Food: Home prepared v High Quality Commercial

[simonrickell]

We have been raw feeding for a year and a half. Brought about by our Guinness who was suffering from very bad ears - had to have an op. Which could have been caused by allergies - which may have been due to the commercial food he was getting.

Now, they (Thats Guinness 11 , Willow 1.5 , Bailey 8 months )
get all human grade food (except the mince)
Chicken wings one day
Chicken necks another day
Minced meat which is a special type with minced bone - mixed with some offal usually liver, and veggie slop - mixed vegetables pulped in a juicer and mixed all back up. Then added to this some omega 3/6 oils such as cod liver oil, flaxseed oil, evening primrose oil - squeezed out of capsules. Then to this mix in crushed up tablets of alfalfa, brewers yeast and kelp.

Occasionally they get a treat of rabbit - which goes down very well as they really love it

I am very pleased with their results.

Apart from the veggie/mince day - food prep is really easy.
I pre pack the 7kg of wings I get into meal size portions and bag and freeze them. - so just need to defrost overnight and hey presto. - I do tend to have to chop them up a bit with a cleaver but no problems there - still got 10 digits!!

Regarding human food and diarrhea. I find that too much COOKED chicken and our dogs get diarrhea. LEave it uncooked and we have NO problems. I think it is the effects of cooking that is doing it. Would make anyone think that cooking their dogs food may have adverse effects!

[Caraline]

Regarding human food and diarrhea. I find that too much COOKED chicken and our dogs get diarrhea. LEave it uncooked and we have NO problems. I think it is the effects of cooking that is doing it. Would make anyone think that cooking their dogs food may have adverse effects!

I have had exactly the same experience with chicken. A couple of times I have bought a whole barbeque chicken (non-seasoned) & given my dogs the flesh off it (not the skin/fat or bones) and all 4 of them have gotten the runs. However when I give them raw chicken they are fine. Go figure!

I tried buying my dogs some of the pet mince (chicken & beef) & the stench has just been unbearable. They loved it & suffered no ill effects from it, but I won't buy it again. Dry retching while you are preparing food is no fun. So I just buy human grade meats & mince it up myself. It does make it more expensive, but my poor old tummy is most grateful for it.

The pet grade meats you get, what does it smell like? I am wondering if it is just what they have here in Au that stinks so bad or if it is a common thing.

[simonrickell]

I am surprised about the smell. The stuff we get doesn't really smell at all - but we don't cook it so could make a difference.

We did go through cooking some tripe at one time and that was terrible - but now we do all raw - even the tripe is not too bad.

[Karlin]

Cooked diets as well as commercial diets are well established as good diets for dogs as well and come recommended by many of the key figures in dog nutrition so I definitely do not feel one is any more beneficial over another, though I knew we all can have individual preferencesand one type of diet may work better for a given dog.

No problem here with the runs with any type of cooked meats, for example, and I feed mostly a cooked diet at the moment. I think it really depends on the dog -- I know of dogs who cannot handle raw diets and just get ill on them. I like a mix of foods -- though for reasons I have outlined before, I have now mostly abandoned raw as I do not feel it is safe. I know others do and -- it is really down to personal comfort/risk balance levels and personal decisions.

My own caution with raw diets is from direct experience: one of my cavaliers vomited back up hard, sharp, split bones and most of a chicken wing 10-12 hours after the meal -- when it should supposedly have been thoroughly on its way and digested -- and at a point when his distress level was so high that I was just getting ready to take him to the emergency vet at the vet school near me. I then turned to necks only but have seen some very hard ,sharp pieces of bone in stools -- I have to pick up stools immediately as I have no garden and take the dogs on walks to do their buisness, and hence handle the stools probably a lot more frequently than many people would be doing, while they are soft enough to make bones fragments easily felt. So I am reconsidering whether I even want to to give them necks.