IMPORTANT Question for RAW FEEDERS!!

[Tala]

To teach a kibble dog to chew their food properly you need to start with BIG pieces!! I gave my Lab mix whole chickens and turkeys because he used to inhale his food.

NOW he even chews his slices of porkchop nice and slowly. He learned.

I much prefer tossing them a HUGE hunk of something (the guideline is something bigger than the dog's head) and letting them figure it out themselves

 

[sydney13]

dogs that are more wolf like like huskies are good with raw food but if they are like bull dogs they will have a hard time digesting it

 

[Wolfwoman]

Funny how the mentality is so different.... I WANT my dogs to inhale their food, that way I know they are hungry and healthy. When one of my dogs stops eating like a wolf, then there is concern because when a sled dog doesn't eat, it doesn't live long if it's working. However, that being said, ALL of them also chew all the raw bones I give them... granted, they chew them FAST, but they do chew.

I've had two dogs that didn't eat... one was an internal blockage of some sort that they never found, and the other was an enlarged heart. Because I knew they weren't eating properly, I was alerted immediately to a health concern.

 

[Tala]

Quote:
that is a total myth

 

[my3chickens]

I tried raw because of skin problems my lab was having, but at the time I had 5 dogs, a Great Dane being the largest and a Corgi mix the smallest. It was a lot of prep work with that many dogs but I do believe it is definitely much healthier and more natural. Just be careful with feeding raw and kibble, my vet said they digest at different rates so you don't want to mix raw and kibble in the same meal.

 

[Rin]

Quote:
Wonderful tip. I almost made that mistake when experimenting with raw in the past.

I was thinking of feeding raw once my hens start to lay but wasn't sure really how to go about it with a cat. Most say a whole ground chicken - bones and all. I can easily buy a pound of ground chicken at the grocer and feed that with a bit of nutritional yeast sprinkled on top - would that be fine? In terms of the dog I was thinking of buying ground beef, sprinkling a bit of nutritional yeast into, cracking in a few extra eggs and adding a small bit of fresh grated garlic - I don;t want to feed them any whole excess birds - I really don't want my dog to associate my birds with food. She currently does not and I actually trust her 100% with them.

 

[Crazyland]

Yeast is debatable. I have never given it.
Don't worry about your dogs thinking live chicken is food now.
Mine have actually watched me cull 3 roos and have yet to touch even the tiniest of my flock.
If you want to do both raw and kibble I would give the raw in the morning and kibble at night. That way if they do vomit it, you have a better chance of it being outside than on your carpet in the middle of the night. They don't always eat everything they vomit.

And if you do give them only fully ground whole chickens be careful with their teeth. They need the crunch of the bones to keep their teeth healthy. Just like with a dog on a fully canned diet will have bad teeth much faster than a dog only on kibble.
You can break up the proteins, ground turkey, ground beef, rabbit, quail, venison in season. Watch Craislist or Freecycle for free freezer burnt meat. Join a co-op for raw feeders.
Do try to add salmon oil and Vit E along with Vit C to their diet.

 

[lemurchaser]

Quote:
This is absolutely NOT a okay.

Ground beef is all muscle, dogs and cats need organ meats, bones and a small amount of muscle. For cats the ideal diet has been described as a rat a day (guts, brains and all). The diets you are describing would be very vitamin deficient for the animals. Dogs also can have some veggies mixed in and cats still may need supplements. If they were eating whole mice and rats, they'd get vitamins from the digesting plant matter in the prey's guts.

Cats are true carnivores and a raw diet makes a lot of sense for them, just make sure you do all your homework first, and be aware that many internet sources have no clue what they are talking about. Vitamin deficiencies can take months or even years to show up.

I don't have a problem with feeding dogs raw food, but I disagree that it is their natural diet, any more than raw meat is OUR natural diet. We've changed dogs so much that I think it would be tough to call any diet "natural" because there nature is what we made them. But I digress. Basically you should have a vet check that you have a balanced diet or find a balanced raw plan that is approved by a veterinary nutritionist.

Back to the OP, definitely slow them down at first, dogs that are used to inhaling dry kibble can get really sick from bolting raw food. They need to start in small amounts and be slowed down. At first they don't have the right levels of digestive enzymes and will need to change their gut flora to handle much raw meat.

 

[my3chickens]

There are some really great websites that tell you exactly what you need to provide for a raw diet. I just typed in raw diet for dogs, or try BARF (bones and raw food) and came up with a ton of sites.

When I fed raw I simply got whatever was on sale that week and threw in some cut up chicken or turkey necks since they have fairly soft bones. I have a friend that got a recipe online and he purchases his meats once a month and grinds it then makes patties out of it and freezes it.

 

[catsmithpuddin]

I would not worry too much about whether or not raw or store bought food is nutritionally best. I would not worry about whether the dog can digest its food. And yes you can slow down their eating.

Case in point. We adopted a german shepherd two Christmases ago that was 7 months old and had been beat with a shovel. His hips were messed up and walked on half a leg that flopped but could not be set because it healed that way. He could make it about 10ft before he gave out. In the first year he ate everything he could find in the yard. EVERYTHING. He passed them all. Some of the more interesting things I never thought I would see. He ate a 20 lb bag of birdseed, all of it. I was walking in the yard one day and noticed something weird in his poop. it was red and blue. Did you know a small nerf football can be swallowed whole, make it through the digestive track and be passed out the other end? It will slowly go back to its old shape.

All that to say their digestive tracks are designed to handle it. We finally got him to slow down his eating be keeping deer legs we had cut most of the meat off of and giving him one every other day for a while. He could still make it dissapear in about 5 minutes but he was tasting it. He now at least chews scraps enought to taste them.

BTW he can now do 25 miles an hour with the wheeler and his leg has straighted out on its own and healed. He still is not comfortable but he is happy as a lark.