Raw Pet Food in a Home with Kids
Yes, you can absolutely feed raw with kids in the house — and a lot of our Denver customers do. The hygiene rules are exactly the same ones you already use when handling raw chicken for human cooking, just applied a little more deliberately because you've got curious humans crawling around the kitchen. Done thoughtfully, the risk profile is genuinely fine. Done sloppily, it's not great — but the same is true of raw chicken on a cutting board.
Here's the practical setup that works.
Set up a feeding zone, and use it
Pick one corner of the kitchen or laundry room. The pet's bowl lives there, and only there, for every meal. The "always in the same spot" rule does two things at once: it gets your kids used to the idea that the pet bowl isn't a toy (same way they learn the stove is hot), and it gives you a single small area to keep clean. We've seen this work even with crawling 1-year-olds — kids learn boundaries faster than people give them credit for.
The pet bowl going down on the floor in random spots around the house is the actual problem, not raw food. So solve that first.
Keep the bowls boring
Stainless or ceramic, not plastic — plastic scratches and harbors bacteria in the grooves. Wash with soap and hot water after every meal, or run them through the dishwasher. Air dry rather than towel dry; towels are basically bacteria distribution systems.
If you've got two pets, two bowls. Don't share, and don't reuse a dirty bowl for "just a quick top-up."
Wash human hands. Boring, important.
Three handwash moments to make automatic:
- After portioning food and feeding the pet
- After picking up the bowl post-meal
- After picking up stool on walks (this matters most for crawling-baby households)
That's the whole list. Toddlers' hands too — same rules, scaled down. We're not talking about surgical scrubbing, just normal "you handled meat, now wash" hygiene.
Stool pickup, especially in the yard
This is the one situation where raw-fed pets need slightly more attention than kibble-fed ones, because raw-fed pets do shed bacteria in their stool for a few days at a time. The actual mitigation is simple: pick up promptly, especially in the first 7-10 days while you're transitioning a new pet onto raw, and especially in any yard area where a baby might crawl.
Outdoor bacterial counts drop quickly after sun and air exposure — within minutes for most of it — but earlier pickup is just better with crawling babies in the house. After a few weeks of raw feeding the bacterial shedding settles to a low baseline that's not meaningfully different from a kibble-fed dog who licked something off the sidewalk.
What we wouldn't do
A short list of things to actively avoid:
- Letting a toddler share food with the pet from the bowl. They shouldn't be sharing food with the pet at all, raw or not, but it's worth saying out loud.
- Skipping handwashing because the pet looks healthy. A healthy raw-fed pet still sheds bacteria — that's normal and not a problem, as long as you wash up after.
- Stopping raw feeding because of a viral "don't feed raw with kids" social media post. The actual literature on this is much more measured than the viral posts suggest. Read our salmonella myths guide for the actual risk picture.
The one situation where we do recommend not feeding raw is households with immune-compromised humans — chemo patients, transplant recipients, infants under 6 months. Healthy adults and kids are fine; medically-vulnerable individuals are a different conversation.
Read the salmonella myths guide → · See sourcing standards →