Tips for Switching from Kibble to a Raw Diet

Just a reminder, in case you forgot, I am not a vet or a nutritionist. These are my own observations and ideas. Please consult with a holistic vet or qualified canine nutritionist before making any changes to your dogs’ diet, medications, and/or supplements.

The other thing to note when making the switch to a raw diet is “enteritis.” I somehow managed to never come across this term before I switched the dogs over to raw, and so when one of the dogs had a couple of bad episodes of diarrhea, I was about ready to give up. Luckily, a few encouraging people helped me stick with it, and I am proud to say everyone is not only surviving but thriving on the new diet.

Basically, for dogs that are used to eating processed kibble, you can expect to see some tummy upset to begin with. The way the body processes these two kinds of food is REALLY different, so give it a little bit of time. Sky and Lyla had always eaten RMB one or two nights a week and kibble the rest, so I thought they would transition fine, but when I pulled the kibble and put them on only fresh food, Lyla’s tummy rebelled (although I think one of those rebellions had more to do with eating an entire  Ziploc bag then the raw food itself).

The other area I messed up when switching, and probably the cause of some of Lyla’s tummy trouble was introducing too much too fast. I tried to start on that aforementioned menu the first week in with varied RMB, pork spleen, beef liver, beef heart, green tripe, etc etc. BIG MISTAKE! Because this new diet is such a switch for the body, start slowly. Variety in raw is important, but not at the beginning. To start, just introduce protein sources one at a time, and don’t move on to a new one until the stools are normal from the current one.

Brando is on kibble right now, but will be switching to a raw diet this month. As soon as this bag of food is gone, it’s on to raw we go. Much wiser from my previous mistakes, here’s how I plan to make the switch with Brando.

About a week before the kibble is gone, I will start feeding him probiotics/digestive enzymes. Two to three days before the kibble is gone, I will start feeding slippery elm bark (get at any natural foods stores). When the kibble runs out, I will fast him for one day. No food at all on that day. Then the next day I will start with a whole chicken, cut up (actually, in Brando’s case, he will eat more than one chicken in a week, so I will probably actually feed 2 or 3 chickens during the week). Throughout the week I will feed pieces of the chicken, starting with the meatiest portions first (ie, breast) and working my way to the bonier chicken frame. That first week there will be no liver, no heart, etc. If his stools are normal, then towards the end of the week I might try a little tripe because this tends to be pretty gentle on the stomach since it contains so many digestive enzymes already. If all is well at the end of the week/beginning of next week, I might feed a tiny bit of chicken liver (maybe 1/8 cup; liver is really rich, so introduce very slowly).  As long as we aren’t having any problems, I will take him off of the slippery elm bark and probiotics at the end of this week (these things just help prep the system to digest the new, fresh food, you don’t need to supplement them long term in most healthy dogs).

The next week, if all stool is solid and normal, I will introduce another protein source, probably beef. So during that week I will introduce ground beef, beef heart, etc. And so on and so forth until I’ve introduce several of the protein sources I plan on feeding. Once I’ve done this, I will start in with my “menu” and rotating all of my different variety of sources (pork, venison, rabbit, wild boar, etc, etc… get creative!).

That, in a nutshell, is how Brando will make the switch. I will be sure to post how everything goes on here.

Read Full Post »

Resources for Feeding a Raw Diet

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

Leerburg- Raw Feeding FAQ

Ruffly Speaking Blog

BARF for Beginners

Raw Meaty Bones- US

Raw Meaty Bones- UK

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

Read Full Post »

Crunchy Granola

“Crunchy granola” is a much loved slang phrase of mine. A previous boss of mine used to use it in reference to people that lived more “green” or ate organic food or any of those wonderful, healthy things people should do more of. It is not meant to be derogatory in any way, it was just a fun way to say, “hey look, those people are making healthy choices and I’m eating a Big Mac.”

I have mentioned in passing that I feed my dogs a raw diet. This is actually a relatively new development in my house, and they have only been eating this diet for about the past 4 months. The changes in them have been many and great, but this is not a post about how to feed a raw diet. There are many better places you can go to find that information (like here: http://blacksheepcardigans.com/ruff/?page_id=4930). No, this is a post about how my dogs will not eat anything anymore that is not healthy or natural.

A couple weeks ago I was driving to Arkansas to pick up an in-season bitch that needed to be transported to the airport so she could be shipped to Puerto Rico to be bred. I took Sky with me because he’s my car buddy and because he really enjoys looking out the window for several hours on end.

When we got to the toll booth the sweet lady inside asked if my dog could have a treat. I said yes because despite the healthy diet I feed them, a Milkbone now and then isn’t going to kill them. I handed Sky the little red bone (seriously, dogs need red food dye?) and he promptly spit it out. I handed it to him again and he not only dropped it but half spit, half threw it onto the floor between the seat and the armrest.

At that point I gave up and scratched his head and called him a Crunchy Granola dog, all the time chuckling at these health food monsters I have created. Lyla probably would have eaten it had she been there, but Sky has always preferred the finer things in life.

Speaking of finer things, last weekend I went to the natural foods grocery store to grab something for the dogs and then drove to Walmart to pick up my dinner. Spoiled rotten! (although, I would just like to clarify, the only reason I went to the natural food store for the dogs was because I needed something that wouldn’t have been at Walmart, they really don’t eat better quality food than I do…. usually)

Read Full Post »

What the Pharmaceutical Companies Don’t Want You To Read

There are two “hot button” dog issues that really get me going: food and vaccines. Why the vast majority of dog owners aren’t concerned with these issues given the massive implications they can have on the health and lifespan of your dog, and subsequently the vet bills you pay, I don’t know. Perhaps many just don’t realize or have never had cause to believe they might be being misled.

I am certainly no expert, don’t get me wrong, but I am a researcher by profession and by nature, and I tend to research things to death. I read very long, very dry journal articles and books for my own personal… “enjoyment” is too strong a word… “enrichment.”

Today I’ve found a new study out this year by Dr Shultz who is kind of my vaccine hero. His findings indicate what people have been saying/thinking for a really long time, and that is that dogs and cats that have been vaccinated for the core viral diseases (in dogs this is Distemper and Parvo, and Rabies too… but that’s a different beast thanks to legislation) after about 4 months of age, have a Duration of Immunity that lasts at least, AT LEAST, not at most, at least 9-10 years. Futhermore, Shultz goes on to say that elderly dogs and cats, unless they have never been vaccinated ever or were vaccinated at too young an age where the vaccine was nuetralized by maternal antibodies still present, do not become ill with or die from Parvo or Distemper.

So basically, I see this article as having two very real, very pertinent implications to breeders and pet owners alike. The first is that starting to vaccinate puppies at 4 weeks or 6 weeks or whatever your vet recommends that is really young, is kind of a waste of money and puts immature pups at a needless risk of vaccinosis. The maternal antibodies that are passed to the pups through the dam’s milk are killing that vaccine in the system, not mounting up an immunological memory of it. Shultz alludes that at or around 16 weeks is when the maternal antibodies are no longer doing their job, so to speak, and vaccination should occur.

The other thing Shultz’s research implies it that continuing to vaccinate throughout the lifespan is useless. And I want you to really think about this for a minute. You were probably vaccinated for measles as a child. Do you go in to the doctor every year to get your “measles booster.” Absolutely not. Do you go in every 3 years to get a “measles booster.” No. Why? Because your body has built up an immunity to the measles virus and continuing to be vaccinated does not make you more immune. You either have an immunity or you don’t.

Now you might argue that some vaccines you do have to get semi-regularly, such as tetanus. That is because tetanus is a bacteria and vaccines for bacteria or parasites are much more iffy and tend to not provide the same kind of results we can expect from viral vaccines. That is another beast and one I’m not going to go into here.

This is not the first vaccine study Shultz has done either. He has been consistently showing through scientific, reproducible studies that the Duration of Immunity for the core viral illnesses is really, really long, and probably the life of your pet.

All of this, on top of the knowledge that vaccines can do some really scary stuff to your animal that range from mildly concerning (fever, diarrhea, lethargy) to super scary (seizures, cancers at injection site). I don’t think that vaccine reactions are as rare as we might like to think they are either. I have two right in my own house.

My sweet little rescue cat, Izzy, came to me perfectly healthy. I fed her one of the better brands of cat food and gave her the yearly booster shots the vet told me she needed. I was a model pet owner. One year I took her to the vet to get her yearly vaccinations and everything was uneventful. Three to four weeks later my kitty was very, very ill. It took a whole lot of testing and two opinions to pin down she had Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Developed it out of the blue, just like that. Since it was several weeks removed from the vaccines she’d been given, I never put the two together until many, many months later when I began researching vaccines and learned IBD can, in fact, be triggered by vaccine reactions. Not only that, but vaccine reactions commonly happen several weeks or even a month or two after the physical shot is given, so most reactions are not reported or even attributed to vaccinosis. I can’t prove it was the vaccines that did it, but I would be surprised if it were anything else. Unfortunately, Izzy has to live the rest of her life with this disease because of my ignorance and the industry’s lack of scruples.

Sky’s story is a little less dramatic, but frightening all the same. Sky came to me at 9 weeks having already have 2 rounds of “puppy shots,” and at the advice of our vet he received 3 more by the time he was 16 weeks old (plus the Rabies at 16 weeks). Some puppies might be able to withstand that kind of assault on the system, but Sky obviously could not. Over the next 6 months he got every kind of bacterial infection you could think of. I didn’t even stop to think that maybe his immune system wasn’t working properly. On top of that, the vet prescribed antibiotics every single time. By the time Sky was a year old, whatever precious little immune system he had was gone. Since I still didn’t know the things I know now, he got his “boosters” at a year old and our battle with Demodex Mange began.

Sky is now almost 2 and a half years old and I have finally started to get him to a point I feel is healthy. He is on a 100% raw diet and it is doing wonders for him. The way I know this is actually kind of sad. You see, Sky never actually grew a top coat. He still has “puppy fur” (undercoat) everywhere but down the line of his back. If you look closely at some of the pictures I have posted of him, you can see how his back looks different than his sides. That’s because his back is the only place he has ever grown that long, coarse, water resistant hair that is supposed to cover his whole body. Since starting him on the raw diet he has started sprouting long hairs all over his sides. He looks like a porcupine if you view him from the side. That tells me his body is finally, after more than two years, healthy enough to start putting energy into producing a good coat. Sky’s actually due this month for his Rabies and I’m putting it off and dreading it like the plague because his poor body is still so fragile and every stressor seems to send us right back into mange.

So why do we continue to vaccinate like crazy people? I have a theory, but it sounds all conspiratorial, so I won’t go into it, but let’s just say a lot of people are making a lot of money.

If you are interested in reading the very dry but very interesting article, you can go here for the abstract (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19959181), and if you’re lucky enough to be connected to a university system like I am, you might be able to click the button to read the full text article.

Read Full Post »