running nutrition diet
How much of this do you believe? Is the BARF diet the only safe route now?
OK So I have an 11 month old Mastiff and run a group for them here in my town. I get asked nutrition questions all the time and try and be helpful. I feed my pup Blue Buffalo and felt like this was a good decision for us. I cant quite wrap my head around how to do the BARF diet in a two bedroom in the city. Maybe I am missing something.
I did some research the other day and found this, amongst other things which said the exact same thing. Do people know about this? I knew about the recall but I didnt know these gory details on the pet food industry. I thought there was a dangerous chemical found to cause the recall but not this and I consider myself to be fairly intelligent and on the ball! Am I to believe that my family dog when I was growing up was fed dead animal remains and waste inside his store bought food? I am really shocked by this and wonder is Blue Buffalo safe enough for him now? Is raw the only way to go at this point? How is everyone dealing with this info?
I live in the city with my mastiff and he eats a raw diet. However, I couldn’t realistically feed him a raw diet if it wasn’t for my chest freezer. It’s not a huge chest freezer (~10 square feet) but a regular freezer just wouldn’t cut it unless I was going to the grocery store twice a week or didn’t use a freezer for any of my own food. Surprisingly he eats very little – his food for today consisted of three chicken leg quarters and a few ounces of liver. Most dogs on raw eat about 2-3% of their body weight per day while Bowser only eats about 1-1.5% (giant breeds generally have slower metabolisms than small and medium breeds). Since your pup is still growing he’d probably consume 2-3% of his weight daily but would require less as he matured.
If you’re not sure that you can manage feeding a raw diet at this point I certainly don’t think that you should beat yourself up for feeding Blue Buffalo — from what I understand it’s a very high quality food that uses only human grade ingredients. You could use this time to research raw diets; there are about a billion different ways of doing things and it can be kind of overwhelming when you first start reading about the Billinghurst vs. Lonsdale vs. Pitcairn, etc. ways of feeding. Even if you can’t feed your dog a total raw diet you can always incorporate some raw food items into his diet to supplement the Blue Buffalo.
Running Raw: Is a Raw Diet Deficient?
