How Much Bone Does My Puppy Need
Puppies need a substantial proportion of their diet to be bone.
You can buy pet foods that contain minced bone, and its ok to use these as part of your puppys diet. But he needs to chew on actual bone to benefit from the dental hygiene aspects of a raw diet.
A dog that eating enough bone will produce firm stools that crumble when dry. If your dogs stools are loose he is probably not getting enough bone. Too much offal will also produce loose stools.
If your puppys stools are hard and difficult to pass, you are probably feeding too much bone. It might be best to cut back a little.
Can Puppies Eat Vegetables
Dogs in the wild eat the stomach of their prey and some of its contents, which may include digested vegetation. They may also consume fallen fruit, berries, and so on at certain times of the year.
Tripe is the stomach of a herbivore usually a cow or a sheep. Green simply means unwashed. If you feed your dog green tripe, he will benefit from the minerals in the remains of the semi-digested material. On the other hand, humans typically eat white tripe. This kind has had all these important nutrients washed out of it, so it isnt beneficial for your dog.
Feeding green tripe and whole prey animals intermittently is healthy. It will give your puppy access to the range of nutrients he needs. If your puppys diet is more restricted, and you dont feed green tripe regularly, youll need to supplement your dogs food with some vegetables.
Ensure that these are pureed or liquidised. .
Some people like to feed fruit and vegetables to their raw fed dogs as snacks. This is not a problem provided you are aware of which common human foods are toxic to dogs. .
Finding And Buying Raw Food For Dogs
Finding raw food for dogs is pretty simple if you live near a populated area. Often times a butcher shop has scraps and leftovers they are willing to sell for cheap as the scraps are not normally sought after by humans. But dogs love it and you know the meat has come from high quality sources . You can often times find chicken necks, turkey necks, chicken or turkey feet, liver, hearts, pork necks and riblets, tripe or other stomach contents, cow tongue, and many other meat products which are difficult to sell. If you can find the right butcher, you can obtain these meat products for cheaper than you buy your kibble. Call around, you might be very surprised with what your butcher has!
And, of course, there is always your local grocery store or big box store. For the most part, you should buy your dog the same meats you would feed your own family if you want to feed your dog a good diet.
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Remember What Not To Feed Your Dog
If you do get creative, remember what foods your dog cannot have. Onions, raisins, and grapes can all cause kidney failure, so its best to stay away from them. Also, avoid garlic and only use potatoes without their skins.
If you use a wild-caught game in your dogs raw food, freeze it for three weeks or longer before using it. This kills any parasites. If you catch raw trout or salmon, freeze it for at least 24 hours, also to kill parasites.
Adapting A Commercial Diet To Meet The Needs Of A Barf Diet
Its easy to find raw dog food recipes and meal suggestions online and in books. But shopping for safe ingredients, preparing the meals, and ensuring you get the right balance of ingredients and nutrients requires a lot of legwork. Buying a commercial raw diet dramatically simplifies the process.
Several types of raw diets exist. Heres how they vary:
- Commercial Unprocessed Frozen Options: These diets consist of premade, frozen raw meat. Some pet owners prefer the convenience of this option. Buy the frozen food from a specialty pet store, defrost, and serve.
- Commercially Processed Frozen Diets: These raw meals often consist of a premade frozen meat patty that contains all the ingredients and nutrients a dog need. Because you store these meals in a freezer, they shouldnt require preservatives.
- Commercially Processed Freeze-dried Diets: This type of raw food doesnt require refrigeration, and you can store it longer than traditional kibble. These diets make a great feeding option when traveling with your pet or leaving them at home with a sitter who prefers easier meal prep.
- Combination Diets: These raw meals provide a blend of grains, vegetables, and vitamins. Pet owners then must mix the premade food with raw meat purchased at the grocery store.
- BARF Premium Pet Food: These raw diets eliminate the guesswork and labor for owners. Instead, these premade meals contain the right amount of meat, fruit, vegetables, and bones your dog needs for a balanced, nutritious diet.
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Nutritional Needs For Dogs
Dogs rely on us to provide them with a healthy, balanced diet. If you want to create that for them, you need to understand their nutritional needs.
Generally measured in terms of calories, your dogs energy comes from three major dietary components: protein, fats and carbohydrates.
In her Pet Food Label Seminar, Dr. Karen Becker shares the dietary percentages that are biologically appropriate for dogs:
- Protein: 30-52% of your dogs calories should be protein sources: meat, poultry, fish.
- Fat: 47-63% of your dogs calories should be fat sources: animal fats, seed oils from various plants.
- Carbohydrates: 1-7% of your dogs calories should be carbohydrates: vegetables, nuts, seeds and minimal fruit.
Proper Nutrition For Dogs
Like humans, dogs have nutritional needs that must be met in order for them to thrive. Dogs’ nutritional needs differ from our own, so you can’t exactly start sharing your own dinner with your dog. Feeding an incomplete or imbalanced diet can lead to vitamin and nutrient deficiencies in dogs.
Dogs need enough calories to meet their energy requirements. A dog’s daily caloric need depends on the dog’s life stage and activity level. Your veterinarian can help you determine how many calories your dog needs each day.
A homemade dog diet should contain an appropriate balance of protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. Vitamins and minerals must be added to the food to ensure it is complete and balanced.
- At least 10% protein, such as chicken, turkey, fish, lean beef
- Up to 50% carbohydrates, such as rice, pasta, and potatoes
- About 2.5-4.5% fiber, which can come from vegetables like peas, green beans, and carrots
- At least 5.5% fat, usually in the form of vegetable oil
- Vitamin and mineral supplements
If you are ready to get started cooking for your dog, the first step is to talk to your veterinarian. Your vet may have recipes for you to try. Or you may need a referral to a veterinary nutritionist or a vet that focuses on canine nutrition.
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Raw Dog Food& Puppies
When it comes to puppies, feeding raw is perfectly possible but it’s important to pay really close attention to the nutrients and ingredients as puppies have very specific nutritional needs.
If you decide to feed raw dog food to your puppy/puppies I’d suggest discussing it with your vet first to make sure that you have all the health angles covered.
This article Raw Puppy Food takes a very in-depth look at feeding raw puppy food and has a ton of information, advice and tips to help you create well balanced meals for your little one.
If you’d like to feed a homemade diet to your dog but prefer to actually COOK the food first, check out my Homemade Dog Food page.
How To Feed Your Dog Wild Raw Venison: A Sample Raw Dog Food Recipe
That said, heres a balanced raw dog food recipe containing cuts of wild, raw venison along with some other cuts of meat.
I put it together for Wally following the 70-80/10/10 formula.
Wally is an adult, 3 year old Feist mix who weighs 38 lb, which is his ideal body weight. That means he doesnt have to lose or gain any weight. Wally eats 2.5% of his body weight in raw dog food per day, which translates into around 15 oz. 15.3 oz to be specific.
Of those 15.3 oz, 10.6 oz are muscle meat, 1.6 oz are raw meaty bone, 0.8 oz are liver, 0.8 oz are other secreting organs, and 1.5 oz are veggies.
Wally gets two meals per day. The meal shown below consists of his total daily amount of food, the 15.3 oz. That said, I split it into two portions.
Heres the exact breakdown of the recipe:
Muscle Meat: 10.6 oz
2.46 oz duck meat. Thats the part of the duck wings that isnt bone.
1.3 oz thread herring. Thats one whole tread herring.
2.7 oz beef green tripe.
1.2 oz venison heart.
3 oz venison meat.
Raw Meaty Bone: 1.6 oz
1.64 oz duck bone. Thats the bony part of the duck wings. Duck wings consist of an average of 40% bone. I used 2.5 duck wings that weighed 4.1 oz total. 40% of that is 1.64 oz, and the remaining 2.46 oz are muscle meat.
Secreting Organs: 1.6 oz
0.8 oz venison liver. Thats the first half of 1.6 oz.
0.4 oz venison kidney and 0.4 oz lamb brains. Thats the other half of 1.6 oz.
Veggies: 1.5 oz
Tip: Use my discount link for 15% off your Raw Feeding Miami order.
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How To Feed Your Dog Wild Raw Venison: Freeze For 3 Weeks Before Feeding It
Heres a word of caution: Youll want to freeze your wild venison for 3 weeks before it makes it into your pups food bowl. This ensures that the venison is free of the parasite Trichinella. Thats a small worm that lives in the intestines of animals.
Tip: You wont have to do that with the venison you buy from Raw Paws Pet Food and Raw Feeding Miami, as their venison has previously been frozen.
Symptoms of trichinellosis in dogs include abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, as well as fever, muscle pain, and joint pain. The disease also causes edema, which is swelling caused by the accumulation of large volumes of fluid in the tissues between the bodys cells.
So definitely no fun stuff and not worth risking, which is why youll want to remember to freeze raw, wild venison for 3 weeks before feeding it to your pup!
How To Make A Balanced Raw Dog Food
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Raw Dog Food: Preparation And Hygiene Guide
Our highquality raw meals can be kept in the freezer for up to nine months.Every two to three days transfer the amount that your dog requires, and allowto defrost in the fridge. If youre in a hurry, soak in hot water in thekitchen sink. Our Cotswold RAW meals will keep fresh for 48-72 hours in the fridge. Just as with all raw meat do not refreeze food that has been fully defrosted.
In order to make raw feeding easier our sausages are individually wrapped in theiredible skins and all our packs are the perfect size for stacking in the fridgeor freezer.
Raw Feeding Can Be Time
Whichever raw dog food recipes you decide to use, it will never match the convenience of dry dog kibble.
Dry food is simply easier to use. Thats why people love it you buy it and you pour it into your dogs food bowl.
For a lot of busy dog owners, preparing homemade meals is just too much hassle.
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Staying Objective On Raw Feeding
There’s a lot of talk about raw feeding and how this diet is based on the way ancestors of dogs survived in the wild.
Contrary to veterinarians’ opposition to raw feeding, recent studies found a number of benefits this diet provides to dogs. But it’s important not to romanticize raw dog food diets.
With all the advantages, like any other type of food, raw feeding still has its their negatives.
It’s no secret that it takes more time to make homemade meals, whether it’s raw food or cooked recipes.
They can also be more costly, especially if shopping for fresh meat at your local butcher’s shop.
Finally, because we’re dealing with raw meat, bacterial contamination is a big concern if it’s not done correctly.
For the uninitiated, raw feeding is exactly what it sounds like: a diet that consists of uncooked and unprocessed ingredients. Because the foods are raw and haven’t been tampered with, that means they are natural and wholesome, containing no byproducts, artificial preservatives or food colors, and no filler.
Ingredients in raw dog food recipes most commonly include meat of different type and eggs.
Other recipes will also include seeds, nuts, grains, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, beans, dried fruits and some other foods.
Before you delve into trying these best raw dog food recipes for your pet, let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of preparing raw dog food meals.
There are many recipes out there, but not all of them are safe or appropriate for all dogs.
Get A Barf Diet Delivered Right To Your Door
Feeding your dog a BARF diet is as easy as getting a delivery of the food at your home. At Darwins Natural Pet Products, our number one goal is to help keep your pets healthy and active for as long as possible. We provide a library of articles in the hope of arming consumers with useful information to help their pets. And, primarily, we produce affordable, high-quality raw dog and cat meals which are shipped directly to consumers, so they are as fresh and convenient as possible. Our meals are high in protein, gluten-free, grain-free, and are created to provide complete and balanced nutrition. We encourage you to learn more about our meals for dogs and meals for cats.
Or, if you think you might want to try a trial of Darwins at an introductory price, we would love to send you our meals and hear how much your dog or cat loves them.
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Guidelines To Creating Balanced Homemade Dog Food Recipes
Following are guidelines for feeding a raw or cooked home-prepared diet to healthy dogs. No single type of food, such as chicken, should ever make up more than half the diet.
Except where specified, homemade food for dogs can be fed either raw or cooked. Leftovers from your table can be included as long as theyre foods you would eat yourself, not fatty scraps.
Meat and Other Animal Products: Should always make up at least half of the diet. A raw diet for dogs can be excessively high in fat, which can lead to obesity. Another potential hazard of diets containing too much fat: If an owner restricts the amount fed too much, the dog may suffer deficiencies of other required nutrients.
Unless your dog gets regular, intense exercise, use lean meats , remove skin from poultry, and cut off separable fat. Its better to feed dark meat poultry than breast, however, unless your dog requires a very low-fat diet.
Raw Meaty Bones : If you choose to feed them, RMBs should make up one third to one half of the total diet. Use the lower end of the range if you feed bony parts such as chicken necks and backs, but you can feed more if youre using primarily meatier parts such as chicken thighs. Never feed cooked bones. Read a full report on raw meaty bones here.
Boneless Meat: Include both poultry and red meat. Heart is a good choice, as it is lean and often less expensive than other muscle meats.
Pros And Cons Of A Raw Diet For Dogs
As with any change, starting your dog on a raw diet will have pros and cons. Well discuss tips for safely transitioning your dog to a raw diet later in this article, but here are the most common benefits and risks to raw feeding:
Pros:
- Increased risk of bacterial contamination to both pets and humans
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