How to switch your dog's food to a raw food diet - our experience of switching a puppy to raw food

Some raw feeders say that you can change over from commercial dog food or kibble straight onto raw food, whereas others suggest that you should phase it out to get the dog used to the new raw diet. Whichever route you choose, switching your dog's food to a raw diet will be the best thing you've ever done for your dog. Most people seem to agree that you shouldn’t mix the two types of food in one meal, but alternate the two until the dog is happy with the new menu.

Kay Laurence Come dine with us, recommends introducing the puppy to a raw chicken carcass and holding onto it, simulating the other puppies pulling at it, then remove it after ten minutes. After a couple of days you can graduate to raw chicken wings. For adult dogs she suggests starting off with raw minced meat and raw meaty bones to get them used to the taste of raw meat and then moving on to raw chicken wings.

When we picked up our eight week old puppy from the breeders he was used to being fed commercial dog food four times a day. We already knew that we wanted to get him started on raw dog food diet as soon as possible so we had stocked up on raw pet mince from a raw food company, raw chicken wings and beef marrow bones.

The company who supplied the frozen raw food (pet mince) assured us that we could just switch over to raw food straight away, without phasing it out. As a puppy, he needed the equivalent of 8% of his body weight in raw food a day, all in the right proportions of bone, meat, offal and greenery. Luckily the frozen pet mince contained all of this, making it easy to start feeding raw food straight away without having to worry about raw food recipes - all we had to do was defrost the frozen raw dog food and serve it to our puppy.

Said and done, we presented him with his first meal on raw minced meat and we were half expecting him to turn his nose up at the food but to our surprise he took one sniff and quite literally wolfed it all down in one go. We continued to feed him the mince for a couple of weeks with good results, he absolutely loved his food and never left anything in the bowl.

Our long term goal was to introduce real meaty bones to his diet, but it took us a while to work up the guts to feed him his first chicken wing. The dog had no such doubts. He sniffed the wing, snatched it out of our hands and ran to his safe place and started chewing it. It didn’t take him long to swallow the wing and then he had this unbeatable satisfied look on his face that only a happy dog can have.

He had the same natural reaction to his first raw marrow bone which he gnawed on for hours with his sharp little puppy teeth. At five months we gave him marrow bones regularly to keep his teeth clean and off other things like our furniture, and also started giving him more raw chicken wings as part of every meal.

The dog loved his meaty bones but we were presented with a bit of a new problem – poo, or rather the lack thereof. Although, less poo is a good thing from an owner’s point of view, increasing the amount of bones in his diet had made his stools more difficult to pass. Apparently this is quite normal and we got around the problem by interspersing every bone meal with a non bone meal until the dog’s lower bowels have worked out how to pass his stools without discomfort.  

All in all, we're still learning as we go along but the dog loves his food and everyone comments on his shiny beautiful coat so we must be doing something right...

This article was written by Linda Bliss. I am earning money online by writing here at HubPages.com. Would you like to earn money online too?

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