A Quick Guide to Raw Feeding

[banana]

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A Starter Guide

People new to raw feeding all have the same questions:

“how do I start”, “what exactly do I feed?”, “how much do I feed?”

All too often, people are not given the information or confidence they need to begin and this is an unfortunate barrier to getting their dog off kibble, especially if their vet is against raw feeding.

As you will learn, there really are only a few hard and fast rules in canine nutrition. No one has all the answers, not the pet food manufacturers, not the vets and not even the canine nutritionists. Yet what you will also learn, as you see the health of your dog improve and your dog start to glisten with health and vitality is that it doesn’t matter. Just as we ourselves do not scientifically analyse what we eat,nor do we need to do it for our dogs.

RAW FEEDING GUIDELINES

The key points to remember with a raw diet are:

Balance over time – one meal could have more bone content, another more meat or organ.

The approximate ratio to aim for overall is:

80% meat, sinew, ligaments, fat

10% edible bone

5% liver

5% other organ meat

Meats are high in phosphorus, bones are high in calcium. When meat is fed with 10% bone you have the exact ratios of calcium to phosphorus required by a dog. Whole prey, fish, eggs and tripe have a balanced ratio.

Read More at Raw Fed Dogs by Clicking HERE

 

[Jasp]

Many people are put off raw feeding because of the perceived dangers, ie - 'bones are dangerous, they splinter and cause internal injuries' or 'raw meat contains poisonous bacteria like salmonella'.

Well, both of these are true, but canine digestive systems are very different to our own and are actually designed to cope with such risks far better.

With bones the most important thing to remember is raw, raw, always raw. Next time you put a chicken in for your Sunday roast, take off one of the wings first. Once the chicken is cooked take off the other wing and compare the two. Pull them apart and break up the bones. The cooked bones will snap and splinter leaving sharp and jagged edges and the inside of the bones will be dry and powdery, really not what you want to get lodged in a dogs throat or intestine. The raw bone however will be soft and moist, where it does break it will be springy and flexible and dogs are perfectly adapted to cope with this type of food. They have been doing so after all for many thousands of years.

The only other thing to remember with bones is to make sure that they are of a size appropriate to the dog so they have to be chewed up rather than swallowed whole and to avoid any weight bearing bones like hip/leg bones which are very dense.

Bacteria in raw food is a big problem for humans and can lead to very serious illness, the bacteria are killed by heat so the food must be cooked. The actual problem is the speed of digestion, most raw meat (even fresh human grade) contains some bacteria but once it gets into our digestive system it finds the ideal conditions to multiply very quickly, resulting in more bacteria than our bodies can deal with and hence the illness. Dogs are quite different though and can digest raw foods much quicker, the bacteria get less time in a nice warm, moist environment and so less time to reproduce into dangerous numbers. Heavily processed commercial dog food with its fillers and additives can take up to 3 days to get through a dogs system, but most raw feeders will tell you that they can see the (greatly reduced!) end result of a morning meal by the evening of the same day.

Raw feeding is not for the feint hearted, it does take some forward planning and commitment, as well as a strong stomach (try portioning up a sheeps lung or watching a rottie eating a whole pigs head, yum yum!) but the benefits if you can get the balance right are beyond belief. Your dog will be fitter and healthier than ever before, they will have gleaming white teeth and an unbelievably soft and shiny coat, their 'output' will be firm, odourless and most importantly, only about a quarter of what it was. You will also find that your dog is better behaved, calmer and more able to concentrate.

Do your research and start slowly and you will never look back.

 

[vickyjane72]

Thank you for that - it would be the way forward for me however I'm not sure I could manage the sheep's lung or pigs head. I may have to have a think about that. Would be useful to have a look at the sort of stuff I'd have to deal with.

 

[Jasp]

Thank you for that - it would be the way forward for me however I'm not sure I could manage the sheep's lung or pigs head. I may have to have a think about that. Would be useful to have a look at the sort of stuff I'd have to deal with.

If you can manage the freezer space it is possible to get everything you need in ready to go form from a variety of online suppliers, it all depends on where you live. Most of them sell various meats in 1lb blocks and pre-packed bones, necks and offal etc.

By far the cheapest route though is to find a local supplier that butchers their own meat. Most of the stuff that they would normally chuck out can be put to good use so can be had for next to nothing, but many butchers now buy their meat already butchered so aren't much help.

 

[eingana]

Molly is a happy and healthy raw fed GSD who weighs between 38kg. She has a chicken carcass or 3/4 chicken wings for her breakfast and a pound of minced meat, bone offal and blood for her dinner.

We get the chicken carcasses from a local wholesale butchers and the minced meat from a DAF stockist, who I'm lucky is just down the road from home.

It's true that being a raw feeder takes up a lot of freezer space and quite a bit of fridge space to store the meals which are in various states of defrosting before being fed (we have a big stack of tupperware type boxes which go round and round between dishwasher and fridge being containers for defrosting meat because otherwise the blood gets everywhere) but it's cheaper than buying a complete biscuit and Molly had chronic diarrhoea on every complete food we tried.

We don't put much in the way of vegetables in her dinner because she stops eating her food if we do, so we just give her some fruit as a treat and let her have things like fish skin and the like when appropriate. We also put cod liver oil on her dinner a couple of times a week.

 

[Jasp]

My dog has had whole fish several times and plenty of trimmings as well. Oily fish is great for the coat and I have had complete strangers stop me and ask how I get his coat so shiny. We used to tell them that we had just polished him.

The first time he was presented with a whole mackeral he was a bit dubious at first, but it didn't take him long to get stuck in. Strangely, even though he ate the head, tail and every bone, he did leave the eyes, which I found staring at me from the bottom of his bowl!