Raw & Home-Prepared

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Bill and Marin Corby of Romeo, Michigan, feed a homemade dog food diet to their two rescued Cockapoos. Max, estimated to be anywhere from 6 to 9 years old, has been with them for three and a half years. Max weighed 32 pounds when first adopted, but his current weight is a healthy 20 pounds. Mickey was four months old and very sick when they first brought him home, as he had problems digesting his food. The Corbys switched Mickey to a raw dog food diet, and he’s now thriving at 20 months of age and 16½ pounds.

including ground meat

Those of us who feed our dogs a raw diet that includes bones believe that this is the healthiest, most natural diet dogs can eat. But not everyone is comfortable feeding such a diet to their dogs. Here are directions for feeding your dog a cooked diet, or a diet that includes raw meat but no bones. Your dog will still benefit from a variety of fresh foods in proper proportions, regardless of how theyfre prepared. It takes a little more work to ensure that a cooked diet that does not include bone meets all of your dogfs nutritional needs. Wefll explain how much calcium, and in which form, youfll need to add to his diet.

From head to tail, boiled or fried, crustaceans are delicious, but can dogs eat cooked shrimp? The answer is yes—with reasonable precautions. For most of us, shrimp are a treat, not an everyday meal, and it should be the same for dogs.

Many of us would like to feed our dogs a biologically appropriate raw diet, but lack the time and experience to ensure that the menu is complete and balanced. Frozen commercial diets are the answer. Despite what many makers of conventional canned or dry pet foods would have you believe, raw diets for dogs are not a modern fad, but a return to the dog’s not-so-distant past.

Three of the most knowledgeable and experienced advocates of well-formulated raw diets for dogs have joined forces to explain how to evaluate commercial raw diets. We described them in the inaugural installment of this column last month: Dr. Karen Becker, a leading holistic veterinarian; Steve Brown, one of the founders of this industry; and Mary Straus, one of the most dedicated canine nutrition researchers and writers. This month, we've asked them to address the state of the commercial raw diet industry, starting with diets that are labeled as complete and balanced" or "AAFCO-compliant" (formulated to meet the nutritional levels established by the Association of American Feed Control Officials).Their executive summary? More and more dog owners and veterinarians are learning that well-formulated raw diets are the best food for most dogs most of the time – but the commercial raw dog food industry has problems. They are disappointed with the apparent lack of basic nutritional knowledge demonstrated by many companies – as evidenced by the formulation of their products – despite the manufacturers' good intentions.They hasten to add

Making meals from scratch is the only way I know to have exactly what I want for my dogs – no ingredients from places with spotty records for quality assurance, no multi-syllabic additives making a label longer than I like. After I covered the pet-food recall in 2007, I changed the way I eat and the way I feed my pets. For my dogs, that meant commercial products from companies I trusted, along with raw-food meals from regional sources of meat, grains, and vegetables. It wasn't a huge shift from raw to cooked when my Flat-Coated Retriever, McKenzie, started chemotherapy for soft-tissue sarcoma a few days after her seventh birthday. At the suggestion of her veterinary oncologist, I dropped the carbs, rebalanced the diet with the help of some expert advice, and started feeding McKenzie Meatloaf" to all three of my dogs."

As more and more owners make the decision to switch their dogs to homemade diets, we grew increasingly aware of the importance and urgency to supply appropriate guidelines that could help people create homemade diets that would meet their dogs' nutritional needs. Over the past five months, we've presented information on homemade diets, cooked and raw, with whole bones, ground bones, or boneless. During that time, we've learned about some new products, read a great new book, tried out some sample pre-mixes and freeze-dried foods, and responded to questions from people about issues raised in our past five articles and points that would benefit from clarification. We'll discuss these topics in this final installment of our series.

Over the past few months, I've read more than 30 books on homemade diets for dogs. Many offered recipes that were dangerously incomplete; a smaller number provided acceptable guidelines but were confusing, unduly restrictive, overly complicated, or had other issues that made me recommend them only with reservations. A few were good enough to recommend without reservation. This review is about the cream of the crop: three relatively new books (one is a new edition of an older book) whose authors have taken the time to analyze their recipes to ensure that they meet the latest nutritional guidelines established by the National Research Council (NRC).

There are some very high-profile illnesses that can result from handling raw meat – scarifying things like E. coli, salmonella, and trichinella. The mere idea of these threats prevents many people interested in “raw feeding” from giving this type of highly beneficial diet a try. So, we’re going to demystify everything that could go wrong with raw meat (but probably won’t). We’ll describe some horrible diseases, and how they would affect a person who got them, and how they would affect a dog.

Over the past three months, we’ve provided rules and guidelines for feeding a homemade dog food diet, but getting started can still seem overwhelming. This month, we’ll hear from owners who feed their dogs a homemade diet, and learn from them how they go about it, including tips and tricks for finding, preparing, and storing the dog food.