Is the Raw Feeding Course from Dogs Naturally Magazine worth your money?

In April this year, I took the “Raw Dog Food Nutrition” course from Dogs Naturally Magazine University and got certified as a “Raw Dog Food Nutrition Specialist”.
I didn’t initially plan to take this course. However, Dogs Naturally Magazine (DNM) made the course free for a few weeks during quarantine, so I seized the opportunity!
Some time ago, I told you on Instagram that I was going to write an article on what I thought of the course: now, 6 months later, here it is. Why did it take me so long to write it? It's because I, meanwhile, registered for a feline and canine nutrition course at the Southern Illinois University, and I wanted to start this course before writing the article. So, now, I have both a term of comparison with another course and I also gained better knowledge in animal nutrition!

What is the course like?

The Raw Dog Food Nutrition course is delivered in video format and Dana Scott, the founder of DNM, is the lecturer. The course is organized into 6 modules and each module is broken down in several lessons. There is a dedicated video for each lesson in the course. The slides which are shown in the video are available for download: note, however, that they don’t contain the transcript of the video. After completing each module there's a quiz to pass. When you register, DNM indicates that the recommended completion time for the whole course is 6 weeks but, if you fully commit to it, they say it can be easily done in 3-7 days.
It took me 10 days to successfully complete it at a normal pace, taking into account that I also work a full-time job.
The quizzes at the end of each module are multiple-choice questions, with 3 or 4 questions each. The final quiz is also a multiple-choice question, with a total of 75 questions.
I personally found the quizzes very easy to pass and, apparently, if you fail the final quiz you can try to pass it again for up to three times. If you fail all your attempts, you will need to retake all the courses before trying to test again, meaning that, while it can take some time, it’s virtually impossible to fail the course!
To give you an idea of the course content, here are the titles of 6 modules: The Ecosystem, Nutritional Components, The Digestive System, The Modern Primordial Diet, Building The Raw Diet, and Feeding The Raw Diet.

What did I think about the course?

Overall, I think you can learn a lot of useful things if you are feeding raw or want to feed raw and want to learn a bit more about nutrition.
It really provides a good introduction to the science of nutrition, with explanations of the digestive system, of the different micro and macronutrients, the different standards to which a diet can be balanced, and the mathematics often needed to balance a diet.
It’s also interesting to get a deeper explanation of what’s behind a raw diet.
However, among all the good information, there are several questionable pieces of advice. I will give you a few examples (not an exhaustive list) below.

In the lessons about vitamins, some “unofficial” vitamins are presented: 

• Amygdalin as Vitamin B17: a quick research will show you that it has been falsely promoted as a cancer cure and that eating amygdalin can lead to cyanide poisoning.

• Pangamic Acid as Vitamin B15: this acid doesn't have a standard chemical identity and it seems to be an example of quack remedy.

In the part about transitioning, the misinformation that dogs have a higher pH when fed industrial pet food is also presented, while we saw in this blog article on mixing raw food and kibbles that this theory is not backed up by science.

It’s also repeated several times during the course that a good source of copper to feed is pork liver: while it’s true that pork liver is rich in copper, the copper in pork liver is not bioavailable to cats or dogs. This means that eating pork liver won’t, in fact, provide any copper to our pets.

I find this particularly problematic in such an introductory course: in fact, I only spotted these mistakes because I've already had some knowledge of nutrition. If you don’t have any background in nutrition when taking this course (which is probably the case for most people) you won’t be able to notice the misinformation. And having to fact-check the content of a course is not what you would expect to do, especially for a paid course. It also makes me doubt the rest of the content: how many other misinformation did I learn and didn’t realize that it was misinformation?

Finally, the course is very in line with the philosophy of Dogs Naturally Magazine, as explained on their website: “At Dogs Naturally, we want the world to be a safer place for dogs. Our holistic vets and experts help you give your dog the life he deserves … a life that’s free of chemicals, drugs, processed foods, and unnecessary vaccines.”
The website also promotes alternative science/medicine such as homeopathy, essential oils, … So if you decide to take this course, you should be aware that it has a strong bias toward alternative science.
“Mother Nature knows best”, is often the leading motto during this course. So, if you agree with this you will probably like this course. I personally don’t entirely agree with this philosophy: in nature, wild animals don’t live as long as domestic animals and often suffer from various health issues including malnutrition. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to keep the diet of our pets as close as possible as what they would naturally eat while taking into account everything that science has to teach us, in order to provide the best possible diet.

Would I recommend this course?

I would not recommend this course for the following reasons.

For the amount and the questionable quality of the content, I find the price really expensive (395$), as the course can be completed in a few days. I personally wouldn't have taken it if it wasn’t free when I passed it. The price is particularly high especially when compared with the course I’m doing at Southern Illinois University, which indeed costs 1500$ (4 times the price of DNM), but it is 6 months long! The amount of content provided by the Southern Illinois University is also much more substantial, with numerous slides with audio comments from the teacher and additional readings. Moreover, as the course is provided by a real university, you have an actual teacher to whom you can ask questions or additional explanations. The evaluation after each chapter is also much more challenging, with open questions and actual diet formulation exercises.

Additionally, the DNM course, as its name indicates, it only focuses on dogs. Because of the similarities between cats and dogs, a lot can be applied to cats and you will find a few information about cats sporadically. However, if you are interested only in cats, this would be another reason not to take this course.

While it provides a lot of information on nutrition and raw diet, I don’t think that passing this certification makes anyone a qualified pet nutritionist for dogs. It is only 9 hours long, and the course doesn't evaluate your ability to make a balanced diet for dogs, as you are only evaluated on your knowledge of the course. Anyone paying for the course will get the “certification”, as it’s impossible to fail the course.

Furthermore, Dogs Naturally Magazine University is not an accredited university, but just a magazine! (At the moment, when I’m writing this article in September 2020, it seems that Dogs Naturally Magazine University rebranded to "Dogs Naturally Magazine Pro", maybe to avoid this confusion?).

If you want to know more about nutrition, I would recommend instead the course provided by Raw Fed and Nerdy. The suggested price is 50$, but you can pay as much as you can. The information provided is science-based and reliable. You won’t get a diploma, but I believe that knowledge has more value than a certification.

I hope this article was helpful if you planned to take the DNM course. However, keep in mind that this was just my personal point of view!