Food

Feeding a raw dog food diet to your dog is quite simple, especially once you have a system in place. Though like anything else new, it can seem very complicated when first starting out. These sample dog food diets should be helpful to dog caretakers who are considering feeding a raw diet. Even those who have been doing it for a while may learn some new tricks to make the process of finding, preparing, and storing home prepared dog food simpler.

Over the past three months, we’ve provided rules and guidelines for feeding a homemade dog food diet, but getting started can still seem overwhelming. This month, we’ll hear from owners who feed their dogs a homemade diet, and learn from them how they go about it, including tips and tricks for finding, preparing, and storing the dog food.

Those of us who feed our dogs a raw diet that includes bones believe that this is the healthiest, most natural diet dogs can eat. But not everyone is comfortable feeding such a diet to their dogs. Here are directions for feeding your dog a cooked diet, or a diet that includes raw meat but no bones. Your dog will still benefit from a variety of fresh foods in proper proportions, regardless of how theyfre prepared. It takes a little more work to ensure that a cooked diet that does not include bone meets all of your dogfs nutritional needs. Wefll explain how much calcium, and in which form, youfll need to add to his diet.

bones

including ground meat

Not long ago, I was talking with Jay Weinstein, professional chef and editor of Kitchen & Cook, another one of Belvoir Publications of magazines, at a meeting with our publisher in Florida. Weinstein asked me where I had flown in from. I told him I had attended a pet products show in Chicago, and was touring some dog food factories on the trip, as well. Ugh! Jay protested, his fine dining sensibilities temporarily offended. Why do they have to be called dog food factories? Why can't they be called dog food kitchens, at least? Or pet nutrition facilities?

We all want our dogs to enjoy the highest quality of life for the longest possible time. Proper diet, adequate exercise, weight control, appropriate supplements, and good veterinary care can all help our dogs remain active and vibrant well into their senior years.

Antioxidants are all the rage nowadays, seemingly good for anything that ails you or your dog. Antioxidants, natural and otherwise, are also widely used as preservatives in processed foods for pets and their people. Antioxidants are, however, another of those things that the more the scientists learn about them, the more they learn they don't know. This paradigm seems to repeat itself in the realm of holistic health!

No one is in a better position than you are to decide which food you should feed your dog. That may not be what you wanted to hear. You may have been hoping that someone would reveal to you the name of the world's healthiest food, so you could just buy that and have it done with.

You may think of it simply as a convenient vessel, useful for keeping your dog's food gathered in one place, off the floor. Your dog probably has a very different perspective. For him, the bowl is likely to be a high value object of great import, especially if he's a hearty eater. In this magical dish, one or more times a day FOOD appears.

There are all sorts of other laboratory research studies conducted by the larger pet food manufacturers that push the envelope of humaneness." Some companies perform (or order a "contract lab" to perform) studies that call for a disease or health problem to be induced in a population of test dogs

Few topics excite the passions of dog lovers as much as food. Should dogs eat meat? Bones? Fruits? Vegetables? Grains? Dairy? Should their food be commercially prepared? Home-prepared? Raw? Cooked? Fresh? Frozen? Should dogs eat what people eat? What dogs in the wild eat? Whatever the choice, is it safe? Is it dangerous? For thousands of years, domesticated dogs ate whatever their humans fed them plus whatever they could find on their own. No one worried about fat/protein ratios, the role of carbohydrates, or how much calcium is too much.