Ian Billinghurst is an Australian veterinarian who graduated with an honours degree in Veterinary Science from Sydney University in 1976. Ian had previously graduated with a degree in Agricultural Science from Sydney University (majoring in Agronomy) in 1966. Prior to pursuing his veterinary studies, Ian worked as both an agricultural scientist (agronomic research) and a high school teacher. Whilst teaching, Ian studied for and obtained his Diploma in Education. Since graduating as a veterinary surgeon in 1976, he has worked full time as a (mostly) companion animal practitioner, with a break of about 18 months in the late 1980s to pursue research prior to writing his landmark book Give Your Dog a Bone.

The inspiration to pursue Evolutionary Nutrition as a consuming passion arose from many sources.

Ian's high school years were spent at an Agricultural High School (Hurlstone) on the western outskirts of Sydney, chosen because of his love of plants, animals and all things natural. There was never any question that his career would be both biological and medical.

The years spent studying Agricultural Science and teaching, and the studies in education, all helped shape Ian's unique approach to things veterinary, particularly regarding nutrition and disease. That early education fostered an understanding of the fundamental role that sound nutrition - translated today as Evolutionary Nutrition - plays in health. This concept dominates his writing, lecturing and research as well as his day-to-day veterinary practice, which continues today in his companion animal practice in Bathurst, New South Wales Australia.

After being in practice for about six years, Ian decided to heed the advice of his veterinary training and feed his own pets using scientifically formulated complete and balanced commercial pet food. It should be noted at this point that during the late 1970's and early 1980's, many Australian dogs and cats were fed predominantly on a diet based on butchers meat and bone together with human food scraps direct from the table. Ian, for the first time in his life, decided to abandon this time-honoured method of feeding in favour of the method he had been trained to endorse - grain-based commercial pet food. His veterinary training had taught him that a diet based on raw meaty bones and household scraps was inadequate and that commercial pet food was the ultimate in pet nutrition. He accepted that theory as a possibility because he was looking for optimal nutrition for the family pets, which were now involved in breeding and showing. The food chosen was one of the 'best available' brands of commercial pet food and Ian looked forward to even healthier animals than he already had!

Over the next four to six months, his supremely healthy family pets began to develop a range of problems very like the ones he was seeing in his client's animals. However, it took a number of years of watching this decline before the realisation hit him that something was going terribly wrong with his own animals.

In 1984, Ian began studies in acupuncture and was introduced to a range of complementary healing practices, including whole food nutrition. He read Juliette de Bairacli Levy's book and her approach brought him full circle to his old practice of feeding cats and dogs with meat, bones, organ meats and other healthy food scraps. He realised these were far superior to the approved veterinary method of relying on commercial pet food.

Following the switch to his old method of feeding, Ian did not have to wait long for results. Like most people experiencing the incredible improvement in health from eating raw whole foods, he had not realized the extent to which the health of his family's pets had deteriorated on commercial pet food. He also re-discovered that apart from being simple and easy, this method of feeding was also very cheap compared to buying the commercial products.

By now, it had become clear to Ian that commercial pet foods not only did not promote good health, they produced positively bad health. This dismal failure of commercial pet foods to keep his pets healthy forced him to read whatever he could find on the subject of nutrition. He needed to understand nutrition both at a fundamental level and also at a very practical level. He was also looking for answers to the question - "Why does commercially produced pet food cause health problems?" He read all the current pet health/nutrition books of the time, books by Pat Lazarus, Dr's Pitcairn and Belfield together with numerous others on human nutrition.

Eventually however, it was his own experiences that lead him to the very simple truth. Raw bones with meat, offal, vegetable scraps and other healthy foods - which had always produced positive good health in pet animals - were very close to the evolutionary diet of cats and dogs. These were foods which our pets had evolved over millions of years to require. Their genetic background would not allow them to thrive on cooked food based on grain. They would not thrive on foods adulterated by chemicals. He realised that by cooking and processing foods to stop spoilage, the elements being removed or destroyed were usually the very ones which promoted health. The evolutionary approach to nutrition was obvious and a matter of common sense. It was also first class science.

Ian realised that small animal nutrition was one area where his veterinary training had let him down. He began to re-think the way he answered the often asked question, "What should we feed our cat or our dog?"

Having witnessed commercial pet food's health destroying abilities first hand, together with the health promoting benefits of an evolutionary diet, Ian began to share this information with his clients. When clients adopted these ideas, Ian noted improvements across a broad spectrum of health issues. Puppies grew beautifully and trouble free, skin conditions disappeared, arthritic dogs began to walk freely, breeders' problems began to dissipate, old dogs became young again, animals with dry unhealthy coats developed a full and lustrous appearance. Many previously unwell pets became totally drug free.

Over the years that followed Ian noticed that pets fed this way were less likely to develop cancer and other devastating diseases of degeneration such as diabetes, renal and heart disease.

It slowly dawned on Ian that many of the disease problems he was seeing in cats and dogs that he had spent five years as a veterinary undergraduate learning to diagnose and treat, were due in large part to nothing other than poor nutrition, principally commercial pet foods. This meant that many of these diseases could be eliminated, easily and cheaply, by switching cats and dogs to a raw whole food or evolutionary type diet. Clearly this was both a revolutionary thought and an incredible revelation. Ian wanted to tell everybody, although he foresaw major problems. Would his fellow vets accept this feeding philosophy for pet animals, given that vets rely heavily on ill health in their patients for their daily bread?

By the mid to late 1980's, nutrition and health issues had taken pre-eminence in the thought processes of Ian Billinghurst. Some would say he had become obsessed. By the end of the 1980s, Ian had spent years correlating the state of health of his client's pets with what those pets had been fed. The results were consistent. Healthy pets lived and thrived on a diet which had, as its base, raw meat, bones and other healthy food scraps, while commercial pet foods were a major cause of ill health in his patients.

It should be noted that vets are not trained to seek basic causes of disease. The degenerative processes which ultimately produce disease are simply viewed as an inevitable part of the aging process and rarely seen as problems that could be prevented through improved nutrition. To further reinforce this line of thinking, veterinary students are given the impression that modern processed pet food is so advanced it could not possibly be the cause of disease at this basic biochemical level. Instead their training focuses on diagnosis and treatment. Their principal reason for being requiring to understand the role of physiological processes in disease causation is to understand how drugs work. With the exception of the parasitic diseases and those for which vaccinations are available, vet students (and therefore veterinarians), are trained to believe that disease in cats and dogs is inevitable, not in any way preventable. The idea of trying to prevent most of the diseases seen in cats and dogs using nutrition was, and still is, a foreign concept in veterinary circles. By way of contrast, the concept of disease prevention via nutrition was - and is - well accepted in farm animals used to produce meat, milk, wool and eggs.

By the mid to late 1980's it had become obvious to Ian that those - never discussed - basic causes of disease had their roots in poor and inappropriate nutrition. He was also aware that while most medical practitioners and veterinary surgeons had no idea of this concept, many of the patients and clients of those two healing professions had begun to embrace this approach to health for themselves, if not for their pets.

Ian's first attempt to spread the 'Word' was via a newsletter circulated by the Post-Graduate Foundation in Veterinary Science of the University of Sydney. It reached every vet in Australia. The year was 1986 and Ian's words were greeted with deafening silence. The next attempt was a paper circulated at a Post-Graduate conference in small animal nutrition in 1988 - hosted by a company called Hills, a company not at that stage - but soon to become - well known in veterinary circles in Australia. This attempt also passed without comment by the profession.

Ian's ideas were ignored because veterinary dogma holds that small animal nutrition is something left to the experts employed by pet food companies. That the "so called" super premium products are the pinnacle of pet nutrition, and if the manufacturers of super premium pet foods and prescription diets don't know the answers, then it would be impossible for any one else to know.

However, from Ian's perspective, his message was too important to let die. He decided that if the vets could not be convinced, let alone tell pet owners, he would have to educate the pet owners directly. This required a book. The aim of the proposed book was simple. It was to free pet owners from the tyranny of only being able or allowed or only being trained to feed their pets commercial pet food.

Ian wanted people who lived with cats and dogs to know that there was a healthy, simple, cheap and viable alternative to processed pet food. He knew that because most books on nutrition are deadly boring, difficult to understand and highly impractical, it was important that his book be easy to understand, highly practical and hopefully entertaining. He wanted people to read it, understand it, be changed by it and act upon it.

There was much to tell, because not one of the books he had read was saying what he was experiencing. There was not one book which promoted the feeding of raw bones together with raw meat, offal, eggs, dairy products, vegetables etc. All the books on so-called natural feeding relied heavily on grains and often specifically warned against feeding bones, which flew one hundred percent in opposition to what Ian was experiencing on a daily basis in his veterinary practice.

Because cats are obligate carnivores while dogs are carnivores and omnivores, it was decided they each needed their own book, and the dog book would be first. "Give Your Dog a Bone" proved an instant hit, with Australian dog breeders taking it to heart. Since that time, "Give Your Dog a Bone" has been making steady inroads into the minds of breeders and dog owners throughout Australia and around the world.

By 1995, "Give Your Dog a Bone" had found its way to England where it developed a steady following. In 1997 Ian was invited to England where he lectured in Birmingham, Bristol, London and Manchester. The tour proved an outstanding success and gave an enormous boost to the already growing movement of raw feeders in England. By now there was a strong interest in raw feeding within North America and in 1998 Ian was invited to present his ideas on evolutionary nutrition in a series of 1 and mostly 2 day seminars from the west to the east coast and back again, including Seattle in Washington, Dallas in Texas, Orlando in Florida, Hartford in Connecticut, Richmond in Virginia, Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, Chicago, Toledo in Ohio, Bellingham in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and finally Honolulu Hawaii. These seminars were held in October, November and December of 1998.

It was during this US tour that Ian released his second book, "Grow Your Pups With Bones," which formalized the concept of BARF, an acronym standing for both 'Bones And Raw Food' and 'Biologically Appropriate Raw [or Real] Food.' This book was written as the breeders supplement to 'Give Your Dog a Bone', and included a section dealing with the prevention and treatment of skeletal disease in growing pups. That American tour and what has come out of it in terms of raw feeding lists on the internet, pet food companies producing raw pet foods and the growing awareness of the role of raw whole foods in health has proved to be the turning point for pet health across North America.

Today, as a direct result of that self published book, 'Give Your Dog a Bone' which first saw the light of day in 1993, there is a thriving and growing movement of raw feeders, breeders, trainers and even vets throughout the western world. Many of the people who now feed their dogs and cats this way have no idea of the origins of this movement and that is the way it should be. It means that the work of Ian Billinghurst in dedicating himself to spreading the truth about pet nutrition has not been in vain. And his work continues today with the formation of BONSAH, which exists for the sole purpose of achieving, through the strength of numbers, what one person could never achieve alone in forwarding dog and cat health through Evolutionary Nutrition.