How To Feed A Raw Food Diet

I’m pretty sure one of the main reasons dry food continues to be the most popular choice for feeding our dogs, is the ease and convenience of being told that everything our dog needs is contained with its kibble. I discuss the pros and cons of dry food v. raw in more depth in this blog post.

This was my main concern with raw food diets – knowing how to appropriately balance the nutrients and vitamins my dogs need. After all I’m a dog trainer not a canine dietician!

Thankfully, there is another alternative to making up your own raw food diet for your dog. Rather than worry and stress about whether I’m giving my dogs the right balance, I feed Natures Menu – a company that does all the hard work for me  🙂

Basically Natures Menu, along with other pre-prepared raw food diet companies, create products which you can just weigh out and feed to your dog. The food needs to be stored in a freezer and then taken out and defrosted before feeding.

Some experts state that it should be thoroughly defrosted before feeding, but my experience and that of my colleagues is that young dogs who are teething quite appreciate it being cold to chew on a bit. Plus frozen food on a hot day is rather a treat, bit like a doggy lollypop! 

As I have a lot of dogs, I use the blocks of food that they sell as it works out more cost effective. But I particularly like the bags of nuggets that they sell for small dogs or for only-child dogs 🙂

The beauty of the nuggets are is that once you’ve worked out the correct weight you need to be feeding your dog, you can simply count out the number of nuggets your dog needs per meal.

So how do you calculate how much food your dog will need per meal?

Puppies

Adult Dogs

I also feed my dogs raw bones which is great for their teeth, as you’ll see from my recent blog post about avoiding smelly dog breath! This is something that makes some people shudder, but it really isn’t a scary prospect if you introduce your dog to it carefully and only use raw bones NEVER cooked. The cooking process weakens the bones and causes them to splinter which can cause problems in the intestines and stomach.

Here’s a great explanation from Natures Menus veterinary surgeon friend Vicky Payne BVetMed MRCVS 🙂

Would you like further help and advice? Comment below and I’ll see if I can help 🙂