milk is more digestible than cow milk, Hill said, adult dogs and cats lack the ability to digest large amounts of any kind of milk without developing diarrhoea. “Goat milk also contains lactose but about 20% less than cow milk so [they] could consume slightly more,” Hill said. “But I would not advise giving lots of milk of any sort.”