Sounds like you are doing really well
I saw a change in energy almost right away too, and much better concentration
I had planned to do raw and kibble the next meal but after about 2 days I just did all raw and havent looked back

Only thing I would say different (everyone has different views)
I dont feed marrowbones as they are a bit to hard and can break dogs teeth
But the chicken bones are great, lamb ribs and breast- sometimes get lamb knuckle bones too (but remove once ben has eaten the end bits off) pork ribs - anything like that
and if you watch how your dog eats, if its a good chewer then dont worry about the smaller bones - Ben (who is 12Kg) loves chicken wings, I have seen bigger dogs with them and its crunch crunch swallow - but thats just how dogs eat food

You might find with bones that your dog brings them upagain sometimes only to eat them again
that is perfectly natural - dogs can reverse swallow (to feed pups) and a kibble diet makes the tummy less acidic so it can take longer to digest bones

Really it is easy to feed, as much and as big a mix as possible
Heart and tounge are both classes as muscle meat and a good cheep meal for a dog

If you take the plunge and ever ditch the kibble you just need to add about 10% offal - 5% to be liver (really easy and cheep)

personaly I dont add vegies at all I get frozen tripe now and again

Sorry, yes, I forgot to mention that. I don't feed beef bones at all, same reason, they are a large animal and the bones are very dense.

For edible bone, chicken is easy for them. For a greater work out (taxing both mentally and physically) I like lamb ribs, neck, leg etc or even better again, mutton (also much cheaper if you can find a source). These bones are more appropriate for dogs than beef as the prey size is more realistic.

Mutton is my preferred food for mine as it is a lovely rich meat and the bones are edible. Another feed type often overlooked is rabbit.

I also agree tripe is a wonderful food, although it needs to be 'Green Tripe' which is actually brown with sometimes a bit of green, it's basically unprocessed so retains all the goodness, unlike the processed White (bleached) Tripe.

Yes, also good point about regurgitation - perfectly natural and normal.

She had chopped turkey thighs this morning. It was hilarious.

She was as enthusiastic as ever when I put her bowl down. Then she realised there were big lumps of stuff in there. She picked one out and put it in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then did a play bow and started to growl and bark at it and throw it around the kitchen. After a couple of minutes she went back to her bowl and repeated the whole scenario with the second lump. This continued until most of the turkey was sitting uneaten all over the kitchen floor. After about 10 minutes she started trying to chew one of the lumps. It took her a good three of four minutes to get the hang of it. The rest of the meal was then devoured pretty quickly after that!!

I hope she learns to eat it straight from the bowl or I'll spend an awful lot of time washing the kitchen floor!!!

So yes, I can see that it's better than mince.

I'm still nervous about the protein levels in a raw diet. I don't even know how to make a guess about how much protein and fat she's getting when feeding her raw meat. Does anyone know? And is there ever any benefit in carbohydrates? If carboyhdrate really isn't necessary wouldn't at least one pet food manufacturer create a food without it? Are nutritional requirements always the same regardless of your dog's lifestyle? For example, would you typically feed a racing greyhound (short bursts of speed) differently from a sled racing dog (endurance)?

Sorry for all the questions. I'm just trying to make sure I really understand what I'm doing!! I spoke to my vet about a home cooked diet when we first got our pup and she told me absolutely no way should we feed anything but a complete kibble, and that people that didn't typically ended up with dogs with all sorts of problems. She said that if you were preparing food yourself it was vital to get the balance exactly right and that it was almost impossible to do. I don't believe this, but I am nervous about getting it badly wrong and harming my pup.

Personally i do not agree with feeding raw and agree with your vets view that it is vital to get the balance right. I think that dog food companies get a lot of stick and it is not deserved with all of them. They put a lot of research into getting the balance right. Therefore i don't think adding to a good quality balanced complete kibble is right as you are increasing the levels of protein and completly undoing the balance ending up a diet which has a higher level of protein in it....sounds like pedigree chum to me!

But can you point me to any studies that support this?

I'm finding it hard to find unbiased studies that give clear guidelines about nutritional requirements for dogs. Most sources I find are either pushing a specific diet, or selling dog food!

The argument that commercial complete diet is safest sounds reasonable until you start to really think about it. OK, some of the things that make me doubt my vets advice:

1. Lots of vets feed raw, home cooked or similar diets. A breader of Beagles (my dog's breed) who is also a vet and advisor (or similar) to the Kennel Club feeds her dog kibble with raw chicken wings. So my vet's opinion clearly isn't shared by all vets. Which suggests to me that there are no standard guidlines for dog nutrition. So what are the commercial dog food companies basing their 'recipies' on?

2. With regards to protein content and the importance of getting the balance exactly right. Our vet advised us to choose a complete dog food. No specific brand was recommended. Nor was advice to choose a quality brand given. At one point when our pup was a bit of a fussy eater chappie was suggested. Now Chappie has something like 5% protein whereas many complete brands have somewhere in the low 20's. Many people say that it's important that meat is the first ingredient on the packet, whereas Burns (a highly regarded, quality dog food) has meat as the second ingredient - the meat and protein content is lower. And the vet that developed Burns food says it's perfectly safe to feed on a mixture of 1/3 meat, 1/3 vegetable and 1/3 brown rice without the need for supplements (provided you vary the food). So if getting the balance right is really such a fine art, then how come there is so much variation between different brands of complete dog food?

3. Why is feeding a dog so complicated that we need to buy it in pre-prepared, perfectly balanced, format yet we're trusted to raise kids on ad-hoc home prepared diets?

4. If you look at the ingredients in most comercial foods it's quite a short list. In humans they say eat as wide a variety of foods as possible as the experts don't really know the precise detail of what we need. By eating variety you increase your chances of getting all that you need. Yet for dogs the experts know more and can safely put together a very limmited yet complete diet?

Feeding a commercial complete food does seem to be a 'safe' option. Our pup was raised mostly on Burns then we switched to Wafcol when she developed pollen allergies. So quality kibble certainly keeps dogs healthy in my experience. But I want to try and find what's best for my particular dog. I've got good reason to believe that a little raw food will help her. My difficulty is in finding good, unbiased scientific studies that tell me how to give her that raw food whilst still ensuring that she has all the nutrients she needs.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

I use them to figure out how much of what each food has
Pretty much most meats have 20% +/- 2%

I have met several people with high level agility and HWTM dogs who feed raw with no problems and there are a few yahoo groups where you will find hundreds of people who feed raw and have healthy diets

The reason we have carbs in kibble is becuase it is needed to stick the kibble together, and also carbs are cheep

People have been feeding their dogs raw meat then table scraps for thousands of years - pet food is a v new thing
but due to fantastic marketing everyone now thinks it is impossible to give your dog the balance that it needs - nonsense!!
Is it possible to make a human compleate food?? no - because we need a variaty of things - and the mixture is best found in nature, what is best for each species is what each animal has evolved to eat

dogs are the same species as wolves - they can breed and produce pups
they have the same digestive system and the teeth of a carnivore
fed the correct diet the tum pH is far lower than humans (omnivores) but unlike cats they are also scavingers and can survive on other foods when hunting is lean

thats why pet food manufacturers have got away with more and more cheep carbs in the diet

carnivores use fat in their food for energy - they need far more fat than we do

My boy can run and run for 3 hours nonstop if we are off for a long walk, he is still going when the collies are plodding
but, because of his food (and I saw the change in less than a week) he is calmer and more focused at other times when running isnt needed

WHy do we even have the saying 'as fit as a butchers dog'?? what do you think the butcher was feeding them??

I cant post the studies at the moment cos although I have heard them from lots of people the only written down thing have have seen is on the diploma I am currently studing for and the stuff is protected so I cant post it on a forum, I will ask my tutor for the links to the actual research when I speak next

have to say - really fantastic questions you are asking - once you start looking into canine nutrition it is a great subject

LOL, I just came on here to post the same USDA link as Ben!

I'm off to bed, so will come back to all the questions tomorrow, but for now, this is something to think about.

Raw meat with bone is around 20% protein.... however, you still can't really compare it to commercial food as the quality of the protein is 100% better.

Take raw chicken for example. The USDA analyise it as:

65% water,
17% protein,
15% fat,
and the rest is trace milligrams of vitamins and minerals.

Now you look at those percentages and compare them to a bag of "quality" commercial. Not so different eh? But what IS different is that 65%. Because it's dry food, they've got to do something to replace all that water..... so what do they do.... ah yes, GRAINS!!! They use grains and other carbs as filler food, as they can't really up the protein levels too much as the food would be imbalanced, nor can they up the fat content either, so that leaves the manufacturers with no other choice.

Carbs are not needed by dogs, although are fine if fed in very small quantities. Meat with some bone should still make up the majority of the diet though.

I'll come back to the other nutrients tomorrow. As far as vets go, as with any profession you get vast differences in knowledge levels particularly with regard to nutrition as it doesn't form part of their studies. Their information on nutrition is largely given by the pet food manufacturers who graciously give the lectures for free ..... with of course no bias whatsoever ......

Some vets of course, do go out and do their own research, and generally speaking, it is those vets who are most enlightened.

That makes me a lot happier! One of the main things I was struggling with is that I had it in my head that meat was mostly protein, and that by feeding nearly all meat I was giving her a diet of upwards of 50% protein!!!!

I really appreciate all of this help. The info I'm getting here is far more usefull than I'm finding via searches as you're explaining the bits that weren't making sense to me.

One more question. If I really can't bring myself to give her bone (scared she'll choke or get a bowl blockage) is there an alternative? For example, I believe sardines and egg shells have a high calcium content?

Bones excercise the jaws and help clean the teeth. My dogs have beautiful teeth - even the 14 year old. Just don`t give too many or too big.