Choosing a Raw Diet

Since choosing to feed our corgi, Pocket a raw diet... we've had lots of factors to consider. Where to get our supply of meat? What type of meat to feed? How often? How much? What "philosophy" will we follow: B.A.R.F., raw meaty bones, whatever is on hand with no rhyme or reason, should we stop feeding kibble altogether or feed some occasionally? Will we consult a nutritionist, or just follow our common sense? We've come to a few decisions, and we're still working it out with the help of Pocket. So far, so good!

Supply of meat: local. We're open to roadkill and hunting if the opportunities present ourselves, but we've found an excellent source of goat/pork/ and lamb meat just north of town: Winns Livestock and Hatchery. Initially, we found a great source of 'meat' from a butcher about 40 minutes up the road, and still have a few butchers to call up for alternative sources... but the first butcher sold dog food in the form of ground beef (muscle and organ meat). And we've sense decided that what she needs is meat and bone. (Pocket is seen here consuming ALL of a goat neck, from the flesh to two vertebra).

Philosphy: The ground meat, along with chopped veggies and other raw human-grade meat was a great start, but we've since decided that going with the 'raw meaty bones' philosophy makes the most sense to us. I purchased the book "Work Wonders: Feed Your Dog Raw Meaty Bones" by Tom Lonsdale and read it cover to cover. His website, rawmeatybones.com (which i haven't visited yet) has more resources and forums, and i feel that feeding meaty bones that require Pocket to pull, chew, "floss" and gnaw makes more healthful sense than feeding already ground up meat. I still feed her chopped veggies, in season and supply her with chunks of meat, but the majority of her diet is now fed from raw meaty bones. And when we're talking meaty, we're not talking a bone with some meat on it, we're talking about a leg of critter, covered in all the good stuff and consumed down to the last swallowed bone chunk. Eating is a workout, strengthening her jaws and shoulders and cleaning her teeth all at once.

So now we have both source and philosophy down, it's time for implementation. Along with meaty goat and lamb bones (and potential pig/sheep/goat heads and other weird body parts) purchase specifically for Pocket from the local farm and butcher shops, she'll also enjoy bones from human grade food, that would otherwise be wasted or saved for stock making. I only buy whole chickens when i want chicken meat, so i have plenty of chicken carcasses coming through the kitchen. When i have plenty of homemade chicken stock on hand, i'll save the chicken frames and backs for Pocket's meals. If i need to save a few for stock making, she'll have to eat something else. If we happen to buy some bone-in red meat, i may cut off the meat for us and save her the meaty bones.  "Reduced for quick sale" meat is a great option for us and her, and one can usually find gizzards and other cuts in the grocery store. Utilizing 'spare parts' or less popular/old cuts of meat, and sharing the edible portions from the meat we do purchase becomes cost effective, resourceful, and healthful for the whole family to utilize as many parts from the animals/meat we choose to eat.

Now that we've decided what philosophy and source we'll be feeding by, the proof is in the pudding: Pocket's coat is shiny and soft, her teeth are getting cleaner and her itchy ear scabs have cleared up. Are you interested in the pros and cons of a raw diet for dogs? I'd be happy to post more about my research and experience, and i'd love to hear from you if you feed your dogs/cats raw meaty bones.

Shall we continue this conversation?

Dog Food Supplement: Seasoning Salt for Pocket!

Since making the switch from kibble to a raw diet, Pocket has been eating with gusto! Other corgi parents may find it surprising that she's always been very picky, dainty, and unwilling to over eat. She'll often take a day off from eating if she didn't get enough exercise that day (wish i could control my caloric intake like that), and has amazing skill at picking out even the tiniest of 'unpalatable' crumbs. Case in point: she always leaves any trace of beet skin at the bottom of her bowl, but picks out all the delicious squash first thing.

So, as much as i believe feeding raw food is the best way to go with her- i want to be sure she's picking up enough extra goodies that may or may not be included in her kibble. Extras like kelp, omegas, minerals etc are important to a pooch, and since we don't live on land where she can forage on clover etc, i need to give her the goods myself. So, i got to work dehydrating some fresh things and picking up some bulk dried herbs at the grocery store and mixed up some 'seasoning salt' to add to her evening meals. By grinding up and mixing together assorted healthful ingredients, and combining "gross" spirulina and beet with "delicious" yam and apple i can add just a touch of this 'salt' to her food without her being able to pick it out.

I let her lick out the funnel to see if she liked it... i didn't have to wash it out much later, so i guess she does!

She'll get a tip of a spoonful every day, and i'll be sure and add other seasonal yummies as they come around. Broccoli is her favorite right now, and the aforementioned delicious squash. She eats up the meat then brings the broccoli to her bed to gnaw on it a while. It's gratifying to feed my dog nourishing food, and to rinse out a totally empty bowl in the evenings. No more kibble being thrown to the chickens because she's not into it - just a diet of 2-3% of her body weight in raw meat, veggies, yogurt, eggs and seasoning salt to keep her body healthy and fit! Gotta love the sound of a bowl being licked clean to the last drop!

If you feed your dogs a raw diet, how do you supplement it to be sure they're getting all the nutrition they need?

Pocket's In for a Change

As many of my long time readers know, my hubs and i are proud parents of one 20 pound almost-two year old..... who is covered in fur.  Isn't she cute?

Pocket's first whiff of sea air at the Oregon coast

Since before we brought Pocket home, we've been planning for her long, healthy, well educated life. I'm a bit of a task master when it comes to her training, but i also bring all my nutritional savvy to her dinner bowl as i do in our own kitchen. As a pup, we fed her Nature's Variety kibble and raw diets. This very expensive, and very high quality dog food was the best we could get in the city, but we want even more wholesome food for our fur-baby that will in turn more reasonably fit into our budgets.  Even Nature's Variety, with its probiotics, grainfree and well balanced ingredients, and raw options doesn't quite get it. Kibble, for so many reasons, is so off the mark. Dehydrating, sapped of nutrients, not very tasty, and far removed from what nature really intends for our dogs to eat: kibble just isn't a great option.

For all the reasons kibble is a poor choice of dog food, i've been supplementing Pocket's food from the beginning with homemade, grain free treats, veggies from the garden, and chunks of human grade raw meat and bones, plus guts and old meat scraps not as appealing for human consumption that i sourced from local farmers. Even with her fairly high quality food, Pocket has had problems with itchy ears to the extent of requiring medication. Moving forward, we will continue to feed Taste of The Wild kibble in small quantities: i'd hate to go backpacking and have nothing to feed the pooch without swerving her diet off its normal course. But i'm talking small quanities, like less than 1/4 of a cup. What will we be feeding her instead?  Real, raw food: raw meat, raw and cooked veggies and herbs, plus homemade yogurt and local eggs.

Once we're raising our own animals for meat, milk and eggs, (and living more rurally with access to squirrels and buns to hunt), we'll have even more options for feeding our pooch. For now, we have to source what we can from local farmers and butchers, and have so far found some great resources. I'll be posting even more about Pocket's new and improved diet in the following weeks here at AAH and over at Not Dabbling in Normal. I welcome your questions and suggestions... i am aware that the subject of what to feed your children: furry or otherwise, can be source of some contention and disagreement and i welcome the conversation!

What do you feed your pets? Do you think your pet's diet or health has room for improvement, and have you noticed any ailments in your pets that could be due to allergies?

Nutrition and Your Dog

Well, gosh - i must admit i'm a bit embarrassed.
I posted a recipe for dog biscuits a few weeks ago and now feel like i need to mention some changes many of us may need to make in how we feed our doggies.

As a disclosure: i grew up feeding our golden retreivers Nutra Max. I don't know of the ingredients, but my girl made it to the age of 14, so some combination of that food and her rigorous lifestyle of horsey romping helped her stick around. My husband's last dog, Tela was fed cheap chow. Cheap. I felt bad, but we're poor and she was old and didn't care what she ate and she wasn't really mine. Yes, i can be an awful person. Miss Pocket Muffington Rommel, however will be fed the best food that we can afford (i don't even want to say how much i've spent on silly toys and treats - she's just so cute and fun to buy things for!) because we want a smart, well balanced, teachable, willing, happy and healthy dog to hike with us and herd our (near future) goats for many years to come.

Mealtime can be a puzzle - kibbles in a Kong = puppies who have to think a lot get very tired!

Here in Austin we are so lucky to have the Lee Mannix Center for Canine Development, minus Lee himself who passed away this spring in an automobile accident. The center is not cheap - but i can already tell (after just one class with little Pocket) that it is so worth it. They teach us to be the best dog-leaders we can be, using pack dynamics, proper nutrition, and of course positive reinforcement.

I knew when purchasing our first bag of puppy food to avoid those generic or even brand name foods with colors, grain as a first ingredient, or other fillers. I chose Loyalle puppy kibble at the recommendation of my feed store.  No one, including my trainer and vet has heard of Loyalle (made by Nutrena, maker of horse and poultry diets, etc) I'm wondering if i went astray! Pocket does not love her kibble, but that's most likely because she gets delicious peanut butter and natural treats during training and would rather leave that boring kibble for the turtle to scavenge (yes, Holly has in fact eaten up dropped kibble, much to Pocket's confusion). Reading the ingredients closely i see this: the first ingredient is poultry by product. The second is brewer's rice. 4th or 5th is wheat and there is corn in there somewhere. Not ideal.

Puppies and turtles, living together.

Pocket has since moved off lead around the turtle and is so far polite and reliably calm.

I don't want to cross any lines with LMCCD or divulge any of their 'secrets' but i will mention this one note on nutrition as i feel it is so important. Like kids on candy, puppies and dogs who eat trash will act stupid. These are the ingredients to avoid:
Corn, Wheat, Soy, Sugar, Egg, and Dyes.

My dog biscuits are made with whole wheat. Whoops. I originally got that recipe when i was in elementary school - i guess understanding of dog nutrition has advanced a little since then? I'd hope so. I'm not certain WHY wheat is bad for dogs - it may just be that some dogs have wheat allergies (just like people) so it's best to avoid? In any case - i'll still be making some biscuits with wheat flour, but i'll try and mix it up with other flours, or flourless (jerky type).

It's a hard life to be a dog with so many toys to choose from!

The ideal diet to feed your dog is a raw diet. This will keep their teeth and skin healthy, their bones spry, and their demeanor top notch. I can't afford to feed raw (meat and veg) but i'll do my best to choose a dog chow that fits more closely with LMCCD's recommendations once Pocket has finished this bag of puppy chow. Another note of interest: puppy, senior, active, weight management: all  marketing ploys that are unnecessary if you're feeding high quality food.

Good quality fish is a great protein to use in treats. This one was thrown back.

Many apologies for steering you wrong. My next dog biscuits will be adapted from one of these or these recipes or some other experiement with meat, veggies, yogurt and non corn/wheat/soy grains. Why no eggs? I don't know, but i guess she won't be getting any of those either. Doggies are herbivores and love their roots and fruits - Pocket is partial to tiny cherry tomatoes. Yogurt up to a tablespoon a day is also great, especially if it's organic or homemade. Keep variety in your pup's food - just like a child, he/she needs to develop a good immune system to handle random 'snacks' (aka horse manure or squirrel carcasses). If fed the same thing constantly (just like protecting your child from all germs and having them grow up sickly with no immune systems) they won't be able to handle it.
Treat your pup with raw veggies (in moderation and avoiding the toxic ones), high quality meat, human grade ingredients (but never human scraps) and stay away from those preservatives, dyes, and other addictive nasties you'd avoid in your children's foods.

Here's to your health, and your dog's (and your turtle's!)

Some good sounding dog recipes can be found here. Please don't use the wheat flour they recommend though - try potato, rye, or oat.

****Update from the original posting: Lee Mannix recommends no eggs, but i've found that very high quality food (including Nature's Variety Kibble and Raw, which i've started feeding Pocket despite the expense) includes eggs. Since my girls lay organic, free range eggs - i say they're as good for Pocket as they are for us. I'll still try and replace the wheat flour in my recipes with oats, rice or some other flour, and make my treats with fresh veggies and organic meats (including yogurt, pumpkin, and fish oils). Just use common sense, don't feed them anything that isn't high enough quality for you to eat, and avoid addictive ingredients or those that could have antibiotics or additives in them.

****** Second update: just a quick note. We all wonder how much to feed and how much this will really cost? Nature's Variety has a great feeding guide to use when feeding their products. I've found it very helpful. Right now Pocket is about 12 pounds, a growing puppy, and being fed 1 and 1/4 cups kibble with 2 oz raw. Once she's grown, about 20 pounds, and averagely active, she'll be fed 7/8 cup kibble and 1.5 oz raw (or 1 ounce raw and a whole cup kibble, give or take training treats, etc). That's not so bad! The food is expensive, yes - but the quality allows for lower quantities fed.

This post was seen in Simple Lives Thursday - Join the hop!

Homemade Dog Biscuits - Simple Living Thursday

***** Please note the updates on Dog Nutrition in this POST. Whole wheat may not be the best flour to be using when feeding our pups - many are allergic to it. Please avoid using Wheat, Corn, Soy, Sugar, Dyes, and Non-organic Eggs *****

We love our puppy and we want to feed her as wholesomely as we feed ourselves. I've been baking up this recipe for my dogs since i was in the 6th grade back in Merrill, OR. One of the teachers at my elementary school would fly up to Alaska (or Canada or wherever it takes place) to race in the Iditarod each year, and she gave us all this recipe during some pep assembly. I tweaked it up a bit to suit my puppy's needs, and if she could speak i think she'd recommend them to her friends. You can roll them out thin or thick - thinner makes them easier to break apart for training, thicker makes them harder to chew - so depending on if you're using them as training tidbits or pre lunch snacks, roll accordingly.
These treats are edible for humans too, depending what you add to them. I used to snack on them when i was a kid ;)

Ingredients

• 3/4 Cup hot water or Meat Juice*
• 1/3 Cup Spectrum natural vegetable shortening or other natural shortening or butter (i used less to make these lower cal, and subbed in a little peanut butter for flavor)
• 1/2 C powdered milk, i used goat
• 1/2 tsp salt *optional
• 1 egg beaten
• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• I subbed in a little bit of diatomaceous earth with the flour to help combat worms. Brewer's yeast would also be good to add - repels fleas and is good for the skin.

* For the meat juice i purchased some inexpensive soup stock beef bones and boiled them for many hours along with some beef liver. After the beef liver was boiled i cut it into tiny bits and sundried them in my car. That was not a pleasant car to get into the next morning, but Pocket approves of the treats. I have about a quart of meat juice leftover to use for more batches of dog treats.
More options are to add vegetables to the broth to increase the nutrients in the snacks. Try leafy greens, apples, squash, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli. 

1. Pour hot liquid over margarine and peanut butter
2. Stir in milk, salt, egg
3. Add flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing well. This will be a very stiff dough.
4. Knead 3-4 minutes adding more flour if necessary.
5. Roll to 1/2 inch thick (see notes above)
6. Grease a baking sheet and place cookies with a bit of space between themselves. You can use cute cookie cutters, you can cut into pea sized squares or rectangles. I made rectangles that i break apart for training - i will try cutting them into tiny sizes before baking next time and see how that goes.
7. Bake for 15 minutes at 325
8. Allow to cool, remove from pan and store in a sealed jar. Makes 1 1/2 pound and seems to keep quite well.

Positive reinforcement training really works, as our little pup is proving daily. For heaven's sake don't use newspaper if your puppy has a potty accident (which was your fault, by the way!), give her treats every time she pees outside where you want her to, and use healthy treats as lures during difficult training excercises. Dog training is less about making your dog learn to be a human, and more about understanding and listening to your dog, talking to her, encouraging her when she is good (all times that she's not being bad) and ignoring when she IS naughty. It isn't difficult, but it does require consistency and patience.

 Practicing "Down" and "Leave it"

I feel good knowing where my pup's treats come from, and what's in them. I feed my chickens locally made organic non-gmo feed and organic veggie scraps from the garden. My turtle gets mystery pellets along with her bananas and grubs, but she's not overly picky. 

Two long dogs, laying down together. "Sleep" seems to be her most frequently practiced skill.

Do you eat organic food, slow food, local food? Do you feed your pets according to the same dietary goals and limitations as yourself?

I think that "stick" may be slightly too large to fetch, Pocket.

PS - Don't forget about my ONION GIVEAWAY! You still have until Monday to enter your comment for a chance to win a bunch of old fashioned multiplying onions! You get double the chance to win if you 'grab my badge' (in the right hand column) and post a link to your blog with said badge attached. Networking is fun!