About the Book

Are you worried about not providing a “complete and balanced” diet for your dog? Here’s a little exercise: Pretend you can’t obtain any “complete and blah blah” kibble, so you decide to get all the ingredients separately and make your own. Here’s what you will be putting in the bowl – I am using the ingredients from a very well known adult dog food:

• Dried Ground Yellow Corn Kernels
• Chicken Meal: Rendered by-products - necks, beaks, feet, undeveloped eggs, intestines, and some stray feathers.
• Corn Gluten Meal: Dried corn residue left over from making corn syrup or starch.
• Soybean Meal: The remaining bean husks, left over from the oil extraction process.
• Beef Tallow: Preserved beef fat (lard) left over from rendering cattle.
• Brewers Rice: Waste fragments left over from making beer.
  
• Animal Digest: Animal tissue, cooked down to a powder or liquid. If the meat source (i.e. chicken) is unspecified, this may include any dead animal – horses, shelter kills, pigs, goats, etc.
  

Here is an excellent site to help you understand what goes in kibble:

http://www.iei.net/~ebreeden/kibble.html

Note that soy and corn, along with wheat, are extremely common allergens in dogs. Allergies usually manifest in licking and chewing, especially of the feet, dry, itchy skin, hot spots, chronic ear infections, and excessive discharge from the ears and eyes. Dogs with food allergies are no doubt miserable, and cost their owners plenty in vet bills.

I also counted 33 other ingredients like dicalcium phosphate, thiamine mononitrate, a few vitamins, and other things I cannot pronounce. So, you will need 33 bottles of powders and liquids to sprinkle on top of your bowl of rendered animal parts and grain left-overs. If someone in a white lab coat told you this is what you must do for every meal in order to feed an optimum diet to your dog, would you do it? Would you really feel good about it? The advertising blurb for this particular kibble includes the statement that they have devoted an entire staff to advancing pet nutrition for over 70 years. This food costs about $30.00 for a 37.5lb bag.

How about this: You feed your dog fresh raw foods, like chicken, fish, beef, pulped vegetables and whole eggs. You may or may not include a little high quality cooked grains, vitamin supplements, and miscellaneous things like yogurt and select human left-overs. Most people find that it costs the same or less to feed fresh food, and they have happier, healthier dogs to boot.

Dogs have systems designed to eat raw meat and bones – like many animals, actually. Wolves, foxes, and coyotes eat whole raw animals. Herons swallow whole fish without chewing. Lions, bobcats, and panthers eat whole raw animals. Big snakes eat whole raw animals – ask anyone who owns one as a pet what they feed their large snake! Large carnivorous fish eat small fish – whole, bones and all. I have Oscars (large tropical fish) who gulp entire live goldfish, and it never occured to me to worry about them getting food borne illnesses or having a problem with sharp little fishie bones.

Dogs are not designed to eat lots of grains, rendered meat, and various preservatives for every single meal. I am not sure there is an animal on the planet who is supposed to eat what’s in kibble – a raw diet is THE optimum diet for dogs, just as nature intended.

I wrote this book to complement the other raw feeding books already on the market. These are wonderful, information-rich books – but so many people have a ton of questions and little practical issues not addressed elsewhere – look through any raw feeding internet discussion group! I wanted to write a book that filled the gaps, that demystified the process, and gave people the confidence to feed their dogs. I wrote the book that I wanted to read when I started out.