I get asked from time to time about how I feed my dogs. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m kind of a research nerd, and this research has led me to be a dog food freak. Not everyone agrees with how I choose to feed my dogs, and that’s okay I suppose, but for those of you who are interested in feeding a homemade raw diet, here are some of the resources that I used the most before, during, and after the big switch.
Websites
Grand Adventures Ranch Intro to Raw
Books
Raw Meaty Bones: Promote Health by Ian Billinghurst (this is really a science behind the idea book, not a practical guide for feeding raw)
Raw and Natural Nutrition for Dogs: The Definitive Guide to Homemade Meals by Lew Olson
Yahoo Groups: I am a member of rawfeeding and RawMeatyBones. Both are great to ask questions and just lurk around on to see what others are doing and what kinds of problems they are running into.
By far the hardest thing when I started to make the switch to feeding raw, was knowing what to feed to keep ratios and whatnot in balance. I wish that Lew Olson’s book had been out before I started, it is a great reference. Since I didn’t have that, I asked around and got “menus” from some people who had been feeding raw for a long time. From there I made my own menu (and now that I do have Olson’s book, I am pleased to say that the people I talked to knew what they were talking about, not that I doubted, and my diet fits within the book’s guidelines quite nicely). So, I will post a sample menu here, not because it’s the right way or the only way, but because I know when I started I just wanted someone to tell me how they did it in concrete terms. (Disclaimer: I am NOT a vet and I am not saying that this is the right diet for your individual dog)
Sunday: Muscle Meat
Monday: Raw Meaty Bones
Tuesday: Liver (or other organ meat- kidney, spleen, etc)
Wednesday: Raw Meaty Bones
Thursday: Green Tripe
Friday: Raw Meaty Bones
Saturday: Beef Heart
Raw meaty bones in the above “menu” are any animal part that has a combination of edible bones and muscle meat. What is an RMB for your dog will depend on your dog’s size. For my dogs it is a chicken back or leg quarter or a turkey neck, or any of the other “mid-sized” RMBs. For a large dog it may be pork ribs or half of a chicken. For a small dog it may be a chicken wing.
Muscle meat is anything that is just meat, not bone or organ. Muscle meat is boneless chicken breast, ground beef, beef trimmings, boneless pork chops, etc. One important thing to note is that heart and poultry gizzards are a muscle meat, not organs.
Organs are any organ that is not the heart. Organs should make up about 10% of the diet (even though they are icky gross) and at least half of that should be liver. Liver has lots of awesome nutrients in it that aren’t found anywhere else.
Green tripe is not a category in and of itself. It counts as a muscle meat in the above “menu.” Remember, this is not the bleached tripe you buy at the butcher’s or in the grocery store. You generally have to find green tripe somewhere “special” or ask for it because it is not allowed to be sold as “fit for consumption.” I like to feed the green tripe because the dogs love it, and it is one of the other foods that has a lot of good vitamins in it. The downside is it smells like nothing I have ever encountered in my life. It smells like cow poo, literally. I feed it once a week and I HATE tripe night, but, ironically, it is the dogs’ favorite night!
Coming Soon: Tips for making the switch from kibble to a homemade raw diet
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