Feeding a dog the BARF diet

I am really considering switching my dog over to a raw diet. I posted not that long ago about my dog with her food allergies and her bowel problems. I talked to my vet about this and they said it would be fine to start my dog on a raw diet as long as it is a balanced and complete diet. My dog has been having way to many stomach and allergy issues while she has been eating commerical dog food. I was just wondering if anyone out there also feeds their dog the BARF diet?

I fed my Bengals a raw diet supplemented with vitamins when I had them

I made it myself and it cost like 50 cents a day to feed them both, morning and night.

What a remarkable difference in made with them in even a short period of time

Go for it!

When I have a dog of my own I plan to feed them at LEAST a mostly raw diet. Only time I see using dog food is when people are dog sitting him/her and stuff like that. With our family dog I try to supplement her dog food with healthy raw meats and other foods any time I'm cooking something that has ingredients that would be healthy for her. It's really cool to see how well they do even with a little something extra other than the dry dog food.

You will see a world of difference when you start your dog on a raw diet! My dog kept having allergies, bowel problems & prone to getting stones, but once her on a raw diet she thrived.

YES!!! I am so glad to see so many people that feed raw!!!!

Yes.. a balanced raw meal is what they are MADE to eat!!! And you will be amazed the difference you see!!! Less poop (which will break down within a couple of days) less shedding, more sustained energy etc!!!

I totally get the idea of feeding dogs a balanced raw diet. But couldn't someone come up with a better acronym than BARF? :rofl:

I'm not sure I want my dog to have more sustained energy.... :P But I would be interested in learning more about raw diet options. Are there any options out there that are comparable to the convenience and cost of high-grade commercial kibble?

Technically humans sould be eating only raw vegetables and fruits and meat too, but you'll only find rare people who do.

I tried the raw diet with my dogs. I didn't find it TOO pricy, but I also saw no difference in my dogs eating the rat diet vs a decent dog food. After a few MONTHS I found a raw chicken wing hidden under my pillow and ended the raw diet. And I was feeding them on the porch too. Sneaky buggers.

The other issue I had was the time to feed them(multiple dogs, making sure everyone had time to eat without food being stolen by others) and getting them to eat the veg vs the meat. The major issue was the mess, since all my dogs have hair(vs short coated ones) and would get various bits of raw diet stuck all over face and paws.

I've heard tons of great things about feeding raw diets, didn't see any benefits feeding it to mine and went to a quality dog food instead.

We feed our Danes 100% raw, and they are thriving...could not imagine feeding them anything else! In fact, my husband & I recently bought a second freezer so we could better store all their food. We now have one freezer just for raw meaty bones, and another for the 2-lb containers of specialty foods I get from http://www.mypetcarnivore.com I've been an advocate of raw-feeding for more than 10 years now, and really cannot stand the BS that most commercial dog food companies peddle to make a buck.

I love the variety you get when feeding raw. Rather than feeding the same kibble day in, day out, you can really mix things up & get a feel for what your dog favors. There are a lot of great resources out there for establishing the right model of feeding, and you're SUPER lucky to be located in PA. There's a great raw food supplier, Hare-Today.com, that is based out of PA. If you decide to seek out some specialty items shipping should be relatively cheap for you, especially with winter coming up. http://www.hare-today.com/

Call around & find a restaurant supplier, and you should be able to find a lot of items relatively cheap. We get chicken backs & necks for $.49/lb right now, and turkey necks for $.79/lb, from a local restaurant food wholesaler. They may be a good source for organ meats as well - liver, kidney, etc. Just remember that things like tongue & heart are considered a muscle meat & not organ meats when you do your RMB/muscle/organ breakdown. :) Also find a good source for green tripe, either frozen or canned. Bleached or white tripe strips out all the nutritional value...I could go on & on. I have a file full of raw resources & links...PM me if you'd like a copy. ;)

Here's hoping your experience with raw has been every bit as awesome as ours has!

K~

what exactly are you feeding?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by purplemuffin

Only time I see using dog food is when people are dog sitting him/her and stuff like that.

---

You don't even need to switch back & forth...just bag up per-meal quantities of what your dog eats, and label it (i.e. puppy breakfast, lunch, dinner), and leave it with instructions to pull out of the freezer the night before & leave out to thaw. Granted, for the few days you need someone else to feed your dog you may not want to feed stinky things like tripe if the feeder is at all sensitive, but otherwise leaving pre-measured raw for a pet-sitter is really easy. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by womsterr

what exactly are you feeding?

---

I feed pork & beef ribs, pork neck bones, chicken backs, chicken necks & turkey necks for raw meaty bones. This is supplemented with heart, tongue, liver, kidney, spleen, pancreas and green tripe from beef, sheep & bison, as well as rabbit, lamb, goat, venison, bison, duck (usually ground) salmon (filets or canned), raw eggs...basically whatever I can get my hands on from a GOOD source to make my dogs' diet as varied & nutrient-rich as possible. :)

Our boys eat DARN good! :D

K~

True, but I have a family of wussies! They have enough trouble using raw food to cook with, I can't imagine them even touching a bag of dead stuff that they don't eat! Hopefully by the time I am on my own I will know someone I can trust to do that for me who can handle a little bit of raw meat!

feeding raw will absolutely change your dog's life. our dog was an overweight pudgy dog, and his hips crackled every time he stood up. now he acts almost like a puppy again! he springs up at walk time now, he's lost about 20lbs since starting on the raw, his fur is soooo much shinier and healthy looking, and he's just generally more active and happy. and NO SMELLY DOG FARTS! god, that was the worst! his poops are also way way easier to clean up.

we have a friend with a very small chihuahua x pug and his dumps are bigger than my 75lb black lab x rott cross!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kara

I feed pork & beef ribs, pork neck bones, chicken backs, chicken necks & turkey necks for raw meaty bones. This is supplemented with heart, tongue, liver, kidney, spleen, pancreas and green tripe from beef, sheep & bison, as well as rabbit, lamb, goat, venison, bison, duck (usually ground) salmon (filets or canned), raw eggs...basically whatever I can get my hands on from a GOOD source to make my dogs' diet as varied & nutrient-rich as possible. :)

Our boys eat DARN good! :D

K~

---

I'll have to look into this more. My lab has always had skin and stomach problems. During hunting season I supplement with venison heart/liver/kidney/pancreas.

Heck, I'm doing good just to keep my dog out of the cat food and taking the people food off the counters! :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JLC

But I would be interested in learning more about raw diet options. Are there any options out there that are comparable to the convenience and cost of high-grade commercial kibble?

---

Depending on what you choose to feed & the resources in your area, raw can be very cost-effective, especially compared to the price of high-grade, premium kibble.

Convenience is raw diet's only drawback, IMO. You can get commercial raw diets, like Bravo, Oma's Pride, etc, but you'd still have to find a source for raw meaty bones and tripe, as most commercial products are typically just whole-ground animals...good stuff, but not necessarily a complete diet. If you're buying RBM in bulk, frozen, you'd have to thaw & repackage into meal-sized portions & then store in your freezer. Then there's the matter of thawing out the food for daily feedings, and if you're thawing enough for a couple of days, where you want to keep it so it stays refrigerated.

For perspective, Ryan & I buy 160 lbs of raw meaty bones at a time, and that lasts us about 6 weeks. It takes about 36 hours for the 40-lb boxes to thaw out enough to repackage, and repackaging 160 lbs into the quantities that we feed in a day (3 meals x 2 dogs) takes about 2 hours for one person, including time spent stripping fat & skin off of the chicken necks. Our main supplier is about an hour away from us (one-way) so we tend to buy a bunch at once. We get better pricing that way, and don't have to drive in as frequently to pick up food. It's a labor of love, but not terrible, and TOTALLY worth it IMO. :)

HTH!

K~

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kara

Depending on what you choose to feed & the resources in your area, raw can be very cost-effective, especially compared to the price of high-grade, premium kibble.

K~

---

This is probably my biggest concern when it comes to attempting a raw diet for Mira. With as frequently as we move...and the constant unknown about what's next....my local resources are always a mystery.

My ability to store large amounts of frozen food is also rarely more than a single standard family 'fridge that also has to hold all the family food. We can't haul around big box freezers with each move that may or may not have a place to live in the next house.

I think I'll look into what sorts of commercially prepared raw foods I can find in national chains (if we ever get sent someplace that doesn't have a petsmart or the like, then what I feed the dog will probably be the least of my worries)....and how they compare in price to the dry food I buy now. (Which ain't cheap) Would you say that such food is significantly better than high grade kibble...even if it's not as completely rounded out as what you're able to provide?

Judy, I think it would be doable, especially if you have access to a varied, commercially-available raw diet (Bravo comes to mind), and/or enough of a variety of RMB, muscle & organ found locally.

If you had the option for even a compact chest freezer (3-4 cu. ft) it would make storage easier. Something that size would work for a single dog, doesn't take up much space, and isn't as cumbersome to move as a standard deep-freeze. Additionally, it would allow you to take advantage of finding various foods on sale and storing them, if you can't find a bulk supplier in your area. It would also eliminate the issue of storing the dog's food next to the family's ice cream. ;)

With a little bit of work & resourcefulness, you can feed a complete raw diet. The key points are to ensure a correct RMB/muscle/organ ratio, and to feed as much variety as you possibly can. This doesn't mean you have to go crazy feeding the more exotic stuff however, if you were limited to only one food source (i.e. just chicken) it would be necessary to take another approach to feeding.

I have always supplemented my dogs with raw meats and the like, and wouldn't really mind switching to a raw except for- how do you figure out how much to feed your dog? I play enough of a guessing game with dry kibble, so I think it would be rather scary to do so with foods that will very directly affect the dog's nutritional intake.

Also, it seems like everyone else here just has a couple dogs... with 5 dogs I wonder if it really becomes any cheaper.

That's just my two cents. :P

Is there a list of certain breeds that need different nutritional needs? I know at least with kibble that certain breeds need certain extra nutrients to compensate and it seems like bigger dogs and little dogs have different dietary needs. I know I want a corgi, any advice on them? Is the raw diet basically a fit-all-dog diet because it gives them full nutrition unlike kibble?

Oh.. for the people that travel, or don't want to deal with the icky raw.. Freeze dried works well. :D

I will say .. about the dog specific foods.. MANY of those are just marketing ploys.. And most of the foods that have breed specific lines are crap (as in lots of corn/wheat/by-product/etc)


If you do research on dogs. you will find out what ones are prone to becoming snausages. Corgies are one of them.. so with kibble.. often times a lower protein works well..

Raw is usually a broad spectrum food..

I also use a freeze dried raw called honest kitchen. It made a massive change in me boston terrier who always had a vomiting problem since she was a pup. She was on very expensive meds to stop the vomiting for years. Now she eats just the raw No vomiting in 4 yrs! Would never go back to kibble.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by starstrukk

I have always supplemented my dogs with raw meats and the like, and wouldn't really mind switching to a raw except for- how do you figure out how much to feed your dog? I play enough of a guessing game with dry kibble, so I think it would be rather scary to do so with foods that will very directly affect the dog's nutritional intake.

Also, it seems like everyone else here just has a couple dogs... with 5 dogs I wonder if it really becomes any cheaper.

That's just my two cents. :P

---

2-3% of the dog's body weight per day is rule of thumb when feeding raw. If a dog is on the heavy side, you feed less (2%). On the lean side, you feed more (3%). Either way, the amount you feed is spread out over the # of times you feed in a day. Example, our dogs each get 3.5 lbs per day, so 1 lb in the AM, 1.25 lb at noon & night.

This is all information that you'll see time & time again when thoroughly researching raw, and I cannot stress enough how important it is do really do your homework before making the transition to feeding a raw diet. While it's an easy feeding method once you understand the requirements, it's not as simple as just putting raw meat in a bowl & feeding it to your dog.

As far as expense when feeding more dogs...I have friends with quite a few dogs (7 in one household, 15 in another) who feed nothing but raw. This is where buying in bulk for discounted prices & having the option to store large quantities of frozen food really come into play. Buying the same amount of premium kibble every month would cost nearly twice as much as the raw, but these folks are also very, very resourceful when it comes to finding good sources for quality raw.

This topic got me thinking so I started doing some research and I found these great videos, I will be changing my dog to BARF. Please take the time to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3wLT...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTWHxvjI_as&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdDPi-1Yjy0&feature=relmfu

I know this is older, but I wanted to share my friend's experience with Raw diets. She has 3 German shepards and I often helped her find meat sources. We picked up feet and heads from farmers and local people who raised 4H animals. They'd give us guts too and we could often get rabbits, chickens and goats. Some people would give us crud from their freezers that was freezer burnt that the dogs would eat. Even hotdogs are fine for treats once in awhile ^_^ She wasn't too picky as long as most of what they ate was healthy.

One of the dogs had chicken allergies and the first time she tried raw food, the diet was mostly comprised of chicken product. He had goopy eyes and liquid poop all the time and her vet in Southern California convinced her she was killing him with raw food. Once she started him on a non chicken based diet, she tried raw again with turkey and beef and he does great! It's a little harder with dogs that don't chew well and you can sometimes have issues with bone chunks if your dog inhales his/her food if it's not pre-ground. Even with the risks (some studies indicate that raw fed dogs can have slightly more salmonella bacteria in their systems) it's what I will feed my dog if I ever get one! i figure if i feed my snakes as close to a natural diet, why shouldn't it work for dogs? I figure if they can breed with wolves, they are still close enough to their wild selves that they can almost the same thing!

i tried this with my dog,,, and he refused it:confused: go figure.
spooky

I also Feed My dog a raw food well there skin improves a lot hair become shinny overall a good health