"Everyone has a doctor in him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.
Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food " -Hippocrates Greek Physician (460 BC - 377 BC)
Feed bones to our dogs we must be mad! First a word of warning never, never, ever feed cooked bones to a dog they can splinter and cause problems.
Warning over, now for a little history, We had problems with one of our dogs in particular with her anal glands, she would regulary scoot along the floor obviously in some distress, and they all developed a heavy build up of tartar on their teeth and having had serious similar difficulties previously with another dog involving regular costly vet visits to have her teeth sonically cleaned we were in a receptive frame of mind to listen to solutions.
For once luck was on our side when I attended The first BASC National Gundog Conference and sat through a talk on raw feeding given by enlightened vet Nick Thompson.
Could raw feeding be the answer to the tartar problem? On doing some of our own further research we decided to give it a go, we had nothing to lose, I was later to discover that most raw feeders come to it because they have problems of one sort or another and have tried other solutions that haven't worked, it's rare but not unheard of for a raw feeder to take it up straight off the bat because it's the right thing to do. At the time of course we didn't know if it would work, but it did, thanks Nick for giving such an easy to understand talk, it's a long time ago now.
Our dogs seamlessly changed over to raw and just a few days in the results were astounding, the doggy smell disappeared along with the tartar, the dogs enjoyed the new diet far beyond our expectations, and the worrying anal gland problem is so rare nowadays as to be forgotten about. However now I would recommend changing to raw slowly with just one type of meat, chicken is probably best, over a week to ten days and gradually introduce different meats in small amounts. This gives the dogs stomach a chance to produce the right amounts of acid and enzymes to digest raw food.
A couple of months into feeding raw we bought a new chest freezer for ourselves and used our old one for the raw dog food. A week later I chanced on a cheap second hand six month old fridge and bought it, good kitchen scales came next, then a semi professional food processor to deal with the veg/fruit mix, good knives and a good pair of poultry shears are also essential. This equipment enabled us to buy large amounts of raw food more cheaply taking advantage of any bargains that came our way. Our maxim of not giving the dogs anything we would not use ourselves dictated that only fresh Human grade food could be bought for the dogs. OK so I have been vegi myself for 30 yrs, but no doubt you get my drift. In March 2012 we will be into our eighth year of raw feeding.
The early days saw us looking for Pigs Trotters,Pork Loins, Beef Skirt, Lamb Breasts, Chickens, Liver, Salmon (on special), Sardines and anything else we could find. We moved on to buying rabbits in large numbers, picking up deer at the roadside and have since made contact with wholesale butchers. We also feed our home made processed veg and fruit mix containing every veg and fruit that we can lay our hands on, apart from potatoes and anything from the onion tribe, together with the addition of apple cider vinegar, powdered kelp and alfalfa makes a doggylicious breakfast.
There are plenty of useful sites on the Internet should you wish to do your own raw feeding research, We are not looking to sway anyone away from feeding kibble but would just like to point out the alternative and to state that we have found raw feeding to be the answer to the "What do I feed my dogs" question. The evidence for feeding raw is all anocdotal, but is in our opinion well worth listening to. If it strikes your interest go ahead try it. Just be sure to do your own research first.
