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Location: Surrey
Joined: Jun 2010
Posts: 4,420
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Might have missed a post elsewhere but can I ask what diet you're putting Honey on and why? E.g. is it 'just' a raw diet or does she have health reasons and needs to go on a chicken & rice type exclusion diet or similar? If you're switching her to a completely raw diet then it is very important to get the balance of meat, bone and offal correct. Have you done much research? I spent about a year considering raw before I felt confident enough to do it, but I am a natural worrier when it comes to my pets!
I would start off on an easily digestible meat like chicken but do gradually introduce new meats. Variety not only gives the dog a change (so provides mental stimulation) but can ensure that the dog doesn't suffer a particular deficiency - by feeding the biggest variety, you cover all the different vitamins etc. For example, if you ate peas as your only vegetable with dinner, you may get a lot of goodness out of the peas, but you'd get
more by occasionally adding carrots, cauliflower, brocolli, etc. - similar foods but slightly different nutritional values. For example, chicken is quite a lean meat, and although you don't want to feed a high fat diet, some fat is natural and good for animals, so a slightly fattier animal like lamb can help provide those natural fats.
Adding things like rice, pasta, potatoes, vegetables, etc are personal and different veins of raw feeding suggest different things. I would join the Yahoo group "BritBarf" and do more research to make up your own mind. I decided to follow the prey model diet myself, which is kind of mimicking a wolf's diet - their normal kills would mean that they eat about 80% meat, 10% bone and 10% offal in a week, so my two get those proportions balanced over a week. I occasionally feed veg but not really routinely - their diet does include a lot of green (unbleached) tripe which has more nutrients in than cleaned tripe, and lots of raw feeders believe that this is just as good as feeding veg as it contains all the vitamins & minerals from the cow/whatever animal's stomach as they digested their food.
If Diesel's on a complete diet and you're not switching him to raw yet, do be careful that you don't feed him too many raw titbits as you run the risk on unbalancing his diet. A bit like someone being on one of those complete liquid diets with the shakes and soups, and then eating a burger in addition every day - the complete diet gives Diesel everything he needs in the correct amounts so if you start adding meat you can up the protein, fat, etc in his diet, and if you start feeding offal like liver, you can then run the risk of overdosing him in Vitamin A as the complete food will already be supplemented with the idea amount, and liver is naturally high in Vit A. Overdose of Vitamins can be just as bad as deficiencies - Vitamin A overdose can cause some nasty side effects like upset stomach, irritability, hair loss and even internal organ damage.
Raw feeding isn't massively complicated but it is very important to do research before you start to avoid giving an unbalanced diet.
If you are serious about feeding raw as a permanent diet then there are cheaper ways of doing it than buying from the supermarket. I tried supermarket food to begin with to make sure my two liked a raw diet but when I switched to a proper raw meat supplier (produces it all for dog consumption), the cost was literally about 1/4 of supermarket meat but still fab quality - the difference being I wasn't paying for fancy packaging, prepared cuts, etc., or anything towards the upkeep of a supermarket or all the various warehouse & transport costs, it literally goes straight from the abbatoir to my supplier to me. If you can't find a supplier locally (do ask those slightly further afield though, mine comes from a couple of counties away but already had customers in the area so was happy to include me in his route), you can try butchers and local abbatoirs to source carcasses, wings, offal, etc that they'd otherwise bin. You may need to invest in a chest freezer to store it in but you can try getting a secondhand one - I got a large (4') chest freezer from Ebay for about £30-35 delivered and it's saved me a fortune as I can bulk order about 150lb of meat now.
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