would be interested to read that

We feed raw and Kibble here, its been interesting reading this thread, for the owners cooking their dogs food do you not worry about your dogs getting all the goodness they need from cooked food?x

I fed raw for a while, but i needed an extra freezer so i could buy in bulk. I found it expensive because of this. Also i found it hard to find a butcher that had bones, alot said they bought their meat deboned because it was cheaper.

Also my lurcher developed bad colitis and i went back to kibble, took me ages to find something though suitable.

The one thing i did notice on the raw diet was their teeth were excellent.

can you tell me what page please as I have the magazine and cannot find it anywhere. All there is an article on dental which is pro rmb

Here's a very interesting (and long) article I found.

http://www.woodhavenlabs.com/barf-myth.html

Here's an extract;

"Raw Bones - Myth 5

The feeding of raw bones to domestic dogs is an integral part of the Barfer diet fad. Proponents claim that no harm will come to any dog fed a raw bone. Never mind the literature and veterinary clinics that have seen countless cases of impacted bones, torn stomachs, and other internal organs as a result of this practice. What Barfers' fail to recognize is that the wolf and other wild canids have developed a unique process to accommodate raw bones, a process which domestic dogs as a result of 100,000 years of natural selection cannot duplicate. Debbie Davidson, wildlife biologist with the International Wolf Center in Maine describes that process.

"I'm a wildlife biologist in Maine and the Maine field representative for the IWC. Wolves, and likely the other wild canids that you mentioned, have a mechanism that protects their internal organs when they pass the bones of wild animals through their systems. The first feces produced after a kill are very dark and quite liquid-like with little form; it looks to us like diarrhea. Wolves don't necessarily eat everyday and so the subsequent feces often reflect the same kill. The next time they defecate, the feces is still dark but has more form. With each defecation, the feces become lighter in color and contain more substance. Because they often eat the entire animal that they kill, they ingest a lot of hair. Towards the final defecations involving the same kill, hair can be seen in the feces actually wrapped tightly around any bones that are passed through. This seems to protect the organs/passageways as the bones are eliminated."2

Very few Barfers' are feeding whole carcasses complete with the hide and hair. The availability of whole carcasses to most people is severely limited. Even if a Barfer were to find patches of hide to feed along with the raw bone, today's naturally selected evolutionary model of domestic dogs does not have the ability to digest these bones in the same manner anyway. Domestic dogs have not been shown to be able to "wrap bones in hair" to protect internal organs.

What a load of twaddle,

Presumably the wolf kills an animal, rips it's stomach open, scoffs the insides. Offal is known to cause loose, dark stools - voila, there's stage one. The wolf eats the meat and smaller bones, the stools firm up. Few days on, the wolf is getting to the end of what's left of the kill - now it's the larger, harder bones and the bulk of the hide, so the stools that follow contain large amounts of limited-digested bone and hide.
That's not a mechanism, what is the guy claiming? The stomach has learnt to do origami with animal hide to wrap the bones nearly? Or does the wolf sit there and wrap the bones in hide like a fajita wrap? Both get eaten, both don't get digested fully, both get squished together in the guts and both come out the other end together. I'm no scientist and I can figure that one out!
We're not feeding our dogs giant carcasses like elk, bison etc. so you can't expect their bodies to digest things the same. Feed a wolf on the same kind of thing as a dog - or vice versa - and I would hazard a guess that they digest it in a pretty similar way.

Birds of prey manage to sort out in their stomachs what to digest and what not to so why is it so far fetched that mammals may be able to do it?
I've been present when a puppy threw up totally undigested bones which it had eaten 48 hours previously yet had eaten other food in the meantime!! Not impossible.
Becky

Lol @ Karly. Fajita wrap

I read the article in Dogs Today and was quickly put off by it's biased approach. I would have more respect for an article and would take it more seriously if it debated the pros and cons. I also remember looking at the author and wondering how they were qualified to write the article, they weren't a nutritionist or any kind of expert of I recall correctly, just someone with a strong anti raw opinion

i can honestly say in 19 years as a vn the only problem with impacted bones...or bones in general have been COOKED bones.

do remember a dog fed home cooked diet that ended up with liver problems...sorted with a proper balanced diet(not cooked at home)