cooking for your dog

I've always been an advocate of a raw diet, but over the eight years of Penny's lifetime I've softened in my approach and now go with the theme of 'everything in moderation'. (Unless a food is actually unhealthy for dogs, of course.)

It can become tricky to source a variety of raw meats, but I think the list by Dr Bruce Syme at the bottom of this old post of mine is a good general resource.

In general, we'll continue with the raw diet, but I've come across a new book that has a convincingly clear explanation of many aspects of diet for pet dogs. It's called Feed Your Best Friend Better.

One of the things I like about the guy who wrote this book is that he's more about what to feed your dog for good health rather than focusing on what not to feed.

Another feature of the book is that it has the clearest explanation I've come across of  how much to feed your dog in terms of activity level...

and a clear diagram of how to estimate whether your dog is at a healthy weight and how many calories a day she requires for her level of activity and age.

Because the recipes and information are for US measurements, I've had to adapt them, but as you can see from these pictures, I'm getting myself organised, lol.

[If you click on the photos of the book, another window will come up with a large photo that makes the pages more readable.]

At first, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the discussion of what supplements a dog needs if you are preparing meals at home, but it's reassuring to see that the author, Rick Woodford, is not dismissive of commercial foods. If I've understood correctly, he says that commercial foods are supplemented so fully that even adding half commercial food to the dog's diet will result in sufficient nutritional extras.

We add Sasha's Blend (or Glyde) to Penny's bowl each day, for joint health, and  Melrose Omega-3 Liquid, plus Vet's All Natural Complete Mix a few times a week. I think that covers most of the nutritional requirements that she might miss on a home--prepared diet. She gets ZiwiPeak canned food some days, also - the label says it has 'added Vitamins and Minerals'. I love this food, even though it's expensive, because it's mostly meat (or fish) and has a variety of meats and organ meats we couldn't easily access from the butcher (venison and tripe for instance).

In the photo above you'll notice some eggshells. I used to crush up eggshells and include them in Penny's food occasionally, until a friend told me about the time her labrador retriever got a bit of eggshell stuck to the lining of his bowel. So I stopped adding eggshells! But Rick Woodford suggests washing eggshells, drying them and them baking them in the over until brittle, after which they go into a food processor to be ground up to a powder. I'm collecting the shells and I'll try his method when I have enough shells to make it worth the trouble.

the value of keeping a doggy diary

Penny's been eating grass. She has always used grass to settle her stomach, or to settle her gut, and it usually comes out the other end, all neatly folded and looking like it has passed through her digestive system untouched.

I've posted about it previously.

But this time she's had us worried, so much so that we went to the vet. She's been rushing outside not long after her meals, tearing at the grass like a sheep, and it's been coming through inside her faeces, so that at first we didn't realise it was there. (Now you know that we truly love her - who else would be pulling poo to pieces to see what's in it?) And then she vomited up a heap of grass.

So, to the vet...

He checked her thoroughly, asked if she's been well otherwise. Yes, she has. He listened to her gut for long enough that I started to get worried, and said it was noisier than usual. And I learned a new word when I read his notes - ascultation.

I mentioned to the vet that the first time we saw her rush outside, she had just been out in the garden chewing a three-day-old lamb shank she'd previously buried, and he said some dogs react badly to lamb. He then made sure her worming is up to date and suggested we monitor her for another couple of weeks, at the same time increasing the amount of roughage she gets.

I didn't think much of it until I came home and looked at the diary we keep:
Tuesday 24th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb, snacked on dug-up lamb shank;
Wednesday 25th January: breakfast - lamb and tripe canned food, dinner - not recorded;
Thursday 26th January: breakfast - lamb,dinner - Royal Canin Hypoallergenic dry food (rarely fed but we had some left over);
Friday 27th January: breakfast - beef, dinner - lamb;
Saturday 28th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb;
Sunday 29th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb kidneys;
Monday 30th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - canned lamb and tripe;
Tuesday 1st February: breakfast - lamb kidneys, dinner beef and canned lamb and tripe.

I said to a friend that we might not have twigged about how much lamb we were feeding if we didn't keep a diary, and she said, "What about plain old memory?"

Well, I must admit we feed such a variety usually that I wouldn't be able to recall exactly what Penny's had over the last week. By the way, there have been other ingredients to her meals, such as raw or cooked vegetables, Vets All Natural Complete Mix, Glyde, Melrose Omega-3 oil and healthy treats.

But lamb has accidentally dominated. And why?
Because it was on special in the supermarket and I love a bargain.
Because I happened to buy lamb as the canned food we sometimes feed (high quality ZiwiPeak, by the way).
Because I thought it would be good to mix in some organ meat and didn't stop to think that it was also lamb.

Once we became aware of this, we stopped the lamb, and she has only chewed on a little bit of grass once, that we know of. She's having more roughage than usual, as per the vet's suggestion (cold cooked potato and pumpkin, which she loves), and some rice and cooked chicken for the next couple of days.

Now the question is, should we let her have lamb in future?

My thought is that we overfed one food type, not that lamb per se is the problem. But we'll wait for a few weeks before reintroducing it.

However, I did come across this interesting snippet at K9Web in looking for information for this post:

Dogs are not allergic to a dog food per se, rather they react to one or more of the ingredients in the food. Some of the most common culprits are beef, pork, chicken, milk, whey, eggs, fish, corn, soy, wheat and preservatives. Many animals are now developing allergies to lamb as well. This was once thought to be very hypo-allergenic, but the more it is used, the more sensitivities are springing up.

It's been a lesson for us.

And I'm glad we keep a diary, even though our friends think we're weirdly obsessive.

great new veterinary blog

I've been following the new veterinary blog by Dr Renee O'Duhring. It's great to read her take on animal health, because she approaches it from a proactive direction - ie, keep your dog healthy rather than try to fix up problems after they occur.

She has written a post about 'the physical and mental benefits of providing your pet with a natural diet. '

I was interested to read it, because she discusses the question of whether dogs are purely carnivores or whether they do well with some plant matter in their diet. Penny definitely likes some vegetable matter in her diet and will scavenge it for herself if we don't include it - grass, horse poo, possum poo, you name it - she's dining on it when left to her own devices.

I asked Dr Renee a question that I've been trying to research on the Net and in the Yahoo groups, without any luck, and received a most interesting and informative reply.

Here's the comment I put on her post:

Dr Renee, thanks for this great post! I try to feed a varied and natural diet, but sometimes I start to worry that I'm not doing enough. It's hard to resist the blandishments of the big pet food company [companies], whose advertising is in my face every time I enter a pet food shop. (Though I do mostly feed things I buy on special at supermarket meat departments, or through my own butcher, or plant-based ingredients that are similar to what we eat ourselves.

I'd love to ask you something I can't find any information on. I asked at one of the Yahoo Groups I am a member of - won't name it, as I'm disappointed and angry about the only response I got, which was that my question was inappropriate, because I should only feed meat, as this is the only "species appropriate food". Not true, as you have noted, given that in a natural environment, dogs will scavenge some plant matter.

My question is this: I grow yakon, which is a very different plant food, in that it has inulin in it (a great food for human diabetics, might be interesting to know if it would be useful for diabetic dogs...). My dog, Penny, LOVES it, and I occasionally give her tiny scraps.

Do you know of any studies that look at the effect of inulin on dogs?

And if you can give me some advice, wuld it be okay to post your reply on my own website? (Fine if you prefer not, of course.)

And here's the reply, which she said was fine to post here:

Hi Parlance. Interesting question about yakon, and funny timing as I have been experimenting with it myself! There is one study I have come across in the Cambridge journals on the effect of oligofructose (which is the carbohydrate in yakon) in companion animal diets, as well as a few on PubMed. One study showed that inulin "may favourably alter the composition of the colonic bacteria", which is one of its functions as a prebiotic. There is certainly nothing suggesting yakon would be harmful included in the canine diet (in moderation). Some pet foods include chicory root as a source of inulin so it seems that pets do benefit from it. Read more about that here: www.dogfoodproject.com
Not sure whether it would be helpful for a diabetic pet or not, as pet's nutritional requirements are very different from humans. Hope that helps, and glad to hear Penny enjoys foraging for all things delightful!

I'll certainly continue to follow Dr Renee's blog.
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