Food: Home prepared v High Quality Commercial

Cathy Moon said:

Caraline, just one thing I thought I'd mention - this may or may not be the same Dr. Pitcairn - but I'm fairly certain that someone on this forum gave their cav garlic tablets (per a Dr. Pitcairn) and the cav got very sick. Garlic has the same chemical as onion, which causes hemolytic anemia.

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I was wondering about garlic. Though I hadn't seen it on any of the unsafe lists, I did wonder if it is related to onion & hence a problem. Having said that, many of the kibbles produced here in Australia have "with garlic" written on the front of the packets. I'm kind of erring on the cautious side at the moment & if in doubt I don't use it.

Mary said:

How much in quantity do you feed the boxer and the cavalier?

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I ended up working this out on a calorie basis. I've got a couple of books that tell you how many calories your dog should be getting.

Sam the 40 kilo active Boxer gets 3 - 4 cups of dinner plus some doggie biscuits & other treats through the day
Scarlett the 29 kilo (on a diet) inactive Boxer gets 2 cups plus fruit for treats & 1 or 2 biscuits at breakfast
Sonny the 8 kilogram Cavalier gets offered 1 cup plus treats & biscuits at breakfast
Beau the rapidly growing Cavalier puppy woofs down 2 meals of 1/2 cup each pluse treats & biscuits at breakfast. I also up his protein intake with something extra like a bit of cheese, some egg, etc.

I am weighing the dogs to monitor their progress at the moment. I am wanting Sam & Sonny to maintain their already healthy weights, whilst I need Scarlett to lose some & of course I'm wanting to grow the puppy.

karlin said:

Probably the same holds for raisins/grapes -- vets say for some dogs, just a few could be toxic, but we probably all know people who have fed grapes as treats for years without any problems

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Oh yeah, I was shocked & amazed when I heard about grapes. When I was growing up we had little x-breed that loved grapes. We'd never heard that they were a problem, and she was obviously one of the ones not affected by them.

Here is a table of calories required for a healthy, active adult dog. It is only part of a larger table from "Complete Dog Care Manual" by Dr Bruce Fogle

Toy 5kg (11 lbs) = 210 calories
Small 10 kg (22 lbs) = 590 calories
Medium 20 kg (44 lbs) = 900 calories
Large 40 kg (88 lbs) = 1680 calories
Giant 80 kg (176 lbs) = 2800 calories

The above calories is for the entire day & must take into account treats given. Of course it needs to be adjusted for the elderly, inactive, overweight or the rapidly growing puppy.

Caraline--thanks so much for posting all the details! I've been out of town and just saw your reply. This helps alot. I'm going to have to get creative and try this with Wrigley.

Luckily, I found a spray that is working quite well on Wrigley's allergy sores. So I think we're making progress on that front. :rah:

Would love to read your book reports once you read your two books!

Thanks again!

karlin said:

I'd recommend getting Monica Segal's book K9 Kitchen (and/or her pamphlets) for anyone trying homemeade raw or cooked or supplemented diets.

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Thanks, Karlin. I'm on Monica's yahoo group and get all the emails. I really need to get the book and give it a read to get the full picture.

Good reminder...on to Amazon!

I must admit, I subscribed to Monica's yahoo group but only stayed on there a short while. The spotlight just seemed to be too focused on vitamins & supplements rather than just wholesome well balanced foods. I also got really irritated at all the behavioural issues (caused by people who don't train their dogs) being put down to diet & then these "special diets" being prescribed rather that addressing the real issues. Grrrr.

As I have not read Monica's book I don't know & should not presume that it is her ethos that drives this thinking, but it sure did turn me off the forum.

Denise said:

This helps alot. I'm going to have to get creative and try this with Wrigley.

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If you decide to give it a go Denise, I'd start off by selecting just 1 food item that you know is safe from each of the common food groups & stick with that for at least a couple of days, if not longer. Then when you are feeling confident that these foods are being tolerated well, then add only 1 extra ingredient and so on. What you are aiming at is to know with reasonable certainty which food if any have caused a reaction, and you can only do this if only 1 thing has been changed at a time.

Also, schedule any additional foods to be started when there are no other changes going on. For example don't introduce a new food in the same week that say you change what shampoo you are using etc.

You've got quite a challenge ahead of you, but I do think that by preparing your own foods you do have better control of & understand of what causes the food allergies. The problem with commercially prepared foods (& this includes human food) is that there are traces of foods sometimes not mentioned because they are so small, that they can be overlooked as a source of allergy. Also with all those chemical ingredients listed, you need a science & pharmaceutical degree to know what the hell they are talking about.

Thanks, Caraline. I'm still testing/experimenting with different protein sources with Wrigley to see what he reacts to. He seems to do well on venison and lamb right now. I'm about to add rabbit to the rotation tonight. Like I said previously, I'm putting him on a rotation of proteins that he's not allergic to in an attempt to prevent any more allergies from developing. It's all experimentation at this point--but there's really no other way to tell what the problem foods are. What does make it somewhat easier is that I can look in his ears about an hour after feeding to see if he's reacting to something. They get very warm and pink/reddish if its a problem. If I don't remove the problem food, they get worse and worse. When I take him off the food--they clear up usually in one day--two days tops.

I don't plan to add any grains at this point because of his obvious allergy to them--but would like to add some veggies that he's not allergic to. I'm not sure which ones those are right now, though. I think he's o.k. with carrots, but seems to react to green beans. I'll probably use apple at times--he LOVES green apples.

Anyway, thanks for the input and listening to my ramblings!

Wish me luck!

Denise G. said:

What does make it somewhat easier is that I can look in his ears about an hour after feeding to see if he's reacting to something. They get very warm and pink/reddish if its a problem. If I don't remove the problem food, they get worse and worse. When I take him off the food--they clear up usually in one day--two days tops.

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What handy little allergy barometers he has

I've been too scared to mix in very much human food for Daisy because she has gotten bad diarrhea from boiled chicken and from ground beef (even a very small amount of ground beef). I feed her EVO, Biljac (small U.S. company no wheat or corn in their ingredients), and Purino Pro Plan Selects -- Turkey and Brown Rice. But I'm going to look at the Purina ingredients and see if it says rice protein concentrate anywhere. If it does, it's in the trash. She's not crazy about the EVO, but will deign to eat it occasionally if she's very hungry. I always sprinkle her food with either dehydrated liver powder, or dehydrated chicken powder. She's kind of spoiled in that if I don't liberally sprinkle it, she just walks away.

I bought a bag of Solid Gold (small dog variety) when she was very small, but she didn't like it.

She won't eat pumpkin or yogurt. She loves the chicken, but it doesn't take that much to cause explosive diarrhea. I bought some deli turkey that I'm going to add to her dogfood tonight. I know she'll like it, and hopefully it won't cause her any problems.

I may look into NV Raw.

It's all so worrying right now that I don't really know what to do.

Caraline, I agree; there's always the issue almost everywhere of people wanting to find the problem and the solution in anything but *training* and putting in the time to work at it -- it ain't a quick fix, it takes time and patience, and can be tedious and demanding. People like instant solutions.

I have a large level of skepticism about supplements. Long term affects of giving animals (or people) massively larger doses of vitamins and minerals than they'd ever get in a normal healthy diet makes me reluctant to give supplements to the dogs or take many myself. We get that figure of 80% of Americans fail to get adequate nutrition from their diets cited as a reason not to 'trust' feeding human dfood to dogs... but surely the problem is the diet and improving poor food choices, not throwing a vitamin on top of the problem. Humans actually have a pretty high tolerance for a range of levels of nutrients outside the ideal, and by any global measure the Western developed world's health problems have little to do with 80% not getting enough nutrients -- instead they are due to obesity and too much food. Yet everyone runs out and spends millions on supplements to be more 'healthy'.

Likewise I just feel a range of healthy food items that cover the nutritional bases is going to keep any dog healthy and often, healthier than highly processed foods like kibble and tinned foods. But that doesn't mean just anything thrown together -- I do think anyone home preparing food should be up on the key elements of dog nutrition because dog requirements are going to be different from human requirements. But perfectly answerable from easy to obtain ingredients.

Allergies and their causes are really poorly understood. No one knows if or how exposure causes allergies, though it is known that allergies tend to be cultural -- Americans have a lot of peanut allergy, an allergy unknown in many other cultures. Odd!

Chicken and beef are two meats that most commonly bother dogs that don't tolerate certain proteins. But I don't think Daisy would need to be rotated through other proteins frequently. Indeed if she has some irritable bowel problems, moving around her food a lot could cause problems -- it could well be she has food intolerances, not allergies per se. I'd consult with a vet or gastro specialist rather than guess at the best way of dealing with the problem.

Nodding with everything you said here Karlin. We are like-minds in this area for sure.

Hey for you guys who are considering home prepared, as per Karlin's other post about the Whole Dog Journal, this month's issue is jam packed with articles on nutrition & home prepared. Starting from the April issue (which you get if you subscribe now) they are running a series of articles on home prepared.

One of the great gems of wisdom I learned last night from reading WDJ (& was worth my subscription fee) is that you don't have to provide a balanced meal with every single meal. It is the whole sum of what you feed over the days that counts as a balanced diet. What this means is that you don't have to spend loads of time in the kitchen being the alchemist & mixing together dozens of ingredients. This certainly is a misconception I had about home prepared and I am very pleased to have had that bubble burst. So instead you just offer plenty of variety over the week & voilia! a well balanced diet

Anyway, when I get my books on home prepared & I am a bit more educated about it, I might start up a topic on the subject for anyone who is interested. At the moment I am kind of like a driven woman on the subject.

Karlin has already posted this elsewhere, but save you looking here is the link to Whole Dog Journal http://www.whole-dog-journal.com/

I posted this on the other thread, too, but here's some info on consulting w/ veterinary nutritionists (real vets who then did a residency in nutrition - highly trained!)

Services run by veterinary nutritionists who run private web sites such as:
www.balanceit.com
www.petdiets.com,

Also, here is the link to the American College of Veterinary Nutrition (There is a statement by the College regarding the recall as well as references to additional web links that may be of help or interest.):
www.acvn.org

Raw Feeding

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:luv:

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!
:razz:

simonrickell said:

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!:razz:

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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.

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.

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.