Homemade cooked food.

[liz&Obi]

Hi all,

I was hoping to get some advice on a balanced meal I can make for Obi that I can batch cook and freeze.
Obi (1.5yr old JRT) has been raw fed for most of his life and enjoys it but he has bouts of runny poops and then refuses food. He often eats the grass and leaves I'm the garden to make himself vomit. Otherwise though he is perfectly happy and very active.
My plan is to switch to a cooked diet to see if this helps. My partner wants me to try kibble but thats a definite No!! I know the vet will also suggest this.
I have tried changing the raw food and experimented with changing the ingredients and nothing has helped.

I have also thought about getting him an allergy test from online - are the tests accurate or worth doing?

Any advice is very much appreciated.

Liz

 

[Laco]

Be sure you understand a dogs dietary nutritional requirements, they are quite different than ours. Once you get that down, home cooked would be the way to go. I feed ours all fresh foods, proportioned by a nutritionist, then prepared lightly cooked, then frozen in bags. Yes I pay a premium for this, but certainly our girl is worth it.

 

[JoanneF]

I missed this when you first posted, sorry.

Laco is right, you do need to make sure you have the right balance of nutrients. For raw, since the normal proportion is 80% muscle meat (remember in this context, heart is a muscle and not an organ), 10% bone, 5% liver and 5% other secreting organ, I imagine if you cook it, the proportions would be the same. BUT cooked bones splinter and are dangerous so either feed that part raw, use ground bones or another calcium source. There's recipes online, I'm sure you'll find something.

There's also a couple of discount vouchers in the food section but they've been there for a long time so I don't know whether they are still valid.

I don't know much about the allergy testing, but it sounds more like an intolerance than an allergy. You could try an elimination diet. A lot of dogs are intolerant to chicken, for some reason, so you could start by cutting that right out of his diet for six weeks, using an alternative single protein; preferably something he hasn't had before, like goat or something. I know goat meat isn't easy to source but that's likely to be the case with any novel protein. Venison maybe? Then, if there are no incidents of runny poo, introduce one more protein for a few weeks. When you get a runny poo, you will know the most recently added protein is likely to be what's caused it.

Good luck.

 

[excuseme]

What a shame you are considering to give up the Raw food! I have fed raw to many dogs and over very many years including weaning and rearing puppies for a very l-o-n-g time and other than using too much liver at any one time have never had any problems with upset tummies. However sensible household scraps in moderation are used too, raw veg are thrown onto the floor while they are being prepared, the girls love these as special treats and often over ripe or damaged fruit as treats too.
I do however believe that home cooked meals are far better and healthier than the modern day convenient kibbles.
As @JoanneF and @Laco have mentioned only gently cook your products so as not to destroy the benefits of the fresh product. Keep the meat Pink and veg slightly crunchy.

With regards to "Heart" being muscle , that is correct in part.
"Heart is part of the string of connected organs that are inside all bodies.

The heart is an essential organ but also a powerful muscle and is part of the essential chain of "offal" organs. I use this as added "organ" muscle as part of the raw home made diet , our lot love it.
Our dogs diets do not have to be balanced on a regular basis, variety of products over a
period of a few weeks is perfectly acceptable.

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[excuseme]

Our lot often pick their own wild fruit and herbs, at the moment we have a wild apple tree where there are some early small apples falling (not ripe at all), the dogs forage in the overgrowth beneath the tree to find apples, some of which they eat and others they will leave. They find and eat various wild herbs and grasses but are never sick!