It explains how to feed, what to feed, the benefits, and other supplements and veggies/fruits you can add.

Monty

It is possible to feed a domestic dog a vegetarian diet as long as it contains the appropriate levels of protein, carbohydrates and other nutrients to meet the dog’s daily metabolic energy requirements. A domestic cat, on the other hand, is an obligate carnivore, and can survive on meat alone. Cats do also have specific nutritional requirements, most notably their need for taurine, and will become ill very quickly if deficient, so if feeding raw meat alone to a pet cat you may want to add a vitamin supplement containing taurine to be safe.

There is nothing wrong with feeding your pet dog on a diet of raw foods you put together yourself at home as long as it meets all the dog’s nutritional needs i.e. contains enough protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber etc. A vet could give you suggestions on how to achieve this, or an animal nutritionist could also provide feeding plans. The area where care needs to be used if doing this is when substituting ingredients from the recommended diet plan, say due to a listed ingredient being unavailable, or deciding to use other ingredients because they are cheaper etc. This can result in nutritional deficiencies, which over time can cause health problems.

Sorry to get academic on you, but I had to clarify the dog – carnivore issue as it is a common misconception and can result in a sick pup in the long term. There are many excellent texts available, including the one I mentioned already, or the likes of “Animal Nutrition” by Mc Donald, Edwards, Greenhalgh and Morgan – a more technical text that goes into calculating daily metabolic energy requirements to develop appropriate diets for a variety of domestic animals (lots of boring calculations and such, but if you are into that sort of thing it’s a great book).

I have a feeling what I have said is going to rile some people up so I’ll throw some qualifications out there to back up what I said (at the risk of being all academic yet again)
Susanne Fritz
B.Science (Biology) B.Arts (Science Communication) Grad Cert Food Science
There you have it – the science geek has been outed!

I understand there are reasons that people don’t want to feed their pets a raw diet; they believe it to be too expensive (it’s not), they don’t like handling meat or whatever, that’s fine. What I don’t understand is the unwillingness of some to even explore the topic – and the degree to which they oppose the notion of raw feeding .

Needing large “controlled studies” to learn what we already know, that carnivores (which include dogs, wolves and cat) eat flesh and bone and have been equipped by nature to do so, seems sort of odd to me. How on earth have dogs been able to survive for hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of years without commercial kibble?

A Word About Salmonella

“At all events, the evidence in which the antibody response takes place suggests that the host-parasite relationship is not saprophytic but of latent infection. If there is no primary factor which produces harmfull effects on barriers within the body, dogs may not fall ill.” Source: Studies on Salmonella in Dogs

Definition: Latent Infection – “The state in which a host is infected with a pathogen but does notshow any symptoms.

At any rate, here are the direct links to Youtube of the videos I have posted on my site;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRaKmbcKjto (wonderful crunching sound effects too. =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLtzLm2RC0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTYiWmPGmTQ