Loading
To pet potions, add homeopathy and acupuncture, laser therapy and herbal tonics, detoxes and titre testing – the latter sold as an alternative to vaccination.
“It’s a huge thing. It’s a cultural shift,” says Sunshine Coast-based vet Dr Hubert Hiemstra. “Pet owners are less and less inclined to say ‘There’s your bowl of kibble for the day, be happy with that’.”
Hiemstra is among a group of vets who are deeply concerned this boom is not making our pets happier or healthier – or doing anything other than increasing our spend on them.
“Pets are part of the family – you’ve got your fur baby – so vitamin whatever for me, and vitamin whatever for the dog,” says Dr Tanya Stephens, a long-time vet based in NSW and a fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. “People are wasting their money.”
Graham disagrees. “There is a lot of science around, as well as case studies,” he says, showing that his range of supplements – which were specially formulated by an animal nutritionist – do work. “Each ingredient, she used scientific studies to back that up,” he says.
Before there were dog vitamins, there was nutritionally complete pet food. And before that, a lot of dogs and cats got sick due to poor diet.
The prevailing wisdom prior to complete foods was that dogs and cats were natural carnivores, so they needed a meat-based diet. “They were simply being fed meat,” says David Fraser, a professor of animal science at the University of Sydney. “Veterinarians were seeing every day animals suffering from all sorts of problems related to malnutrition.”
Modern pet foods contain meat but also grains, vegetables and various vitamins and minerals, and are generally formulated to meet nutritional standards, says Fraser.
“Food that is fed to cats and dogs, it can be the most expensive brand or the cheapest brand, but it will be able to provide all their nutrients,” says Fraser. “You can be reasonably confident you don’t need anything extra.”
Loading
The same advice is given to us humans: if you’re eating a healthy diet, you likely don’t need a multivitamin. (Of course, people haven’t listened. Australia’s complementary medicines sector was worth $6.3 billion in 2025.)
But Graham says that most pets “can’t get all the vitamins and minerals they need from food alone”. Animals with particular health conditions – like joint pain – needed particular additional nutrients, he says.
As pet ownership is growing fast – pets now outnumber people on our continent – so too is the alternative pet health market. Grand View Research projects it will be worth $150 million by 2030.
Pet foods that claim to treat a disease, condition or injury generally need be registered with the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA).
But there is a wide exemption, known as the END (excluded nutritional or digestive products) – pet foods that merely claim to “manage” a disease do not require registration.
Among the pet supplement industry’s bestsellers are joint support pills, which often contain glucosamine.
On the basis of human evidence, the Australian Rheumatology Association directly recommends against taking glucosamine because it does not help arthritis and can be harmful.
A 2022 systematic review of natural health products for dog and cat osteoarthritis, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, found omega-3-boosted diets and supplements were useful, but other nutraceuticals – including chondroitin and glucosamine – either did not stack up or lacked evidence.
In human medicine, researchers conduct randomised controlled trials and then combine their data in systematic reviews to work out the true effect of a drug or supplement. High-quality trials in animal medicine are few and far between, and systematic reviews are virtually non-existent.
Many veterinarians now offer “holistic vet” services, including acupuncture, Chinese herbal therapies, or cold laser therapy, which is claimed to speed up healing and cut inflammation.
Several clinics also offer “titre testing” as an “alternative to vaccination”; the test checks antibody levels against vaccine-preventable diseases. If they are high enough, a recommended vaccination can be skipped.
While nearly all dogs and cats have been vaccinated at least once, survey data does suggest a level of vaccine hesitancy: about two-thirds of pet owners say their animal does not need one. Some 31 per cent of owners either thought vaccination was not safe or were undecided.
The Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.
Read the full article here
