Our canine best friends, while not strict carnivores like their feline rivals, still thrive on a meat-based diet. Raw food mimics the natural prey diet – anything a dog would have eaten in the wild. This approach to a dog’s diet is typically unproblematic to their digestive systems and leads to healthy benefits such as shinier coats, fresher breath and less poop. A healthy raw food diet is made up of ground raw meat, organ meats, bone, and in some instances veggies or tripe.
Rotating your dog’s proteins not only adds variety to their diet, but ensures they are getting all the necessary nutrients needed, as every protein has a different set of macro and micro-nutrients that some proteins may not offer. You wouldn’t eat the same thing everyday and chances are your dog doesn’t want to either.
If you’ve decided that a raw diet is good for your dog, we recommend watching your dog’s body weight and adjusting accordingly. Depending on what life stage your dog is in, or even what season you’re feeding in, you may need to adjust how much you’re feeding. The amount of food is based on various factors including how active your dog is.
A wide variety of factors can affect how much raw food to feed a dog, everything from their breed to the weather outside.
Your dog’s breed, size, and activity level are the main factors to consider when figuring how much to feed. A more active dog will require more food, than the dog who is content to lay on the couch all day. Similarly to breed, feeding may need to be adjusted based on your dog’s size, as smaller dogs actually need more calories per pound due to their fast metabolism.
We recommend feeding adult dogs two meals a day, and puppies 3-4 meals in the day.
We can’t stress enough that paying attention to your dog’s weight will be a key factor in ensuring your pet is getting enough, or too much food. A couple of ways to check their weight would be to weigh them once or twice a week and recording their weight, or physically checking with your hands. You’ll want to feel for hips and ribs to track if they are gaining or losing weight.