The prevalence of Salmonella spp. in working farm dogs and their home-kill raw meat diets in Manawatū, New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Aims

To investigate the prevalence of Salmonella spp. in a convenience sample of working farm dogs and their home-kill raw meat diets in Manawatū, New Zealand.

Methods

Fifty farms in the Manawatū, with at least three working/herding dogs per farm that were fed raw home-killed meat at least fortnightly, were visited. One sample of dog faeces and one sample of food were collected per farm using convenience sampling. If a dog did not defecate, a sample was obtained by digital recovery. Basic descriptive data for all dogs, meat and farm characteristics were recorded. Stomached meat samples and swabs from faecal samples were pre-enriched in buffered peptone water followed by two selective enrichments with agar subculture. Isolates were confirmed to be Salmonella spp. by serology and biochemical characterisation.

Results

No Salmonella spp. were isolated from dog faeces or raw meat samples, giving an observed prevalence rate of 0 (95% CI = 0.0–7.1)%.

Conclusions

In this study, there was no evidence that working farm dogs and their home-kill raw meat represent likely sources of infection with Salmonella spp.

Clinical Relevance

Although this study found no evidence suggesting that farmers should change their feeding practices, it is based on a small sample, from a single region of New Zealand and involved sampling on one occasion for Salmonella spp. only. Currently, although the prevalence of Salmonella spp. carriage appears to be low, feeding raw meat-based diets to working dogs remains a risk and due to the potential zoonotic implications for humans, hygienic measures should be maintained when in contact with dogs and raw meat.

KEYWORDS:

• Salmonella
• dog
• farm
• microbial culture
• raw food
• zoonosis

Acknowledgements

The study was funded by the Centre for Working and Service Dogs (Massey University, NZ). We thank the farmers for participating in the study, Drs. Cristobal Verdugo and Anou Dreyfus for use of the farm database, and Prof. Boyd R. Jones for providing transport to the farms. The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this manuscript.