Raw Meaty Bones - Not For The Squeamish

IF you are bothered by the sight of blood, and the thought of handling raw meat turns your stomach, raw feeding may not be for you.  Even if you can face a couple of raw chicken wings without gagging, can you manage a 40# box of half thawed chicken backs that need to be rebagged and refrozen in smaller portions?  There's a certain amount of grunge work involved in feeding raw!  If you are feeding more than one dog, you will probably end up buying the food in bulk, and SOMEONE will have to do the repackaging. 

We all have our own comfort levels in dealing with such things.  I readily admit to having a box of disposable plastic gloves sitting by the sink.  I use them whenever I handle raw chicken parts, and yes, a lot of my friends tease me about it. But hey, I truly don't like chicken fat under my nails.   It's not the blood that bothers me, just the way chicken backs FEEL.

OTOH, I can't remember the last time I washed a dog dish.  When we first started feeding raw, the dog dishes got washed in hot soapy water every night, but what was the point?  By the time Josie gets done cleaning everyone's dish, not a morsel or drop of raw food remains - and if the dogs were eating raw meaty bones, the food only stayed in the bowl long enough for me to put it in a crate.  I wipe off each dog's face with a paper towel when it's finished eating - if I remember, but that's not a big deal to me, and I don't cringe if a meat eating dog gives me a kiss and leaves dog germs.  I just don't like the feel of raw chicken!

Vegging . . .

While everyone else was probably doing something interesting, or at least watching TV, I spent the evening Vegging.  No, not "vegging out" (relaxing), just vegging.  Or maybe it was vegging up?  Whatever.  What I did was spend a few hours making ten 24-oz containers (cottage cheese cartons) of veggie mix for the dogs.  It should be enough to last a month at least, thank goodness.  NOT one of my favorite chores!  Not difficult, just tedious, BUT it makes a great mix for adding to ground meat/fish/eggs for the dogs' breakfast most mornings,

No veggie mixes are the same and this one included things I already had around the house and things that I purchased specifically for the mix.  Some of them have more leafy greens and less fruit, while others are based on whatever might have been on sale.

Items I had on hand included -

• an apple with a soft spot, an extra kiwi  & a bag of frozen blueberries
• half a red pepper & some elderly radishes
• parsley & oregano from my herb garden
• several tomatoes with bruises & a couple of shriveled garlic cloves
• a head of romaine, half a head of cauliflower, & 4 stalks of celery

Items I bought for the project included -

• a bunch of carrots with tops
• a Savoy cabbage
• bunches of Swiss chard, collard greens, and kale

I purchased the new items at the Mississippi Market Coop and they were all organic, but if I'd had the time I could have saved money by going to the Farmers Market or one of the warehouse supermarkets.  If I had done that I would probably also have purchased a more variety lettuces or a bunch of spinach, a cucumber, a large zucchini, green beans, broccoli and possibly some beets with tops.  If I'd planned ahead I would have picked dandelion leaves, wood sorrel, plantain, and other nutritious weeds. The nice thing about the veggie mix is that you can make it with just about anything, and it's a great way to use up leftover bits of this and that.  The trick to making a good veggie mix is a LARGE variety of food items, particularly leafy greens (NOT iceberg lettuce which has no nutritional value).  I generally don't use much fruit but last summer I froze blueberries when they were on sale, and apples sweeten up the mixture a bit.  Wish I'd had some soft bananas to add.  Sometimes I use twice this many ingredients, but two hours is enough!

All the produce gets carefully washed, and any bad spots get discarded.  Juicers do a really good job of breaking down the cell walls so the nutrition is accessible to the dogs.  I've used juicers in the past and mixed the juice back in with the pulp, but it's easier to just use a food processor and chop everything as small as possible, adding only enough water to get the job done.  I generally freeze most of the containers of mix, as freezing also helps break the foods down. One container stayed upstairs to be added to ground rabbit for the dogs' breakfast.  A cottage cheese containers of frozen veggie mix will thaw overnight and provide enough veggie mix for 2 or 3 days.  At least two days a week I'll use a single item, such as sweet potatoes, broccoli or cabbage, things I know the dogs like, but they'll willingly eat the less palatable veggies as part of the mix when combined with meat or fish, eggs and a squirt of salmon oil.

Tonight We Grind

Nothing went quite as anticipated yesterday.  I stopped at Woody's Pet Food Deli at noon on my way back to the office and the sign on the door said, "Back Soon".  Fat lot of good that did me as I had to get back to the office.  Was planning to stop at Mississippi Market for greens after work, but instead I went to Menards to look at patio doors.  So, a project still awaits me.

Normal boring meals for the dogs.  Turkey necks last night, and a mixture of ground turkey, canned salmon, fruit mix and a raw egg for breakfast.  We don't use much fruit, just add a couple of assorted pieces to an otherwise veggie-based mix, but last spring I had lots of ripe bananas and a couple of soft apples, and as I recall some wilted parsley, so I made two containers of "fruit mix".  Dogs eat it OK, though none are big fruit eaters.  They will rarely eat a piece of banana or a chunk of apple - unlike many Dals I have owned in the past.

A Time To Grind

No time for posting as I spent my writing time on my other blog at paisleydals.blogspot.com, but I have several good topics for upcoming entries to this blog.

Today I will stop at Mississippi Market, a health food coop and pick up a variety of organic veggies to grind for veggie mix.  It's a boring job, but quite easy and it pays off.  Stay tuned!

Where To Feed

Oh yuck!  Where am I going to feed my dog(s) if I switch to raw?  That was one of my major problems when we first starting switching the dogs over.  For the first few months I actually fed them outside, and when I was "dabbling in raw" before finally switching over, I took pictures of the dogs out on the deck in the snow eating their Raw Meaty Bones, in this case just chicken necks.  Guess it was my salmonella paranoia at it's best!  As with anything else, there is no one right way to do this.

Because I have dog crates in my kitchen, I feed my dogs in their crates.  The ground meat/veggie meal is easy of course, and they eat it from bowls, the same as eating kibble.  The RMB meals are also fed in crates. Some people pull out the crate blanket and put down newspapers or bath towels, and that works fine.  Most of us just feed the dogs and never give it a second thought.  If you are concerned and want to be extra cautious, it's easy enough to dip the RMB is boiling water for a few seconds, or wash them in the sink under running water.  Because any bacteria that might be present will be on the surface of the meat, that should do the trick- or at least make YOU feel better.  The dog won't care.  Many dogs new to raw prefer the RMBs warmed up anyway.  Just don't cook them!

Raw-feeders who don't have crates handy generally have a bath towel or washable throw rug for each dog, and the dogs learn to stay on the towel or rug until the bone is finished.  If you are not in control and your dog does not understand stay, put the dog on leash before feeding, and insist that he stay on his rug until done chewing.  They catch on quickly.  OR you can feed outside, at least in nice weather!

Dogs have had pretty boring meals for the past few days.  Ground turkey for breakfast with an assortment of added veggies.  One day I had nothing handy and opened a can of green beans.  Green beans or carrots work nicely and I always keep some on hand for the dogs.  I added an egg most days.  Yesterday I had some left over cabbage, an apple that was getting soft, an extra tomato, and some limp celery stalks. Chopped everything into bite-sized pieces, added a bit of water and put it in the microwave for 5 minutes.  Dogs love these mixtures and get a variety of vitamins and minerals from vegetables.

Dinner has been chicken backs, always a favorite.  They'll have chicken backs again tonight, then we'll switch to turkey necks for a few days.  See, this isn't hard at all!

Did you know that properly rawfed dogs almost never have problems with their anal glands?  Eating the way nature intended seems to solve that problem, even for the dogs with chronic problems.  Like many others, I am convinced that processed grain is one of the causes of many of the health issues common to dogs.

What, No Pictures?

While flipping through the thousands (millions?) of pictures on my computer, I realized that there were almost none that were related to raw diets.  A major oversight and one that needs to be rectified!

There are homemade raw diets, homemade cooked diets, and there all the ones in between.  Ours fits near the "raw end".  Most of what we feed is raw, and all meaty bones are fed raw, but some of the food is actually cooked, at least to some degree.  Our veggies mix is a mixture of raw veggies and a few fruits that have been run through a food processor, juicer or grinder, but when using individual vegetables we often steam or microwave them to save time, add variety, and to make them digestible by canines.  As much as Spotty may enjoy those raw baby carrots, they pass through him in little hard chunks rather than being digested.  Grinding or cooking those veggies make them more digestible.   Argie's "birthday dinner" steak was cooked enough to leave grill marks, but he would have been just as happy to eat it raw.  The sweet potato and cabbage were nuked.  He would have eaten the cabbage raw, but gotten very little out of it, and the sweet potato would have been ignored, or just chewed up on the rug.  If I were to give the dogs grain in any form I'd cook it thoroughly, although there are some who soak oatmeal in yogurt and feed it that way.

We feed canned salmon, mackerel and sardines from time to time and they are of course cooked, and the canned duck meat I purchase at the pet food store is heat processed.  There are a number of canned meats that add variety to the dogs's diets.  If I were a purist, I would feed none of the canned or cooked items, but I'm not.  Using them occasionally adds nutrients and interest - the dogs may not care, but I do.  Our motto is A Variety Of Fresh Healthy Foods.  We also want this diet to be easy, and using canned foods occasionally is handy.

One of the nice things about feeding this way is that we can give leftovers to the dogs.  Not everything of course, but most leftover veggies, some meat scraps, and even occasional pasta with sauce.  Because the dogs are used to a variety of foods, they are able to digest odd things.    As long as the leftovers are made of healthy foods, are not loaded with cooked fats or highly seasoned, they make good additions to the dog's bowl.  Mine really enjoyed the Eggplant Parmesan this week!  I'd make a big pan of it and after 3 meals, we decided the dogs could have the rest.  Eggplant, eggs, tomato sauce, Ricotta & Parmesan cheeses, basil & mushrooms, nothing there a dog can't eat.  I don't give them cheese as part of their regular diet, don't actually use dairy at all for adult dogs, but as an occasional treat it is relished!  They each got a small chunk with both their daily meals.

Before You Begin . .

Read, Read, READ!  I can't stress it enough!  Before you make the decision to switch your dog to a home-prepared raw diet, you should read everything you can get your hands on.  There are a number of excellent books on the subject and no two give you exactly the same information.  It's best to read a number of them and take the ideas and information that work for you, always remembering that you are feeding a Dalmatian, not a German Shepherd or a Pekingese.  The book pictured is one of my personal favorites and I consider it to be an excellent "first book" on raw feeding.  You can easily find a variety of books on-line,  I generally order from Dogwise or Amazon. 

While thinking over this posting I checked into Amazon and noticed two books that I had not read, one of which I had been planning to buy and one that I didn't know about.  Rottweiler breeder Lew Olson helped many of us as newbie raw feeders and I ordered her book "Dogs - The Definitive Guide To Homemade Meals".  "Real Dogs Don't Eat Kibble" by Sandra Bailey was just an impulse purchase.  I have a whole shelf full of books on the subject and it's interesting to note the variety of advice - as I will constantly try to remind you, there is no one right way to feed a dog.

I'm currently reading "Unlocking The Canine Ancestral Diet" by Steve Brown (yes, the Steve Brown of Charlee Bear Dog Treats and the frozen dog food "Steve's Real Food For Pets").   I was NOT impressed with his first book "See Spot Live Longer" but decided to give the new one a try  It's tough going as he explains his ideas on which fat supplements should be used with the basic raw diet - different fats for different meat sources.   He hasn't convinced me that I should be using flax seed, chia seed (Chia? I thought that was just for growing green pets for the Holidays!) or sardines, rather than salmon oil, but his theories are interesting.

Remember that if you are not willing to take the time to read about raw diets and understand them, then it's much better that you should stick to a good quality kibble.  Raw feeding is not for everyone.

Dogs had pretty boring fare today.  Ground turkey, canned salmon, and the last of the cabbage/apple mixture for breakfast, and chicken backs for dinner.  The 10# bag of chicken backs generally lasts for 3 days, and the dogs never get bored with them.  Chicken backs are probably the favorite RMB (raw meaty bone). here, and are generally available, affordable & palatable.  They make good "first RMBs" as they are big enough to require chewing, are relatively easy to chew, and are very digestible.  They are often too fatty for all but the most active young dogs, but are easy to trim.

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 

Waiting For The Thaw

A 10# bag of chicken backs is thawing in the sink. I brought them up last night and they will be partially thawed by this evening.  I'll trim some of the extra chunks of raw fat off and the backs will keep nicely in the fridge for about 3 days.  One of the bottom shelves is the dog food shelf and contains whole and/or ground meat, veggies and whatever leftovers will go into the dog's bowls.

Last night the dogs got ground rabbit with cooked cabbage and apples.  Everyone liked the fresh ground rabbit the second time around.  Fortunately, I might add, as the rabbit was $25.00 for a 5# container!  We won't be feeding it often, and chicken parts and turkey necks are far less expensive.  Although variety is optimum, some raw feeders only use chicken and/or turkey and that seems to work just fine for them.

This morning they will eating their basic "breakfast".  Ground turkey, veggie mix, salmon oil, and the vitamin mix.  Takes no longer than pouring kibble in a bowl and adding water.  Tonight it will be one or two chicken backs apiece and because I have a nice ripe extra tomato, I'll quarter it for the dogs.

A Work In Progress

Not sure how I want to set up this blog - guess I will need to take some time to sit down and work with the new design features that are available.  For now the posts will be pretty basic, pictures and links to follow. I've thought for a long time that I should do a raw food blog but I never seem to find the time - so I decided to do it anyway.  One more thing to have hanging over my head!

The most helpful thing for new raw-feeders is having a mentor, so hopefully this blog will provide that, as well as the encouragement you need to give it a try.  

Where to start . . .   What have the dogs eaten this weekend?  Guess that will work, so here goes.

Saturday morning was pretty typical.  The dogs ate ground turkey with an egg, some of the veggie mixture, the vitamin supplement we've been using lately, and salmon oil.  I buy ground turkey thigh meat, as dark meat is more nutritious than white meat and has more fat.  Because dogs use fat for energy (rather than carbohydrates) we are not trying for a low fat diet. 

Eggs are generally fed raw and are generally fed 3-5 times a week, one egg per dog.  Raw eggs are safe for dogs - remember that salmonella is not an issue for them.  The old rumor that dogs should not have raw eggs because they destroy biotin is just that, an old rumor.  Raw egg whites apparently DO, but raw egg yolks are packed with biotin, far more than egg white would destroy, and eggs are a wonderful source of nutrients.  So don't feed raw egg whites, feed raw eggs.  Of course you can scrambled or soft boil them if you wish, and I have been known to make omelets for the dogs, just for kicks.

We're working on one of the last containers of veggie mix (more on that later), so I will soon have to go to the market and pick up a variety of leafy greens and other veggies plus a few fruits to grind and freeze.  In the meantime we will use more whole veggies until I get around to making a batch.  Planning ahead, I chopped up and microwaved a large chunk of cabbage, an apple, and added some left over spinach and arugula salad mix.  The dogs don't love the veggies mix, but with meat, egg and salmon oil added they don't complain.  They do like things like cabbage, broccoli and zucchini and will eat them unadorned.  Please note that all veggies are either juiced, put through a food processor, or (horrors!) cooked.  The dogs may love those baby carrots, but if you look closely you will see that they are not being digested.

We don't use any vitamins consistently, but I do buy them from time to time.  Right now we are using a container of  "Canine Complete" from Wholistic Pets Organic.  The dogs normally get salmon oil every day, although occasionally we use olive oil instead.  I've purchased the last few bottles from the same company.

Normally they would have had raw meaty bones for their evening meal, but I had purchased a container of frozen ground rabbit from Woody's Petfood Deli and I was curious to see if the dogs liked it.  I mixed it half and half with ground turkey and added some veggies.  Only Josie was a little fussy, but she finally ate it too.  Normally the dogs get veggies only once a day, so this morning they got raw turkey necks, one moderate sized neck per dog.

Not sure about dinner tonight.  I need to thaw a bag of chicken backs, but it take about 24 hours to thaw the 10# bag, so perhaps they will have turkey necks again - or perhaps rabbit and the cabbage mixture.  The secret to raw feeding is "balance over time" so we can be flexible from day to day!