[want4rain]

Originally Posted by pitgrrl

Here's the issue, both my dogs, but one to a much more sever degree, have GI issues. Fun with littermates, woohoo.

Anyways, this means that I need to grind everything and that I need to keep their daily diet pretty consistent from day to day, meaning that I need to incorporate variety into each meal, not over the period of a week or month. I realize this flies in the face of general raw feeding knowledge, but trust me, years of dealing with this has led to these conclusions.

i dont think variety separately is all that important!! its just way easier for me to not have to prepare something, they just get it as we do. preparing it would be easier if we had a big freezer we could store a months or more in.

So, because of time I use NV pre-made raw for part of their diet, but on it's own it's too bone heavy and needs some sort of supplementation. I was using another raw mix (you add eggs, meats, etc.), and everything was great, but they went and messed with their ingredients, so it doesn't agree with my dogs anymore.

do you know what changed?

I started making a veggie/meat (muscle and organs or eggs, rotating) instead, but I don't seem to have the combo down. I'm getting some poop which is soft and dark and then others which is white and crumbly. Because of this I'm thinking maybe it's the feeding schedule, not the food?

maybe taking and keeping a journal of what you are feeding, who is pooping what and when they are pooping it would help??

This is what I was doing:

AM-Veggie/meat meal
PM-NV pre-made raw (which is 95% meat/organ/bone)
before bed-veggie/meat snack

Should I maybe instead just combine both foods for each meal?

maybe mixing the days food and feeding two meals instead of three? if they have continuous yucky poops then you can start eliminating things until the poops look better? also you could try feeding meat and bone by itself and then all the other stuff by itself too??

I'm seriously being driven insane trying to figure this out.

im sure its enough to drive anyone bonkers, i know it almost did me when we couldnt get our cats to keep down anything but chicken. talk about a limited diet!!!! perhaps going back to the basics? how do you feel about using different kinds of butcher meats and seeing if they have an intolerance to meat switching and then make the grain/dairy/fruit/veggie mix always the same? or even making a stable meat variety? if you took a chicken and quartered it then added a table spoon of ground beef, a table spoon of beef liver, tbs of chicken liver and a bit of ground turkey, that should be more than enough to make the difference in the chicken with the bones. basically a piece of a chicken and then a 'meat mix' of the rest of it??? then you get them all together, in consistent portions and more meat than bone. oh and toss an egg or two. feed the 'other' stuff in the morning and the meaty stuff for dinner? this would give you far more control over their meat to bone intake. if you want to feed a supplement before bed? that would be a good idea since you arent really able to cover all your bases by switching up as much as possible.

-ashley