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Dog food naturally

Frost the dog sneaking on the bed! One of my newsletter readers and lovely client has asked me….What did I feed my dog? Well here is the story of what I fed my beautiful lurcher when I had her and my lovely set of knives.

I have a lovely set of big knives thanks to my fantastic colleagues who I worked with contracting at Surrey County Council, they bought them for me because when my partner left me and he took all his large sharp knives with him so I could no longer chop up my dogs dinner.

You are probably at this point wondering what on earth this has to do with natural dog food, but believe me it does. Everyone who know’s me understands that my dogs body is a temple, initially I fed her the brand Nature Diet, it was easy, quick and simple whilst working, she didn’t mind it.

Then I transitioned her over to our homemade food. Most days cooking a mixture of vegetables with a variety of good quality meat. No grains, because dogs can’t digest them, so I never gave them to her.

Slowly we transitioned her to raw meat put in at the last minute with vegetables, so it was slightly cooked. This enabled me to change things for a dog who really didn’t like change.

This transition happened over a few months, and then I turned her completely raw, not that she didn’t have the odd raw dinner in between…..being with a sight hound was always interesting even with a muzzle on, because she had the capacity to bring down rabbits and squirrels when you weren’t looking. Not wanting to waste the life she had taken once she had caught them, taking them home in my back pack was interesting to say the least, after I had ran around the field berating her, then got her to put it down, and I had stopped crying over the death of the animal she had caught.

She was a pure hunting machine absolute poetry in motion for the poacher who obviously had owned her previously, for my vegan life, it could be a bit traumatic to say the least.

She probably thought it was a joke ending up with me, a vegan, she was pure carnivore, it initially broke my heart when this dog wouldn’t eat her vegetables, I tried everything and eventually I found ways to get vegetables into my meat and no veg dog, even if she did learn the art of licking off all the meat from the finest chopped broccoli and carrots and leaving them in tiny pieces in the bowl.

She had learnt the art of looking at me when going to her dinner and showing her absolute disdain, this didn’t matter to be honest what it was, she had on a rotation basis raw organic beef meat, shin bone, flank, chicken carcasses, she ate better than my friends did at times! Chicken wings, legs, turkey portions, she didn’t do fish, but would gnaw her way through a bone or 3 a week, with eggs that she would lick out. 2 days a week I would grind the lot together in a food processor with raw vegetables to give her at least something else to eat so more dirty looks would come on those days.

I would make gravy and give it to her, bone broths sometimes, tripe would go in, liver once a week, heart, and kidneys once a week so she had a lot of organ meats, which would be devoured! She wouldn’t eat fruit, but would eat cashew nuts and pistachios the one thing we actually shared, I would sadly get my kicks shelling them for her.

Mixed with the odd pigs ear, this was more or less her dinner for the last few years of her life.

Why do I have the knives, well to cut up these bones, and chicken carcasses my ex partner had a pretty good set of knives, the night he left I was left with a whole chicken in the fridge to cut up. I’m vegan I really find it hard to cut up anything other than a carrot, so that first night was one of my worst nightmares. Whilst shouting sorry at the chicken I was attempting to chop in half with a vegetable knife and wearing a pair of marigolds, I had the chicken at an angle to me, facing away from it because I couldn’t face it, I was chopping and accidentally flinging chicken bits everywhere, whilst the dog looked on in absolute disdain. But then there was nothing new in that.

I shouted I’m sorry, Oh god, oh god, at the chicken, and in the end with it partly chopped to pieces just gave my dog the whole thing whilst telling her to leave some for tomorrow night, which she did, she was great like that!

I still have the image of her looking at me, then the whole chicken in her bowl, then me again and blowing out her jowls, as though exasperated with me. My colleagues didn’t blow out their jowls they got me a new set of knives!

Feeding your dog raw for a vegan can be a traumatising process, but she did look great on it and was incredibly fit right until the last 8 months of her life when she just quickly went down hill.

Feeding your dog raw is a process of transition if you have a dog that is used to cooked foods.

Weekly she had

  • full bones
  • chicken
  • a variety organ meats
  • would have had fish if she would of eaten it
  • eggs
  • turkey
  • nuts
  • a range of vegetables
  • tripe
  • avocado
  • flax oil
  • fish oil
  • flax meal
  • filtered water but she preferred to drink from the street
  • and because her body was a temple…
  • herbal support
  • supplements – fish oils, spirulina, hemp seeds, flax seeds, seeds
  • massage
  • aromatherapy
  • reiki
  • energy healing
  • a stress free life
  • 2 x 1hour walks a day.

 

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