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Julie Arnold
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Raw Food Pricing, Complete vs Complementary
We put together these charts based on our most popular ranges to help customers work out what their Dogs are going to cost on a Raw Diet.
Nurturing Joyful Puppies with a Raw Diet: Insider Tips
Sometimes when a puppy is purchased, a breeder will tell the new owner that they need to keep the puppy on the same food for 6mths, I am sure this is simply because the breeder believes that the food they use is the best, and wants your puppy to do well, but healthwise there is no reason to wait to change your puppy over to a raw diet, infact, the sooner a puppy is changed over to raw, the better it is, as good nutrients, in their most bio-available form, are the best thing your puppy can get to help them grow fit and strong and have good healthy immune systems to build their natural immunity quickly and effectively.
Ready for a New Dog?
This is mainly done from the viewpoint of those who will be buying a puppy of a specific breed.
It is a very valid alternative to rescue a dog, but for some they will want a pup and this blog is specific to them.
Pet Bereavement
There are complementary therapies which can be of great help to bereaved owners and other pets when a loved one passes over which I can help with.
POTTENGERS CATS
In 1932, Dr. Francis Marion Pottenger Jr. began an experiment in nutrition, supervised by Dr. Pottenger and Dr. Alvin Foord who
was the professor of Pathology at the University of Southern Carolina and also worked in pathology at Huntingdon Memorial
Hospital, Passadena.
The Rational Behind Feeding a Raw Diet as opposed to Commercial Food.
The domestic dog is descended from the wolf, or a common ancestor, and is a carnivore. The wolf may self medicate and eat some plant materials, but for the most part, it is carnivore, eating whole prey, or parts of whole prey, and shaking out and leaving stomach contents.
Carnivorous Digestive System
The dog anatomically, is not evolved very much at all, other than to the state of being able to survive as a scavenger, but still has the digestive system of a carnivore, which has adapted somewhat to survive as a scavenger also. It has the dentition of a carnivore, the strong neck and jaw muscles designed for catching and pulling down prey, and allowing no lateral movement of the jaw with only an up and down motion, unlike herbivores and omnivores who have lateral movement in their jaws for chewing.
Dogs have a highly elastic stomach, designed to hold large amounts of meat and bone, organ and hide. They have a simple stomach, with an under-developed caecum, with a short foregut, and a smooth, unsacculated colon. This means that food passes through very quickly, whereas vegetable and plant matter needs to have time to sit and ferment – thus omnivores and herbivores have longer, sacculated colons, and longer and larger small intestines, with the occasional presence of a caecum (Feldhamer, G.A. 1999. Mammology: Adaptation, Diversity, and Ecology. McGraw-Hill. pg 260.).
This explains why unless vegetable matter fed to dog is steamed/liquidised/mashed to break the cell walls; it will often come out much the same as it went in.
Misconceptions in Canine Nutrition
Vets have very little focus on canine nutrition in their training and often make the mistake of viewing a dog as an omnivore, as advocated by commercial petfood companies.
Anyone who has ever done canine studies will know the dog is a carnivore, classified as a subspecies of the grey wolf, “Canis Lupus Familiaris”.
Feeding a dog as if it were an omnivore places a large amount of stress on the system, as other bodily organs have to work overtime to compensate; i.e. the feeding of carbohydrates and starches places the burden of digestion completely and entirely on the pancreas, as the dog does not produce amylase in its saliva, so the pancreas has to produce unusually large amounts of amylase to deal with the digestion of the starch, cellulose and carbohydrates in plant matter.
Challenges of Omnivorous Diets
Dogs also do not have the kinds of friendly bacteria that break down cellulose and starch for them and as a result of this, most of the nutrients contained in plant matter, even when pre-processed, are unavailable to them.
It is only due to the fact that some small evolutionary changes have happened to enable dogs to survive as a scavenger that they have managed to survive as long as they have on commercial, overprocessed diets without more ill health than we already see, but the difference here, is surviving compared to thriving, and obviously we want our dogs to thrive, and not just survive.
Optimal Dietary Approach
These facts explain why a dog is suited to a whole prey diet, or a diet where the main make-up of whole prey is put together by the owner via chunks of meat, bones, animal parts, organ meats and meaty bones.
To me the question of raw or cooked is common sense – after all, wild animals don’t cook !
Cooked and processed dog foods have only been around for about the last 100yrs, so not long enough for animals to have adapted to getting all their goodness from what, to the internal system, presents as a different form of food. On an evolutionary level, adaptations need much more time than how long wolves and wild dogs have been living with humans, as the changes would be from gross right down to molecular level for the development of such different digestive capabilities.
There are several other aspects of a cooked, commercial diet, which cause problems, a couple of which I’ve mentioned below:
Concerns with Cooked Diets
Firstly, cooking food alters the proteins, fats and minerals, making some more readily available, and others less available. Cooking also alters fats, and many fats cannot take high cooking temps. and become rancid and carcinogenic and toxic. Cooked proteins are also able to cause allergic reactions, because of the changes cooking brings about, whereas raw protein does not.
Secondly, once food is cooked it is deficient in vitamins, minerals and enzymes, since the act of cooking destroys or alters much of them; this is why petfood manufacturers need to add synthetic supplements back into the food – but finding the right balance is not easy by any means and is infact incredibly difficult, as synthetic supplements donot always exhibit the same form [chirality -three dimensional structure] that the natural form has, which means their efficiency and use to the body are substantially decreased. To compensate for this, the commercial foods are ‘over-supplemented’ but this results in the inhibited uptake of other necessary vitamins and minerals. For example, excess inorganic calcium reduces the availability of iron, copper, iodine, and zinc (Lonsdale, T. 2001. Raw Meaty Bones. pg 88). If you are feeding a cooked, homemade diet, can you be sure that your pet’s needs are being sufficiently met if the very act of cooking destroys much of what is beneficial to your pet?
Essentially, once you cook your pet’s food you are now guessing which vitamins or minerals have been destroyed, how much of these might have been destroyed (which means you would have to know how much was present in the food in the first place), and how much supplementation your pet needs.
Importance of Natural Diets
Also, how do we know that researchers have discovered all the nutrients necessary for our pets? This still is an on-going process (such as Eukanuba adding DHA to their foods; DHA is found in raw prey, so any dog eating raw prey has been receiving appropriate levels of DHA), and since cooking food destroys minerals and vitamins and enzymes, researchers may be missing some very important nutrients. Feeding cooked food also causes pets to miss out on these ‘unknown’ nutrients, whereas raw food contains them in appropriate amounts.
Fresh, raw food provides the added benefit of providing very necessary teeth-cleaning for our pets, enabling us to avoid costly visits to the vets where our animals are then subjected to trauma and anaesthetic which is potentially harmful.
One of the very harmful additives in commercially prepared dogfood is Ethoxyquin – added as a preservative, because it gives the food a 2 yr shelf-life, much needed as food can be stored for as much as 18 mths before finding it’s way to the shop shelf.
So, fresh raw is what the internal make-up of the dog is most suited to deal with, un-tampered with and purest and so best, providing the right amounts of what is needed, in the right form and structure that the dogs body can utilise and use most effectively.
Conclusion
Basically, and in a nutshell, why try and mess with the perfect design mother nature had already set in place, and which has worked and still works for our dogs wild cousins.
If anything, it is even more crucial for our dogs these days to have a raw and fresh natural diet, because their previous generations have been nutritionally starved on commercial petfoods, and they need to have the type of diet most suited to them biologically to prevent the illness and disease so many now suffer with which. when traced, is down to nutritional deficiency going back generations.
J.Arnold 2008
