Still Needs Work!

Ugh, I still hate the color scheme on this blog.  Guess I need to play around with it a bit more.  This blog site is definitely "user friendly" as long as the user has the time and patience to work with all the available tools.

The dogs ate pretty standard fare today.  The rest of the ground turkey, more of the ground rabbit (then I froze up the rest to save until next week), left-over green beans from our Sunday dinner, and salmon oil.  Tonight they had the rest of the turkey necks and Argus got a chicken back as well since the necks were small.  They also shared a large nuked sweet potato.  Although the meat is generally raw, the veggies may well be cooked so the dogs can digest them.

I brought up a new 5# tube of ground turkey thighs as I want to feed fish (to the dogs) tomorrow and I generally mix it half and half with ground turkey or chicken.  I'll use one or two cans of salmon or mackerel, mixed with turkey and veggies.  I rarely add water to our raw meals but sometimes add it to fish meals since the canned fish is supposedly higher in purines.  I don't worry much about purines, but it's become a habit to add water to fish meals.  Some days I split a can of sardines among the dogs and because there is actually so little fish, I don't bother with the water.

One thing I figured out a long time ago, well before the stone god got on board, was that the secret to preventing a problem with urate stones is to be sure the dogs get enough water.  That's an important consideration with any kind of stones, whether we're talking dogs, cats or people.  Over the years it's become second nature to watch the dogs drink (and pee), being sure that the boys at least were drinking plenty of water to keep their urine properly diluted.   The dogs get a bit of organ meat from the scraps attached to chicken backs, but we pretty much stay away from it otherwise, although I do use heart from time to time - it's a muscle meat, not an organ meat.  The purine charts have a lot of conflicting information, but for the most part poultry is lower in purines than beef, pork, lamb, and most fish, and organ meats are very high.  For this reason and because chicken and turkey are less expensive, most Dalmatian raw diets are based on poultry parts.

Tomorrow I'll probably pay another visit to Woody's Pet Food Deli which just opened a store in my neighborhood.  I was driving along one day, saw the new store, and almost did a U-turn in traffic.  It would be a perfect place to shop if I was feeding one dog or several small ones, but it would be too expensive to buy my regular food there.  It does provide a good chance to pick up hard-to-find items, like the frozen whole ground rabbit that the dogs have been eating.

I'm also working on another project, one I started about 6 years ago, a booklet on feeding a raw diet to Dalmatians.  There are lots of good books on feeding raw to dogs, but this booklet is on feeding raw to Dalmatians.  I've shared the partially finished project with many people over the years, but this time I have vowed to get it completed.  We'll see.   Gee, maybe if I get the booklet done I might also get to my website too.  Hahahahaha