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Old December 7th, 2009, 08:32 AM
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luckypenny luckypenny is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: St. Philippe-de-Laprairie, Qc
Posts: 11,812
De-boned Steelhead filet is fine to feed occasionally. (<---- ETA: Steelhead is not fine to feed! My error.)I prefer whole small fish such as mackerel and sardines though (soft bones plus they get all the organs too).

There are two things about your diet that concern me though, I hope you don't mind me pointing it out . Rather than ground beef, try to find huge chunks of beef that you can cut into big pieces for your dogs. For example, I feed 1 1/4 lb whole pieces to our dogs. It's much better for their teeth and gums, and contain much less surface bacteria (there's a reason why a "cook thoroughly" label is placed on packages of ground meat).

It would also seem that you're giving your guys weight bearing bones throughout the day? Those are ok for recreational chewing once every now and then but, if you've got power chewers, they can damage their teeth with them. The bone content in your dogs' meals should come from softer, easy to digest bones such as chicken carcasses (we feed half chickens minus the thighs/drumsticks...two of our guys don't digest them properly), soft pork and beef ribs, cartilage, etc. For daily recreational chewing, you can give them Kongs stuffed with cubes of raw meat and/or green tripe (not the white bleached stuff) that's been frozen overnight. Unfortunately, we can't find raw tripe here so we use the canned Trippet brand (found at most small pet supply shops).

If you can find a poultry store in your area, that would be the best place to find the cheapest and freshest chicken organs. Here's a tip: try to find poultry that's been air chilled. Water chilled poultry contains, well, lots of water and there's no point in paying for that. Before I knew the difference, I also noticed our dogs would sometimes get upset tummies from water chilled chicken as well.
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Last edited by luckypenny; December 8th, 2009 at 08:13 AM.
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