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BARF diet for animals

Hello lovely people!! I have a 5 month old Border Collie named Tucker and am looking to transition him to a species appropriate diet. However, I have no idea how to go about this. Everyone already thinks I’m weird enough for eating “Rabbit food” when I bring up changing his diet they just laugh at me! So all you dog owners out there, help me out! What is the best way to go about this?...Books to read, things to know…etc. All advice is greatly appreciated, thank you!

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  • Hi there! I had my kitty on the BARF diet and she did REALLY well on it. I have to admit that it was hard on me to grind up the bones and meat for her (the kitty version is mostly flesh and bones), but I meditated before and after with the mantra “I intend to provide a nourishing and correct diet for my Lucy.” This really helped.

    (On a related side note, she thrived on the food the entire time she was with us. We live in a small neighborhood in suburbia in order to let her go outside. Unfortunately she was hit by a car and died. She didn’t die due to the food!)

  • Luna bluLuna blu Raw Newbie

    Hey there! My dog has been on BARF since she was 5 months old. I just looked at a ton of different websites and went from there. She gets raw meaty bones, ground beef, sweet potato, broc. beans and carrots which i grind up for her. (Chew, what’s chew? says she!)

    You will have to do a lot of research and then make up your mind from there!

    Bring up the pet food recals when people laugh at you. Ask them if they would like to eat pellets, breakfast,lunch and dinner for the rest of their lves. Also, mention that dogs, are desended from wolves (dog = canis familiaris. wolf = canis lupis) When was the last time you saw a wolf tear into a bag of kibble?!

    My girl is a white Shiloh shepherd. Google this breed if you don’t know what they look like! They are stunning!!!!!!!!!!

    Good luck! :)

  • Hi Karen22,

    My boyfriend and I have three wonderful dogs (two pitt bull mixes and a blue healer chow mix). We’ve been feeding them an all raw meat,bones, and organ meat diet for around two years now after having done extensive research online (it’s amazing how much information is out there). We try to give them a variety of meats, consisting of poultry, beef, and fish. As much as we hate supporting the meat industry it comes down to the fact that we want the best for our babies.

    For a meal I feed them a small percentage of organ meat then feed them a piece of meat (with bones) roughly 2% of their body weight. It’s all relative to your dogs activity level and whether they need to lose/gain weight. Ours are very active.

    In terms of supplements we give our oldest MSM and glucosamine condrontine for his joints. We also purchase canned tripe by Tripett. We’ve read that “tripe contains gastric enzymes and amino acids that help the dog in digesting and using the nutrients in food. The raw, untreated tripe is green. It reflects all that the cow has consumed.” The reason for buying canned tripe is because we can never find raw, untreated tripe at the store. In the store it is bleached. But we read great things about tripe and wanted to include it in their diets.

    On another note, since we have three large dogs we can’t afford to buy organic meat for them (wish we could). So we find good deals at the Mexican Supermarket here, called Vallerta, and great fish deals at the Asian markets.

    Also we have read how fasting is good for dogs as well. We don’t fast them often. If we do, I feed them only breakfast in the morning and then no dinner. I’ve read that some people fast their dogs for 1/2 a day every week.

    But good luck to you and Tucker. I really feel it’s the best diet for our babies. They seem very healthy. One of the things I noticed since they have been eating raw is that their poops don’t stink at all.

    Well, perhaps thats too much information :) To your loved ones health!

  • amysueamysue Raw Newbie

    Hey Karen22, my dog – an Alaskan husky mutt thrives on a BARF diet and she’s 12, with no health problems. We use patties from Nature’s Variety since I couldn’t deal with making it myself or dealing with the sausage-like tubes as a vegetarian. We don’t do the raw bones, since she threw up a huge chunk one day. But we did discover a great treat they sell at our health food store – it’s dehydrated chicken mixed with ground oyster shells and herbs. This has helped enormously with her breath which was HORRIBLE on this diet, being so soft and squishy. I’m sure your dog will love going raw! Just a heads up – our vet is very uncomfortable with this diet because of the safety issue for humans (handling raw meat).

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    BARF? acronym for what exactly?

  • I use Nature’s Variety too for my cat and my dog. The dog also gets all sort of raw veggies that are left over from a meal. She loves mustard greens and carrots the most. I also give her probiotic yogurt (frozen in a hollow bone) because she has a tendency to get the bacteria in her gut out of balance. She has this problem if she’s on raw or not. I think it’s because of all the gross stuff she eats when we go hiking in the woods…

    And the last time I took her to the vet (for swallowing a whole pecan in the yard that obstructed her bowel…), I was a bit embarrassed to tell the vet what I had been feeding her. I shouldn’t have been – he said it sounded great!

  • Painnissima- BARF stands for “bones and raw food” diet. Feeding raw is also just referred to as raw food diet by a lot of the raw petfoodists nowawdays since the term “barf” has a negative connotation by many people. ;) (And some people feed only raw vegan to their dogs, but that is generally referred to as raw vegan then.)

    I’ve been feeding my 6 y/o Doberman raw for about a year now and am so happy with the obvious improvements in his health, energy, and return of the “spark” in his eyes. I feed him all organic meat- whole chickens (that I have the Whole Foods meat handlers quarter up for me when I buy) the organs, pork chops and roasts, and some ground beef and roasts, along with Naure’s Variety frozen patties rotated in (Nature’s Variety uses all organic ingredients). He gets a raw beef bone (usually a hock or knuckle and needs to be 3” long or he’ll swallow the pieces and throw them up later) every night, too. I’ve noticed that his breath never smells anymore, he farts much much less and poops less, too, than when I was even feeding him a high quality natural meat and veggie dry kibble. The organic thing is expesive and I can empathize with those who can’t afford it.

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