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IT’S
NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! |
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Preparing a well balanced
healthy diet for your dog certainly requires knowledge and understanding of
what dogs really need to eat. Dog food
companies and those vets determined to abide by the “laws” of nutrition dictated
by those companies do their best to convince you that you’ll kill your dog by
deviating from what comes in those oh so convenient bags of food. Not so. There are a few really
important basic rules: 1) Variety. Whether you feed a raw diet or a cooked
diet variety is essential. Change the meat you
prepare, change the vegetable/fruit mix you prepare and be sure to include
organ meats. 2) Balance
over time. It is not necessary to have
each and every meal totally balanced.
Meet your dog’s needs over a week or two. 3) Calcium. In a raw diet based on raw meaty bones
there is no problem with providing calcium.
If the diet is cooked, that means NO bones! calcium
must be added to the diet.* The calcium-phosphorus
balance is essential to good health.
It is in balance between 1:1 and 2:1.
The more meat in the diet, the greater the amount of calcium that must
added to maintain c/ph balance. Again
– a diet based on raw meaty bones (bones the dogs can consume!) should NOT
have calcium added. An excellent
source of calcium, in the absence of bones, is finely ground egg shells. So easy! One large eggshell contains
approximately 2000 mg of calcium so you can add ½ teaspoon ground shells per
pound of food. Mary Strauss (DogAware.com)
says that meat, organs, eggs and dairy in the form of cottage cheese, kefir
or yogurt should make up at least 50% of the diet. Organ meats should be about 5 to 10% of the
meat mixture but it is probably best to mix a small amount of organ meats in
several times a week rather than have a meal offers only liver – diarrhea is
very likely otherwise. Dogs do NOT require
carbohydrates so if you insist on adding grains, beans or starchy vegetables
please keep the level very low.
Strauss suggests that if you do add grains you choose from brown rice,
oatmeal, barley, amaranth, quinoa and bulgar. Note there is no corn, wheat or soy! Determining the amount of
food to give your dog is a bit testy.
You need to observe your dog and decide what works best. There is no one size fits all because of
the huge differences in how each dog metabolizes food. Chihuahuas require more food per ounce of
dog than a giant breed, for example, and then there is age and activity level
factor. A starting point is to feed 2
to 3% of the dog’s body weight. Toys
may require 4 to 5% and giants as little as 1 ½%. Only you will be able to make the final
decision. Keep ‘em
lean is the plan! Mary Straus’s Sample Daily
Cooked Diet and Supplements for a 40 pound dog is as follows: 8 to 12 ounces muscle meat/heart/fish/leftovers (raw or
cooked weight) 1 to 2 ounces liver or
kidney (raw weight) 1 to 2 eggs (daily or every
other day) 1 to 4 ounces yogurt, kefir
or cottage cheese 2 to 8 ounces cooked grains
or vegetables (cooked weight) 1000 mg calcium Sample daily supplements
(optional) 2 fish oil capsules (400 to
600 mg combined EPA and DHA) 500 mg vitamin C –
preferably sodium ascorbate or calcium ascorbate Vitamin B-50 complex once
or twice a day Cod liver oil – 100 to 200
IUs vit D) 1 clove fresh crushed
garlic This is simply ONE option
for a cooked diet. Remember – you
balance over a week or two. Exclude
one or more of the items one day or one batch and include in the next
offering. Of course, it is so much
easier to feed a raw diet and that is available here in San Miguel. It is marketed as B.A.R.C. – Biologically
Appropriate Raw Cuisine. *Canned mackerel and canned
salmon require no additional calcium.
The bones are in the can. The
only cooked bones acceptable are those cooked to a fare-thee-well – totally
soft, in other words. H |