Meeshika, my oldest, has been on the raw food diet for a couple of years now. There are many pros and cons for the raw food diet, but for us it has been working extremely well. Vets sometimes discourage it because they fear rightfully so, that if it is not done properly, it is not a balanced diet. I’ve also heard that there is a fair amount of lobbying going on in vet school, not just from pharmaceutical companies, but food producers as well.
I took a class at my vet’s office before going down that road. It is not as simple as sending your dog into the back yard with a whole chicken. For one thing, the bigger bones can be a problem, the biggest bone size I give Meeshika are chicken wings and I have to portion them. The first time I put a pound of chicken wings in his bowl, he was so excited that he inhaled them, and not much chewing was involved. Not long after they went down the hatch, they all came back out along with the baby spinach, blueberries and supplements. It turns out that he can handle 5-6 wings in one feeding.
It is necessary to supplement when going raw. We supplement bone meal, calcium, Vitamin E, Kelp, Alphalfa powder, nutritional yeast, Vitamin D on a cloudy day and he gets glucosamine, fish oil and turmeric for arthritis in his knee. He gets organ meat once a week. I am very fortunate that he is not a picky eater. I put a huge heaping of leafy greens (kale, spinach, arugula, brussel sprouts, etc.) in his bowl and he loves it. I also pour a few table spoons of heart healthy oils over the greens (walnut oil, olive oil, safflower oil, sesame oil, etc.). The first blood test after we had switched to the raw food diet showed slightly higher cholesterol than he should have, so we did a lipid panel – yes, you can do that for a dog, even though it was the first time our vet who is nearing the end of her career had done one. The numbers were amazing. His bad cholesterol was 65. The rest was all good. I have yet to meet a human that can pull of those numbers, of course humans chose what they eat so they “slip” here and there, not a problem for my dog.
If you are not willing to mess around with supplementing there is a company that sells a balanced supplement product. There is also a great book with lots of good advice “Unlocking the Ancestral Diet” by Steve Brown. It has great advice if you want to go all in, but it also has some easy solutions if you don’t have the time to feed raw. He has instructions for feeding your dog raw for one day a week, I’d probably do raw for the weekend or 2 days if I ever got that busy, but it is a very simply easy to do program with amazing benefits for your dog.
Meeshika is almost 11 and very healthy, but the best part is how much he loves his food.