raw dog food - search results

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).

Feed your dog raw honey rather than processed honey so that your dog receives all the nutritional benefits it has to offer. Raw honey is known to improve allergies in dogs, soothe kennel cough, help dogs' digestive systems and more! Raw honey is strained to remove debris, but that's it. It's otherwise as natural as you can get. Shop at the farmer's market or do an Internet search for local beekeepers. Processed honey, on the other hand, is manufactured with heat, which thins it and destroys many of its beneficial attributes.

If these companies are devoted to the health of our dogs as they claim, they should use the highest quality ingredients, which to me means human-grade. In addition, why would I pay $1.79 a can (in my area) for food with organic beef in it if the other ingredients are not human-grade? By the way, that particular company used to advertise human-grade ingredients and when I called the company to ask why they stopped I got no comment" as my answer. Most dog food manufacturers are tight-lipped about their ingredients – a red flag if I ever saw one and not exactly a sign of product pride."

Deborah Allen, of Boise, Idaho, feeds a dog food diet that combines a commercial pre-mix with raw ground turkey to her two Labrador Retrievers: Hartford, a highly active, 6-year-old working guide dog who weighs 76 pounds; and Lily, a moderately active, 14-year-old retired guide dog who weighs 53 pounds. Their veterinarian says both dogs are healthy, but they have begun losing weight and developing skin problems in the last few months. Hartford is about 4 pounds and Lily about two pounds under their ideal weights.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing critiques of home-prepared diets for the Whole Dog Journal. My original intention was simply to review the diets and offer comments about what they might be missing or how they could be improved, but I ended up doing a full nutritional analysis of each diet to try to figure out why the dogs eating these diets were having problems, or to better understand a very complex diet. My goal was two-fold: to find out how each diet compared to National Research Council (NRC) guidelines, which would be helpful to those experienced in feeding a homemade diet, and to help newbies get started with the recipes provided.

Every aspect of an AAFCO feeding trial is meant to ensure that a food is capable of maintaining a population of a minimum number of dogs for a minimum period of time (26 weeks for a maintenance" claim; 23 weeks for a "growth" claim). At a minimum

If you ever want to see us develop a twitch when asked a question, ask us something about the teeth-cleaning ability of kibble. First, you...

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."

The easiest type of bowl to keep clean – and, not incidently, also the safest bowl for your dog to eat and drink from – is stainless steel. This material will not leach potentially dangerous chemicals into your dog's food and water, like some plastics, aluminum, poorly glazed pottery, or old ceramic dishes. Stainless steel and glass bowls are similarly inert, but stainless steel wins in my house, due to its durability on the floor and in the sink.

I will occasionally use a bowl, but increasingly my dogs' meals are experiences! One option is a kibble-dispensing ball for each dog, with a closed baby-gate between them to prevent my Cocker Spaniel from stealing the Shepherd-mix's ball when she's done with hers.

In my neck of the woods, we still have a huge ongoing mess to sort out with trying to reunite animals with their people following the devastating Camp Fire. Currently, there are three temporary emergency shelters that are caring for hundreds of dogs and cats (and other animals). It's hard to get exact figures, but more than half of the animals have not yet been identified by any owners, for many reasons.

Most dogs love the sweet taste of honey. Honey for dogs has many health properties as well! Raw honey fights allergies and heals wounds, soothes coughs, and eases canine stomachs.