Adopting a dog soon, learning all about the wonderful world of raw :)

Hey guys! Those of you from Goose will recognize me. We will be adding a dog to our life soon, and I'm trying to learn all I can about raw diets before then.

My boyfriend and I are both vegan, so I think that we will end up using commercially prepared raw diets rather than a whole prey diet or buying meat from the store, just because we are kind of squeamish and don't want to handle it too much. If anyone has advice on commercial diets, let me know! I'm hoping that we can get the same benefits from feeding a commercial raw diet and bones, since we do want what we feel is best for our animals.

In addition, we are currently switching the cats over to commerical raw (NV patties and a little Honest Kitchen) and they are slowly getting into it. Hopefully the dog will be less finicky!

Welcome!

A lot of the premades have stuff added into them, make sure to pick one with no fruit/veg/etc. Only ingredients should be meat/bone/organ.

As always, I would suggest TRYING to do it yourselves. I have a friend who gags every time she touched raw meat, but feeds her own raw to her GSD, she tells me it's getting a lot easier and she hardly gags anymore.

Good on you though, for ANY form of raw! Much better than kibble, any day of the week. Hopefully you guys can be desensitized to it with the patties and whichever premade you choose and one day start doing your own. My mom has a GSD that costs $30 or less/mth to feed, our chihuahua is $5 or less/mth and our four cats are $30 or less/mth! Premade will be pricey, but you will make up for it in savings on vet bills until you can handle making your own.

Lucky for you, dogs are MUCH easier in general. Thaw meat & hand to dog. Whereas our cats took over 8mths.

P.S. PICTURES!

Hey mandycoot. Honest Kitchen is about 63% carbohydrates. VERY bad for cats and not good at all for dogs, both who are carnivores. NV has alot of unnecessary ingredients (ESP for cats) like ACV, fruits, vegetables and also commercial raw is WAY too high in bone. Bone is cheap and it's equivalent to the companies using cheap grain fillers. Your dog will not be getting nutrition like if YOU planned the diet and knew exactly what was going into it and what's not. Not only is handing your dog a piece of chicken or whatever cheaper, it's also mentally stimulating, tones important muscles in the jaws, neck and shoulders, and keeps teeth clean. A glob of premade stuff is going to do as much for oral health as kibble or canned food. Also, the purpose of crunching bone and meat is to prepare the stomach for digestion by releasing acids and enzymes. When the dog is swallowing a chunk of ground whatever, it's a shock to the stomach because it had no time to get things ready for digestion. Whole foods are so important. Whole foods are NOT whole prey. Not everyone does whole prey and that's fine. If you make a model prey animal by feeding a variety of parts from a variety of animals and add in your organs then that's just as good. As for being vegan, there are so many vegans I know on the rawfeeding list I couldn't even count. I tried to use the "but I'm a vegetarian" excuse for myself but after I gagged for a few weeks and seen the results for Amos, my allergy dog, I couldn't go back. Just push thru. I and other no-meaters now love to shop for meat and also to watch the kids eat. I love to just sit there and watch them eat what nature intended the way she intended it.

Side note: Kelly isn't joking when she says commercial is way more expensive. Prey model cost per month is about $4 for each of my beagles. To feed the CHICKEN variety of NV it would be over $100 per dog per month and it's not worth the money. I don't know about you but in these economic times, I don't have money to waste on expensive, poor nutrition for my kids.