Food For Thought - all about diet

[Jas]

Maisey started this topic from our old Auspet board. Contains a wealth of information. Thought it should be marked.
http://www.auspet.com/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000062.html

[Jamiya]

And here is my take on raw feeding:

In my opinion, raw food is the best possible nutrition for your dog. It is the way they were intended by nature to eat. Dry kibble and canned food compromise the immune system, introduce poisons into the system, and are the cause of many health problems that often don't appear until later in life. Poor dental health is an obvious one that leads to many other conditions if not corrected. Food allergies are also on the rise, due to the practice of feeding your dog the exact same food day in and day out - a food that often is not highly utilized by your dog's body. As for cooked food - this is not appropriate for dogs. Cooking destroys some nutrients and changes others. Also, cooked bones should not be fed, and meat alone is NOT a balanced diet for your dog. Meat alone will HARM your dog very quickly, especially puppies.

I feed raw according to the prey model - meaning as close as possible to how a dog would eat prey in the wild. Since I don't have access to whole carcasses, I feed a variety of raw MEATY bones to my dogs - pork ribs, pork necks, chicken leg quarters, beef cuts, turkey legs and wings, rabbits, etc. Bones should be RAW and 75% meat/25% bone. I also feed organ meats, which comprise about 10% of the total diet - beef and chicken livers, kidney, heart, etc. The more variety, the merrier. I also feed whole raw fish and supplement with wild fish oil capsules for the extra omega-3's. A whole egg a couple times a week rounds out the diet.

Cooked bones should NOT be fed to your dog. They can splinter and cause many problems inside your dog. Many people also say to not feed the marrow bones of large animals (weight-bearing bones) because they may cause teeth to break.

Raw feeding promotes a healthy immune system which makes other interventions - such as antibiotics, pesticides, etc - not needed. Raw meaty bones keep the teeth clean, so that dental work is never needed. It improves the musculature of the neck and shoulders. It provides mental and physical exercise for the dog, who actually has to work to eat rather than just snarfing down a bowl full of dry kibble. Bloat does not occur in rawfed dogs (to my knowledge). It also has other benefits like less smelly dogs, and small well-formed and almost odorless stool. To me, this is the definitive proof that the diet is good for the dog. The huge, squishy, stinky stool produced by kibble-fed dogs shows you that the food is mostly fillers that the dog's body cannot process. On a raw diet, the majority of the food is actually used by the dog, making the stool small and firm. In a couple days it dries up completely and blows away - we never have to pooper scooper our yard anymore.

And also - dogs LOVE it! They are excited about eating and it takes up time and energy, which those of us with hyper dogs really appreciate!

Here are a couple links you can look at for more info:

http://www.bullovedbulldogs.com/sarf.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/rawdog/

[Mary_NH]

there are some cases that raw should be taken into consideration before giving.
A for instance - my dog LOL
And this was upon the advise of a holistic vet who ADVOCATES raw diet.
Sadie has liver disease and her age (9 at the time) the changes of her being able to develop the enzymes that are required to break down raw foods were slim.
Sadie used to to go this holistic vet for chiropractic work. We discussed Sadie's diet at one time and I told her she ate prescription food for stones.
I did ask about raw and she did not recommend it for her. She did, however, suggest I add baked chicken to her food along with a vegetable like kale.
Which I did....a few months later a urine test showed her urine to be too acidic due to the kale so I had to eliminate that.
I do mix cooked chicken in with her dinner every night.
So I'd base a raw diet on the dog's health, age and make sure it'll be okay first.