Is Going Raw Hard and Expensive?

[BeingMe]

I am thinking of going raw or at least partially and was wondering if it's affordable and overwhelming?
I have a 110 pd rottie and a 70 lab. I was thinking of doing kibble in the morning and raw at night. Would this be good? And as far as making your own raw or buying predone, is there really a savings, and how hard is it to prepare?
Thanks!!

[Ola_]

There is a huge savings with not buying premade raw food. Usually with premade it's around $3-4/lb that I've seen. When I buy raw stuff at the store I try to stick to $1/lb (though that's not easy in Canada, I hear it's much better in the US) but go up to $2/lb. When I get cases of stuff through some other raw feeders who go in on bulk buys it's between $0.50/lb. So any way you look at it it's much cheaper.

There are other advantages to not feeding premade. One is that you have control over everything that you're feeding, and if one of your dogs doesn't like it or do well on that ingredient you can easily skip it. Also, feeding whole bone-in pieces is much more beneficial in terms of dental cleaning.

There's no preparation to do really, other than putting stuff in the freezer and taking it out of the freezer. Ok, sometimes you have to cut the item into meal-sized pieces. But really that's it. For example you might buy some chicken leg quarters - you take them out and hand them to the dogs. You don't want the pieces to be too small so keep that in mind too, otherwise they may get swallowed whole. Actually shortly after we switched to raw we also went to one meal per day so that I can feed bigger pieces (dental cleaning was one of our main goals) and the dogs are doing great on that. Even my crazy-about-food hound didn't have much trouble switching.

Can you do one kibble meal and one raw? You can, but why would you? Some dogs do okay with that arrangement, while others will have digestive upset, it kind of depends on the dog. It can seem overwhelming at first to learn all the stuff you need to know but I promise once you get started it will seem really simple very fast!

[BeingMe]

Thank you for the advice.
How do you know what veges to mix in? And there are so many different meat pieces to feed, how do you know what to feed? And what about the risk of salmonella, etc?
Thanks again!

[Ola_]

Have you been reading about BARF? I'm not a fan of that style of feeding - it has too many unnecessary components and they make it so complicated for no reason.

I don't feed veggies - dogs have no nutritional need for them. I also don't do a bunch of different supplements as I think they're unnecessary. We do fish oil supplements and that's it except for things required for specific health issues (one of my dog gets joint supplements for example). As long as you feed a variety of meat proteins, different animal body parts, and some organs, you'll do fine.

By variety of meat I mean at least 3 different types - that's another thing I don't like about BARF-style feeding, they tend to rely too much on chicken. As far as the actual pieces you feed, just aim for a balance of about 75-85% meat, 10-15% bone, and 5-10% organs. This isn't at every meal or every day, but over time.

Dog stomachs are much more acidic than ours, so they can handle eating raw meat much better than we could. I mean if the bacteria bothered them then I would expect a raw fed dog to have an upset stomach stomach or diarrhea, when for us it has been exactly the opposite. Actually my sensitive-tummy dog has never had normal, solid poop until we switched to raw. It's the easiest thing for him to digest. I know there are others even on this board who have had the same experience.