Food
Nutrition is something that I’ve always taken seriously when it comes to my family’s diet. After taking applied clinical nutrition in college, I could no longer turn a blind eye to the link between what we put in our bodies, and the quality of the cells that are formed from those basic building blocks. Cutting the bad stuff out of our diets has been a slow progression that started several years ago and began with the basics: soda, nitrates, hydrogenated oils, and high fructose corn syrup. The difference we felt from just eliminating those from our diets was amazing. My headaches and fatigue stopped, I was sleeping better, and had much more energy. We’re not food extremists, but do try to eat whole, naturally occurring foods, and we avoid processed foods.
That said, I’m a bit disappointed in myself for not researching raw feeding sooner. I’d heard of BARF, read a couple paragraphs, and thought “Wow, that must be time consuming,” and basically dismissed raw as an option before I really did the research. Before we got Milo, I did research dog food quite a bit, and spent hours poring over the information at www.dogfoodproject.com. I knew grain-free was the way we would go. Why on earth would you feed a dog grains when they would never eat them in the wild? We tried several brands, and would switch him every 3 or 4 months, either because he would start to turn his nose up at them, or his stools were just too soft and smelly. When we added Stella to our family, we started the process again, trying to find one that worked for both of them. We finally discovered Taste of the Wild Canine Wetlands formula, and that one stuck.
With Stella’s second litter, I spent a lot of time researching nutritional needs during pregnancy. For her first litter she was on kibble (Taste of the Wild Wetlands), with a supplemental scrambled egg 2-3 times per week during the last 3-4 weeks of her pregnancy. I felt compelled to cook the eggs, apparently using my knowledge of human food consumption. With this current litter, and after even more research, I started giving them to her raw. There is a lot of compelling information out there about the benefits of feeding raw. Dogs would never cook their food over open flame in the wild, so why should we cook it for them? For 10 million years dogs have been eating raw food, with kibble only being introduced in the last hundred years or so. Mammals, unlike primitive organisms, cannot evolve quickly enough to adjust to this sudden dietary change.
We started slowly by feeding a raw small meal daily (I started with chicken gizzards and about a tablespoon of plain yogurt) and noticed Stella’s energy level increase substantially in the last week. And at day 48 of her pregnancy when you’d expect her energy to continue to decrease, that is significant. She seemed to be a different dog than she was on day 39 of pregnancy. I was already convinced, and through much research, committed to transition our four-legged family members to raw.
Some of the articles I read while doing my research are listed below. To learn more about raw feeding, visit:
http://www.dogtorj.net/id51.html
http://www.rawfed.com/myths/index.html (comprehensive and sources well-cited)
http://www.canismajor.com/dog/barf.html
http://www.skylarzack.com/rawfeeding.htm
http://rawfeddogs.net/
http://www.bornfreeusa.org/facts.php?p=3…
http://www.4loveofdog.com/benefits.htm
