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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.

We all want our dogs to enjoy the highest quality of life for the longest possible time. Proper diet, adequate exercise, weight control, appropriate supplements, and good veterinary care can all help our dogs remain active and vibrant well into their senior years.

Every day, thousands of dogs are diagnosed with kidney disease. The first suggestion most conventional veterinarians make is to switch from whatever the dog has been eating to a low-protein “kidney diet” food. Clients are sent home with bags or cans of “prescription” food and warned not to feed high-protein foods or treats of any kind.

Dogs don't experience heart attacks the way humans do, but this doesn't mean they don't die of heart disease. Heart failure is increasingly common in America's dogs, with many showing symptoms by age seven or eight. Even some young dogs develop congestive heart failure, inheriting the propensity for the disease from their parents. Conventional medical practitioners consider congestive heart failure and other circulatory problems to be progressive and irreversible, but holistic veterinarians know that in many cases, heart disease can be slowed, reversed, and even cured. Understanding heart disease will help you prevent it in healthy dogs and treat it in dogs who are already ill.

The rescued puppy has diarrhea, gummy eyes, ear mites, and ringworm, but there’s a spark in his eye and his tail is wagging. A stray dog has an upper respiratory infection, skin lesions and worms, yet the person who finds her knows she’ll make a loyal companion. Some of the best dogs come into our lives in damaged condition, and the right support can transform them. Yet when dogs have multiple problems, it’s hard to know what to do first. Many dogs and puppies in pet stores, animal shelters, or on the street suffer from malnutrition and conditions that take advantage of impaired immunity; parasites, bacterial infections, fungi, and viruses all take their toll.

Readers of canine health books and magazines, including this one, can be forgiven for assuming that holistic or natural pet care is a recent breakthrough, something developed during the past two or three decades by a handful of revolutionary veterinarians and researchers. Not so. Today's holistic pet care movement began over 70 years ago when Juliette de Bairacli Levy defined natural rearing.""

Juniper suffered a brush with bloat

Dogs do eat chicken bones, but it’s far from an ideal choice and can lead to big veterinary bills.

The long-term goal of this column is to teach interested dog owners how to formulate safe and wholesome complete and balanced" home-prepared diets for their dogs. We will eventually cover raw and cooked diets

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).

Interest in homemade diets has never been greater, especially since the huge pet food recall of 2007. Last month, I reviewed books that explained how to feed a homemade canine diet based on raw meaty bones (RMBs). This month, I’ll look at books about boneless diets – by far the largest category of books. Unfortunately, I found a lot of bad books out there. Many of the recipes provided in the books are nutritionally inadequate! There’s no harm in using them from time to time, or to replace a small portion (up to 25 percent) of a commercial food diet, but anyone who relies on these books to feed their dogs a homemade diet is likely to end up with issues that could range from dry skin to crippling orthopedic conditions.

Between runs at a recent agility competition, I was chatting with Katie and Nora, a couple of handlers I often see at trials. Coincidentally, all three of our dogs had received an annual health examination from our respective general practice veterinarians recently, with all dogs earning good reports. And all three of us had been told by our veterinarians that our dogs had broken or chipped teeth. My veterinarian had noted a slab fracture of the upper fourth premolar" on the health summary report for my 10-year-old Border Terrier