All meat diet for dog
 

I heard that it was good for your dog? Any advice or suggestions on this kind of diet? The good and the bad?

If you're talking raw,all meat is NOT good, they need the bones too, I think 80% meat to 20% bone. Do a raw feeding search on google,tons of info. If you cook the meat, you can't give cooked bones because they splinter. Best bet is to find a vet who supports raw or barf style diets. Also every dog has different needs.

I feed my border collie a raw diet, and Heinz is right. We use Mountain Dog raw food, which is pre-packaged with fruits and veggies in it. Here's a blurb about it from their website, [url]www.mountaindogfood.com:[/url]

[B]We use chicken from inspected sources..... NOT from a rendering plant! This chicken ( comprising mainly of backs, thighs, drumsticks left from the deboning process) is then either ground ( bone-in) or left whole for those that prefer to feed whole raw meaty bones.

The ground chicken is then put into forms and frozen.

For the meat / vegetable mixes; we mix the meat with a vegetable & fruit mixture containing 70% meat and 30% veggie/fruit. We encourage you to add leftover veggies from your meals.

Our mixture

Carrots, Celery, Apples, Yams

Dehydrated Alfalfa

The vegetables, fruit and chicken are all ground together and then frozen.[/B]

Ask Carina
 

Carina has written a book on raw diets and has a yahoo group. She'll probably be around later tonight.

Lisa.

Oh good! I've joined 2 yahoo groups, would love to try this route, I'll check back to see what works for her! Thanks!

raw diet
 

Our golden retriever has been on a raw diet since she was a puppy, and she's over 3 years old now. It takes some getting used to but we can't imagine going back to kibble now. There are some variations on the raw diet for dogs but the basic concept is 70% raw meaty bones (e.g. chicken necks, duck wings), 15% raw muscle meat (e.g. boneless chicken breast, chopped beef), 10% raw organ meat (e.g. green tripe, beef heart), and 5% fruit & veg (minced, pulped or grated). The wider variety of meat sources used, the better. Fish can also be used on occasion. We do not need feed our dog grains or dairy products.

All in all, we have found the diet to be wonderful for our golden retriever - she barely sheds, has very clean teeth, ears and eyes, her coat is very long, thick and shiny and she doesn't smell. She also has not had to see the vet for any reason except for her spay & annual check ups. We have tried switching our cats over to raw but are too dependent on the convenience of kibble for them. At this point they get raw chicken necks or raw organ meat as treats every now and again, but that's it.

Hope this helps. Make sure to do some proper reading on the concepts before switching, instead of just reading online sites...there's lots of garbage out there. I'd recommend Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats: The Ultimate Pet Diet by Kymythy Schultze, or The Holistic Guide for a Healthy Dog by Volhard/Brown...these are two of my favourite.

Good luck!!

This is my Yahoo group:
[url]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BARF-lite/[/url]

Oreokitty, it's a bit more than feeding them just meat (cooked or raw.) They need calcium, for one thing, either in powdered form, ground bone, eggshells, or raw bones. They need organ meat, and variety is pretty important too.

If you are thinking of a raw diet, here's a very good primer FAQ:
[url]http://www.njboxers.com/faqs.htm[/url]
Cooked diets are a bit more complicated...I don't know of any specific sites but books by Pitcairn & Strombeck are very good. (You can search Amazon.)
You can also search Amazon, my book is there of course. :) Right now they are giving a discount if you buy mine and Schultze's together.

My boys thrive on a raw diet. And they love getting something different all the time! :thumbs up

We like [url]http://www.poshnosh.ca[/url] . They even deliver :)

raw diet
 

We order from PoshNosh too! Good prices, great variety.

2cats, what organ meats do you give your cats? Do you feed them canned as well? At the moment my cats are getting high quality kibble and I would love to supplement that with just some raw meat. You don't worry about the chicken bones? I've heard that there's no problem with this but it still makes me nervous.

cats & raw
 

Hi there,

My kitties seem to love beef more than anything else, so they get beef liver, beef tripe and beef heart most often, but I also feed them chicken livers. As for the bones, my cats have yet to consume a whole chicken neck, but they love to play with them while they eat!! They will stand on the bone and rip pieces of meat off and gnaw away at them. I feed them chicken wings too. I don't really worry because I've been doing the raw thing with my dog for a long time...she chomps down on the bones and chews them up in seconds...with the cats I do watch them carefully to make sure there's no problem. Plus, I've seen my cats eat mice...and there's plenty of bones in there. Anyway - it's definitely not for everyone but because I have plenty of raw stuff around for the dog I supplement the cats diets a few times a week. They've always got their noses in the dog's food bowl, anyway ;)

Cheers!

I can't remember all the details now but my parent's friends feed their 4 dogs a raw diet. The dogs were all very healthy before but on the raw diet there was a night and day difference. Their coats were SO glossy they shone. The energy levels went up (all were flyball dogs before the diet switch) and their.. ahem... waste.. apparently looked a lot better too and the timing was more predictable. All in all they are very happy with the raw diet. They buy in bulk from a butcher and own their own meat grinder so they do up a bunch at once and freeze it in meal size portions.

[QUOTE=Grissom's Mom]their.. ahem... waste.. apparently looked a lot better too and the timing was more predictable.[/QUOTE]

LMAO.
Yes....when dogs eat little or no grain, there isn't as much waste and their poops become much smaller and hardly smell. It doesn't attract flies, either.

I actually have a photo of raw-fed Rottweiler poop in my book, hahahaha. I took the photo next to a playing card so you can see how small it is. :D

raw-fed dogs & waste
 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention little waste as one of the perks of feeding raw! My golden's poops are as small as a 20 lb dog, and she only goes 2 times a day. The output dries up (generally crumbles into the ground) within a few days if I don't have time to pick it up. When I see regular (grain-fed) dog poop now it really grosses me out ;)