I personally do not feed any vegetables at all (apart from occasional leftovers) and I do not subscribe to BARF at all, I feel its out dated and does more harm than good. I have seen that my dogs do better without veg in their diet. I'm a big fan of Tom Lonsdale and tend to gravitate more towards prey model feeding.

Dogs are biologically classed as carnivores and as long as you feed a wide variety of different meats etc your dog will get plenty of vitamins. My gang get raw muscle meat (beef, lamb, chicken and turkey mostly, sometimes rabbit), raw meaty bones (chicken, turkey and lamb ones mostly), raw organ meat (liver, kidney etc, heart also but that is classed as a muscle meat), green tripe, and for extras, fish, eggs and live yogurt. Occasionally they get healthy table scraps.

http://www.rawmeatybones.com/petowne...whynotbarf.pdf

http://rawfed.com/myths/stomachcontents.html

Honestly, putting my dogs on raw is the best thing I've ever done for them. They have thrived in ways I could never have imagined and throughally enjoy it

Of course that is JMO, there are a million and 1 ways to feed RAW and what suits one dog may not suit another, thats what is great about it, you can tailor it to fit your dogs needs. But veg is definitely a choice and in no way a necessity

http://www.rawdogranch.com/
http://www.njboxers.com/faqs.htm
http://rawfeddogs.net/
http://www.holisticvet.co.uk/nutrition.htm
http://www.ukbarfclub.co.uk/
http://www.rawlearning.com/
http://www.rawmeatybones.com/
http://www.ukrmb.co.uk/showcontent.toy?contentnid=7232
http://www.raw4dogs.com/calculate.htm
http://sonia.clove.net.au/diet.html

I agree: no veg here either.
There are dogs that are fed veg/supplements and do wonderfully on the raw diet.... and there are dogs that are not fed veg/supplements and do wonderfully on the raw diet.

I'm not a fan of Billinghurst; I feel his diet is too high in bone content; hence the requirement for veg to loosen up those hard stools coming out the other end. I feel that since he has his own range of foods to feed his opinions on raw are rather tainted. Particularly since those views changes just prior to bringing out his own range of foods.

Veg of course will do no harm at all (so long as it isn't one of the dangerous ones for dogs!); and can bulk up a feed for an overweight dog needing to cut down on calories. But other than that, is of no nutritional benefit to the dog.

My two do get the very occasional bit of left over veg, just because it's left over.... It doesn't attempt to replace the essential meat bone or organ in the carnivores diet. :smt001

Glad I haven't caused offence ! I tend to shoot from the hip, but I mean no harm - honest !!

Lara: you say that dogs are carnivores. I must disagree with you. Dogs, like ourselves, are omnivores. Canids are omnivores, along with their close relative, vulpes, the fox. Foxes are particularly partial to blackberries, and I had the pleasure of watching a beautiful vixen delicately picking blackberries off a briar and eating them. Hardly the action of a carnivore. Foxes are closely enough related to dogs that they can mate and produce offspring, although of course the resultant cubs are infertile (F1 hybrids).

Shaun Ellis, the wolfman, lived with a pack of wolves and will confirm to anyone who asks him that wolves very definitely will eat the stomach and contents of the herbivore they have killed. Their favourite food is the liver and heart because they are so nutritious and easy to eat, but they very definitely eat the stomach too, and do not leave it to the last. Soft organs, such as heart and liver, would go first, followed by the stomach and its contents.

Millions of years of evolution cannot be wrong. Wolves have evolved into the magnificent creatures we see today by perfecting this ideal way of obtaining the OMNIVEROUS diet that they need. Domestic dogs have now been reclassified as being the same species as wolves, therefore they need the same diet.

Like us, dogs can survive on "junk" food, but we don't want our beloved pets to just "survive", we want them to thrive. And to thrive they need to eat the natural wolf diet aka raw meat, bones and the imitation stomach contents of pureed raw vegetables. Incidentally, raw vegetables really should be put through a smoothie maker, rather than a liquidiser. I know they are expensive, but so are vet's bills ! The smoothie maker really smashes down the fibres, the cellulose etc. of fruit and veg, making them that much easier for the dog's digestive juices to get to work on them. Liquidise is better than nothing, but smoothie is the creme de la creme.

Any veg will do - broccoli, sprouts, cauli, cabbage, whatever. I used to avoid root veg that are particularly high in carbohydrate, such as potato, swede, parsnip, as dogs shouldn't have any more than 3% carb in their diet, and if you feed liver like I used to, they will get all the carb they need from this. Carrots I used to feed whole to Hal, because he loved crunching up a raw carrot, and because it wasn't pureed, he could not obtain much goodness from it, so no harm done. I would very rarely, if at all, puree carrot for him for obvious reasons.

Apart from cod liver oil with omega 3 as Hal didn't like pilchards, sardines or any fish really (very strange for a northern breed!), that was his diet for the last 5 years or so, and he thrived on it. No-one could believe he was 10, he ran like the wind, had caught a fully grown healthy buck rabbit the week before his op, he mated a bitch last July and the two separate occasions that they came together, there was hardly a pause in activity from dawn til dusk on both days! He had a double coat, the undercoat of which used to fall out terribly on kibble, since he went onto raw meat and veg he stopped moulting completely - ever. When he was bathed, there was never any fluff in the plughole. He used to break wind like you could never imagine - this stopped for ever once he went on the BARF diet.

It is without a shadow of a diet the best diet you could ever give any dog, but you MUST do it properly. It isn't rocket science, it isn't even expensive and the slight extra cost will be vastly outweighed by the saving in vets bills. I would strongly recommend anyone considering and/or actually doing it, to buy Billinghurst's book. It isn't cheap for what is a fairly slim volume, but it will be the best £25 (or less if you can get it second hand on Amazon) that you will have ever spent.

NOTE ..

Don't forget we have a 'Raw feeders' section in 'Member groups' here on Dogsey..

http://www.dogsey.com/forumdisplay.php?f=218

O thanks for that, I'll go on there and have a look.

People can speculate that dogs are omnivores as much as they like but the fact is that are biologically classed as carnivores and are in the Canis lupus familiaris . They are opportunists so some greedy ones may well choose to graze on a bit of greenery when they please, but it makes up an insignificant part of their diet. Interestingly, there is only .02 difference between mitochondrial DNA of a wolf and a dog. There is that much difference between human races.

I have read several books on raw feeding but my personal opinion is that those by Mr Billinghurst are probably the worst of them all, very patchy and badly written IMO. My favorite is probably Works Wonders by Dr Tom Lonsdale, thats the one I would recommend to beginners as it is nice and simple yet explanatory.

http://www.rawmeatybones.com/petowne...whynotbarf.pdf

http://www.geocities.com/havens_home/feedraw.htm

http://rawfed.com/myths/omnivores.html

http://rawfed.com/myths/stomachcontents.html

As I already said, whats right for one dog may not be right for another. Everyone has a right to their own opinions.

Exactly Lara - and that tiny difference is behavioural. So therefore our tame wolves should be fed exactly the same diet as wild wolves - and that essentially is the BARF diet.

Lara: I agree with you on one thing : Billinghurst's book is appallingly badly written and typeset. I used to typeset books for a living, and the design is awful. The content is badly organised as well as being badly laid out, but although it could have been better written, what Billinghurst is actually saying is riveting.

The reason why veggies are important is this. Firstly, B. says that although vegetables, particuarly green leafy ones, should form a substantial part of your dog's diet, they are not essential. Dogs can live and survive without them.

HOWEVER !! They will never be totally healthy, their lives will be short, disease-ridden and painful, so therefore they are ESSENTIAL for a dog's health, not for the SURVIVAL of your dog. A bit like us being able to live quite happily on Macdonalds and other junk food for many years, but during those years we will suffer from a whole host of maladies and never be healthy.

The one nutrient that our dogs cannot obtain from their raw meat and bones is FIBRE, according to B. raw vegetable fibre has its own unique set of health promoting properties. For starters, fibre contains soluble as well as insoluble fibre.

This soluble fibre both prevents and treats some diseases of the digestive tract, including obesity and problems involving the lining of the intestines, malabsorption of food including pancreatic problems and pancreatitis and diabetes. These diseases are a huge problem in our modern dogs - my Hal was one of them. He suffered from malabsorption whilst on kibble, and had huge problems with his anal glands, to mention only two.

With the exception of vitamin B12 of course, green leafy veggies contain most of a dog's vitamin and mineral needs, although B. does say that they are low in thiamin and choline. Apart from this, our green veggies supply B2, B3, B5, B6, Biotin and Folacin, Vit C, Vit A, Vit E, Vit K and carotenoids. As we all know, these vitamin are all anti-oxidant and play essential roles in our well being. We are now aware that alzheimers is directly related to poor diet - I for one do not want to end up with that condition, although OH would say that I am well on the way already !

According to B, dogs on processed foods receive no vitamin C in their diet whatsoever, which I find startling but of course could be supplied to the dog in a supplement, but nonetheless, I was surprised to read that.

There is another chapter of his book devoted to fruits, which I have to say I didn't feed to Hal simply because they upset him so. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I was feeding them too ripe, or too unripe, or maybe I should have persisted, but I am not going to beat myself up about it. He received a good balanced diet which included all the vitamins and minerals he needed.

Please everyone who is NOT feeding raw veggies and/or fruit, at least consider doing so. You are absolutely not going to do any harm to your dog whatsoever at best, at worst you will have wasted some time and money.

In memory of my beautiful boy, my Hal, please, please put YOUR Hal's onto veggies and/or fruit. I would absolutely hate anyone to lose their beautiful dogs prematurely, like I did Hal.

I'm not being dramatic, please you guys do it, just try it for one month and see the difference.

Listen gnasher, you are NOT going to convince me that I am feeding my dogs in the wrong way. As I said, I have tried both and I have seen with my own eyes that my dogs do better without regular veg in their diet. Thats the only facts I need. My dogs do best on a RAW diet, not a barf diet.

Your clearly a Billinghurst convert, thats great. I however am not and much prefer the views of several other people big in the raw feeding world.

As I have said countless times, a diet that works great for one dog may not work at all for another. Only I know whats best for my dogs

I was talking to a good friend of mine this morning, who has Irish Wolfhounds, pointers, lurchers, and always has had loads of them altogether 5 at a time, and we were discussing this raw feeding, and although she said she would love to do it, it scares her to death, bit like it did me before I found Dogsey (3 years ago mind but I still haven't done it yet!). Anyway, as you can imagine with so many dogs around all of her life, she has many tales to tell about various illnesses, BUT, one thing she did say, one dog never, ever saw a vet throughout the whole of his life, and that was a big mastiff who ate nothing but tripe, RAW tripe and nothing else whatsoever, and he lived to a ripe old age of 13 which she said is unheard of in a mastiff! That certainly made me think, and HER too I might add.

Thanks from me for all of this information, you can't have too much information if you're thinking of making big changes imo.

Just one more little question please. Would a dog on a raw diet be prone to weight gain, or would that solely depend on the weight of food given, like kibble or any cooked meat? My current dog, although getting to ideal weight now, is very prone to weight gain. When I give him a marrowbone, he seems twice his size for a few days and even my husband comments on it! Funny that, because he never eats the whole thing, he's only interested in it for one day like I said before?! Would anyone happen to know the weight of meat to body weight ratio per day or doesn't it work like that? Kibble's easy, it's just by the cup!!!