More to the point, the Pottenger experiment was hopelessly flawed and wholly disohonest as its whole point was to try to mistakenly prove that raw cow's dairy was somehow supposedly healthy for cats. That was why they deliberately did not do an experiment comparing cats being fed on a 100% raw-meat-diet to cats being fed on mostly raw dairy as they knew the cats on the 1o00% raw meat diet would be much healthier.
The only thing that the Pottenger experiment proved was that if taurine wasn't present in the diet, cats quickly became degenerated to the point of infertility/birth-defects etc. and cooking was shown to destroy taurine in foods. That was it.
Not a stretch at all. Any decent scientist would naturally have included an experiment comparing cats fed on an all-raw-meat-diet to ones fed on 100% raw-milk diet. The very fact that this rather obvious scientific experiment was never carried out can only be due to either Pottenger being hopelessly incompetent as a scientist, in which case much of his evidence is highly questionable, or an outright fraud who was, shamefully, trying to pretend that raw milk was as or more healthy for cats than raw meats.
The claim is not that raw cow milk is a COMPLETE food for cats (it is too low in taurine), but that it is merely a HEALTHY food.
Analogy: You'll probably agree with me that raw fruit and raw meat are both healthy foods for humans, but that a diet of too much fruit and not enough meat leads to sub-optimal health. (I'm not trying to start an argument with zero-carbers. This is specifically addressed to Tyler who eats fruit).
I agree that Pottenger probably knew that a diet of too much raw cow milk, and not enough raw meat, did not lead to optimally healthy cats. The main focus of Pottenger's experiment was not the comparison of milk to meat, but the comparison of raw food to processed food. Pottenger wanted all cats to get at least some raw food (the idea being, that raw food may counter some of the negative effects of the processed food being tested, and slow down the degeneration). That's why he used mixed meat+milk diets, instead of all-meat or all-milk. This was not some kind of conspiracy to hide the fact that meat is better than cow milk for cats.
Pottenger spent ten years doing experiments, which involved very many cats. If he wanted to compare 100% raw meat to 100% raw milk diets, he would have needed even more time and resources. He had to make some choices about what experiments to do.
This is an absurd claim as there are plenty of dairy-intolerant people around the world who have not gone in for junk foods for most of their lives, going in for home-cooking or whatever.
Some people report bad symptoms from raw dairy, even if they consume it in small amounts, much less than 1/3 of their diet. This has me wondering -- if raw dairy, even in small amounts, is so bad for humans, it should be even worse for cats, and other mammals, who have no evolutionary experience with dairy. But in feeding experiments where raw milk is added to a mammal's healthy diet, problems do not show up. I find this quite puzzling.
The only explanation that I can think of, is that raw-dairy-intolerance is caused by the unnatural environment in which humans have been living. Maybe it goes further back than the last few generations which grew up on industrial food. "home-cooking or whatever" may not be as bad as industrial food, but eating cooked whole foods (grain in particular) is unnatural, and I suspect that it leads to raw dairy intolerance.
If you do not agree with this, then how do you explain that raw dairy does not cause problems in animal feeding experiments?
Finally, I am appalled at the language you use to describe Pottenger. The man spent countless years contributing to human knowledge, and has many publications. Have you read all his scientific papers? I'm talking about the original papers, not the book "Pottenger's Cats". They probably contain detailed explanations and rationales for why he chose the diets that he did, and why he focused on the experiments that he did. Until you read those papers, you have no right to judge him, and call him "incompetent" or "fraud".
