I am switching my dogs to raw (Need people with experience)

[Fleabuskitty]

Oh, and another question(s). A BARF-style diet is more about specific percentages of bone, muscle meat, and organs and involved veggies, right? And prey-model is whole carcasses (like in naturalfeddogs' avatar) that mimics how/what a wolf or wild dog would eat (sorta free-choice)? Or is prey-model controlled amounts of food but percentages of meat, bone, and organ with no veggies? Or is it a mixture of both? Just wanna be sure that I know exactly what everyone is talking about

 

[naturalfeddogs]

Prey model can be large carcasses like the deer one in my avatar, or it can be just regular cuts of meat from the store like, chicken quarters, turkey, beef, fish etc... no veggies are included. Its all about feeding a variety of different proteins, with and without bone.

Barf feeds more ground meats and veggies.

 

[naturalfeddogs]

Ok, then, it has been decided that I will not be giving them veggies (except for occasional carrots because I have found that little pieces of carrots make good training treats).
We went to the butcher again today to get another box of unrecognizable cow parts (it's pretty gross looking and takes some time, but I'm sure it will be worth it) and also got some beef liver. I've heard of people giving liver/organs alone as a meal once a week and also of adding some chunks to the other meat two or three times a week. Which is better? I'm thinking that since they aren't used to it yet it will be best to put a little bit in with the other meat, at least until they are used to it. Is this right?
Also, the butcher sells rabbit and quail meat, so once they are used to eating raw I'll buy them some other stuff like that. I'm pretty excited to try giving them each a whole quail one day, I have no idea why, I just think it will be entertaining.

If you are just starting a prey model diet, you want to start with bone in chicken, skin,fat and organs removed. Organs won't be fed two months or so. Once all goes well with bone in chicken, slowly add it with skin and fat still attached. Then, go on to turkey, fish, pork and other red meats.

A really good site to get tons of info from is preymodelraw.com.

 

[Fleabuskitty]

Alright, I guess the liver shall stay in the freezer for a while, then. So, wait, is starting them with beef and pork bad? Because that's what they've been eating for the past two days... Feeding them just chicken would be really expensive (they will get it occasionally, but not as a huge part of their diet).

 

[jrsckn]

I would never feed a whole organ meal unless I wanted several messes to clean up. Organs tend to act as a laxative if fed in large quantities.

Prey model does focus on percentages if a whole animal isn't fed, it all depends on what is available and more often than not, its hard to find an animal that weighs just the right amount per feeding. The best thing to do is keep a log of every meal so you can keep track of bone/meat/organ% and to know what you've fed if something doesn't work well with you dog.

 

[Fleabuskitty]

naturalfeddogs, that website is awesome! I just read almost everything on there, and I actually didn't know that dogs were a subspecies of gray wolves. I mean, I knew they have pretty much the same digestive system and such, but yeah, that's pretty cool. So, technically, dogs are wolves, so when feeding a dog you are basically feeding a wolf. Prey-model raw definitely makes a lot of sense. But what doesn't make sense to me is how/why people ever decided that dogs should eat different things than wolves.

 

[Phyrst]

I have fed pork from time to time but it never goes over that well with my dogs. It makes them have diarrhea and they've been eating Raw for years. In speaking with a friend who Raw feeds and farms in England, she said the UK Ag Council recommends not feeding pork to dogs. I don't know why exactly but like I said, my dogs don't do well on it. I know another gentleman in Argentina that hunts hogs and raises Dogo's and he doesn't feed much of the pork they get to his dogs either for the same reason.

Pork is a big no-no for dogs. They can't process it and it generally does cause diarrhea.

 

[Fleabuskitty]

I've given mine pork bones, meat, and liver as treats every now and then and they never had any problems with it even though they were completely used to kibble. I don't see how one kind of red meat could be harder to process than another, could someone explain that?

 

[Phyrst]

I've given mine pork bones, heat, and liver as treats every now and then and they never had any problems with it even though they were completely used to kibble. I don't see how one kind of red meat could be harder to process than another, could someone explain that?

I believe pork is known as "the other white meat"!! lol

 

[Fleabuskitty]

I believe pork is known as "the other white meat"!! lol

Actually, the USDA treats pork as red meat, so...
I am interested in knowing what it is about pork that is bad for dogs, though, because everything I've read about raw feeding says pork is fine