The Vegetarian and the Two Blood-Thirsty Savages

This is a guest blog from  Casey Lomonaco, KPA CTP, APDT owner of Reward­ing Behav­iors Dog Train­ing (www.rewardingbehaviors.com)  I asked her if she would write some­thing about the BARF (Bones and Raw Food) diet because she is an avid raw feeder.  I dab­bled with raw a lit­tle bit when my dogs were young with fan­tas­tic results.  How­ever, I am no where near the expert she is.  A great blog to check out for more infor­ma­tion is http://irawfeed.blogspot.com

If you were to visit my home and voy­age into the base­ment, you would be greeted with a sight unex­pected in any veg­e­tar­ian house­hold – two full-sized freez­ers (one chest freezer, one upright) chock full of buf­falo, rab­bit, smelt, veni­son, pork, chicken, beef, turkey, whit­ing, duck, an assort­ment of organ meats, and a fair bit of raw green tripe.

I’ve been a veg­e­tar­ian for nearly 18 years now, and for the past three of those years have been feed­ing my dogs a home-prepared raw diet.  I was thrilled when my friend Jules invited me on board at her fan­tas­tic Sit, Stay, and Play blog to dis­cuss what I feel is one of the best deci­sions I’ve ever made on behalf of my dogs.  Through­out my his­tory as a dog owner, I’ve run the gamut on feed­ing choices.  Grow­ing up, we fed our dogs Dad’s or what­ever was on sale at the gro­cery store.  When I got my own dogs, I fed what I under­stood to be “pre­mium” diets, Sci­ence Diet and Iam’s.  After a bit of research, I real­ized that there were far bet­ter dog foods on the mar­ket and expanded to offer­ing my dogs Innova brand foods, even­tu­ally tran­si­tion­ing to a vari­ety of grain-free kib­bles and canned products.

I did approx­i­mately 6 months worth of research before tran­si­tion­ing my dogs onto a raw diet.  It was scary for me, as a very ded­i­cated pet owner, to take respon­si­bil­ity for my dogs’ nutri­tion.  Most dog own­ers have been taught for as long as we can remem­ber that we are not capa­ble of cre­at­ing a “nutri­tion­ally com­plete” and “bal­anced” diet for dogs and that “peo­ple food is a no-no.”  There was def­i­nitely a learn­ing curve to feed­ing this new diet once I made the leap.  I was con­fronted with many cul­tur­ally rein­forced myths and errant beliefs about raw diets.  “Raw diets are a fad.”  “Your dog will become a blood thirsty sav­age.”  “Your dog will die.”  “Your entire fam­ily is in dan­ger from blood-thirsty sav­age dogs and immi­nent bac­te­r­ial destruc­tion.”  While the first myth always seemed silly to me (what the heck did dogs eat before the kib­ble indus­try arose in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury?), the lat­ter myths were down­right scary.  Mir­a­cle of mir­a­cles, my dogs are not blood-thirsty sav­ages, are both health­ier than they’ve ever been, and Jim and I are rel­a­tively healthy human beings and happy to report that we have noted no human casu­al­ties despite host­ing many vis­i­tors in the past three years.

Here is a fan­tas­tic web­site ded­i­cated to dis­pelling many of the com­mon myths and mis­con­cep­tions about raw food diets for dogs:  http://www.rawfed.com/myths/

IS A RAW DIET RIGHT FOR YOUR DOG?

In my per­sonal opin­ion (and please remem­ber I am not a vet­eri­nar­ian or nutri­tion­ist), the dog that can­not thrive on a raw diet is a rare excep­tion.  If you look at your dog’s teeth, you will see that they are designed to eat meat.   That said, raw diets are not for every­one, as feed­ing raw, par­tic­u­larly for a DIY-er like myself, is a lot more involved than just mea­sur­ing out a given amount of kib­ble and plop­ping it in a bowl at feed­ing times.  If you decide you would like to feed raw, you can choose to pur­chase pre-made raw foods or you can make your own.  Pre-made raw blends are gen­er­ally more expen­sive (some­times sig­nif­i­cantly more costly) to feed than the DIY ver­sion, but are much more con­ve­nient and less messy.  DIY raw can save you quite a bit on your food bud­get, but is more involved and requires a cou­ple hours’ a month prepa­ra­tion time on your part.

MY VET SAYS I SHOULDN’T FEED RAW

If you choose to feed your dog a raw diet, be pre­pared for resis­tance from your vet­eri­nar­ian.  Most vet­eri­nar­i­ans have a very good rea­son for dis­suad­ing clients from switch­ing to a raw diet.  Why?  Because a poorly con­structed, slip­shod raw diet is dan­ger­ous.  It is not as easy as throw­ing a ham­burger on your floor each day at your dog’s meal­time.  It requires care­ful plan­ning and a bit of research to feed raw cor­rectly.  If you are unable to pro­vide an appro­pri­ate and well-balanced raw diet, it may be health­ier for your dog to eat a high-quality kib­ble or canned food, per­haps with occa­sional raw meals included.

To be hon­est, my vet­eri­nar­ian was ini­tially not thrilled that I decided to tran­si­tion my dogs to raw.  She is a trusted pro­fes­sional and some­one who I respect a great deal, and she knows that I am slightly mani­a­cal about doing all I can to ensure my dogs’ opti­mal health, phys­i­cally and behav­iorally.  I dis­cussed my research with her, show­ing her an Excel file I had cre­ated to be my feed­ing guide as I con­structed my dogs’ diets.  I offered to email my spread­sheet to her.  At sub­se­quent check ups, my vet­eri­nar­ian mar­vels at my dogs’ good health, beau­ti­ful coats, shiny teeth, bright eyes, lack of doggy breath, and mus­cu­lar con­di­tion.  I know that she has for­warded the spread­sheet to other clients inter­ested in feed­ing raw as an exam­ple of what is involved in “doing it right.”  Since I orig­i­nally cre­ated the spread­sheet, I was able to enlist the help of some of my raw feed­ing men­tors to improve it ten­fold.  I will share the spread­sheet at the end of this entry for all of you to use as a resource.

RAW FEEDING RESOURCES

I par­tic­i­pate in an online com­mu­nity where there is a fan­tas­tic raw feed­ing forum.  Many of the raw feed­ers on this forum, gen­er­ous though they are with infor­ma­tion, grew tired of answer­ing the same ques­tions over and over again each time a new raw feeder joined the forum, so a com­pi­la­tion of great inter­net raw feed­ing resources was cre­ated which could be sent as an infor­ma­tion library for those look­ing for more infor­ma­tion on raw feed­ing.  The thread is called “So You’re Inter­ested in Feed­ing Raw?” and can be found here:  http://www.dogster.com/forums/Raw_Food_Diet/thread/431875

When I first tran­si­tioned to raw, I needed to cre­ate a spread­sheet to help me plan my meals.  Raw fed dogs are gen­er­ally fed between 1.5 and 6% of body weight, depend­ing on age, breed, activ­ity level, and indi­vid­ual metab­o­lism.  My spread­sheet auto-calculated the amounts I’d need of var­i­ous types of foods in the diet for each of these activ­ity lev­els both daily and weekly.  Some won­der­ful raw feed­ing friends helped me make vast improve­ments on my orig­i­nal spread­sheet, includ­ing new infor­ma­tion based on NRC guide­lines, the abil­ity to auto-calculate crit­i­cal val­ues based on infor­ma­tion entered by the user, and mak­ing it all around more infor­ma­tive and func­tional.  Once you learn the “how’s and why’s” of a raw feed­ing diet from the “So You’re Inter­ested in Feed­ing Raw?” page, check out the spread­sheet for a detailed diet plan:  http://www.dogster.com/forums/Raw_Food_Diet/thread/491589 (again, do check this plan over with your vet and remem­ber that we are not vet­eri­nar­i­ans, just a bunch of well-intentioned nutri­tion nerds).

The Whole Dog Jour­nal is a fan­tas­tic resource with lots of won­der­ful arti­cles on raw feed­ing.  You may pur­chase back issue arti­cles from their web­site at www.whole-dog-journal.com after doing an arti­cle search for “raw feed­ing” to get more won­der­ful information.

If you are look­ing to learn more about raw feed­ing, check out books avail­able by Tom Lons­dale, Ian Billinghurst, Kymythy Schultze, Mon­ica Segal, and Dr. Karen Becker, among others.

I also highly sug­gest join­ing the raw feed­ing forum on dog­ster, for more help on answer­ing ques­tions you may have as a new raw feeder and to get sup­port on your new nutri­tion plan for your favorite dog!