Digestion
Grains are often used as a cheap filler in dry commercial foods, causing a number of digestive issues for dogs and creating great big mounds of poo for you to pick up in the process. Feeding a biologically appropriate, fresh food diet is not only gentler on your dog’s stomach but produces smaller, firmer and less frequent poos – winner!!
Oral health
We get asked all the time if we sell toothbrushes for dogs. No, but we do sell raw meaty bones and chunks of meat that are natures tools clean your dogs teeth. When feeding a diet of dry processed food, your dogs teeth are pretty much redundant. We have all seen how quickly a bowl of kibble is inhaled, meaning that those awesome teeth have very little to do bar grow plaque.
Skin & coat
Skin is the largest organ of the body and a great indicator of whether your dog is in good health. Dry scurvy skin, dull coat, dandruff, a build up of ear wax and itching can all illustrate an intolerance or reaction to something your dog has been exposed to. In the same way grains can affect the digestive system, they can also play havoc with your dogs skin. Feeding a biologically appropriate, fresh food diet is free from not only grain but artificial colours, additives and preservatives.
Mental health
Raw meaty bones are not only a great way to clean your dog’s teeth but they improve your dog’s overall mental well-being by stimulating the brain to release endorphins and provide an amazing physical workout for your dog’s jaw.
Making the switch
We will provide you with everything you need to switch your dog to a fresh food diet.
Switching to raw
Switching to a fresh, raw food diet emulates a way of feeding that would, in the wild, be achieved by hunting and eating prey that was caught. It is not only an inexpensive way of feeding your dog but one that will provide natural goodness you can’t achieve through processed, cooked foods found on a supermarket shelf.
Raw feeding is not an exact science, however, most people tend to follow the rule that a balanced diet 'roughly' consists of 80% meat, 10% bone and 10% offal (5% liver and 5% other secreting organ such as kidney). It is important to note that this balance is one that occurs over time and does not need to be regimented every single day, although many people do.
How to start
There are two ways of switching to a fresh raw food diet:
1. If your dog does not have any digestive conditions then we recommend stopping their current food immediately and switching to raw.
2. If your dog has digestive problems, we would suggest that you introduce the raw gradually over 7-10 days. Each day add a small amount of raw into your dog’s bowl, decreasing the amount of their current food, until you have the full daily allowance of fresh raw food.
When starting a fresh raw food diet, we always recommend you introduce different proteins slowly over a 4 week period which enables you to see if there are any potential problems with different meats.
We start nice and easy with plain stinky tripe for week 1.
Week 2 we introduce bone and feed tripe and chicken.
Week 3 we introduce a new protein and include turkey (or duck).
Finally for week 4 we not only introduce duck (or turkey) but we also add a small amount of offal to the bowl.
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You can find our 4 week transition guide at the bottom of this page with our product recommendations.
How much to feed
Dogs are fed as an individual but as a starting point we aim at feeding an adult dog with no weight issues at 2.5% of their body weight. Don't panic, just click on our raw feeding calculator link here and it will work everything out.
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We start the majority of puppies on 10% of body weight and decrease that percentage as pup grows.
Types of raw
You will see from our website we stock a huge variety of raw foods from a number of different manufacturers and we have split our website into different categories to give you a hand choosing what to feed.
Companies such as Benyfit, Natural Instinct and Nutriment manufacture foods that already contain fruit, vegetables and botanicals. Some have ratios of 80/10/10, some are boneless and some contain no offal.
The other manufacturers you see on our website produce a varied range of 80/10/10 minces along with boned and bones minces. There is information on each product record to help with what you can add to the bowl to balance the meal.
Healthy diet
There are lots of different views on how to feed a fresh food diet and what can and should be added to your dog’s bowl varies from resource to resource. It is important to read and research as much as you can so you can make an informed decision on what will be best for your dog.
Fruit and vegetables, for example, are possibly one of the most debated topics within the social media raw feeding groups. At the Wandering Dog we do recommend that you include fruit and vegetables into your dog’s bowl as there are essential vitamins and minerals that you can’t get from feeding a diet of meat alone.
Lightly cooking or steaming vegetables helps break down the plant matter and enables your dog to digest the food easier then feeding raw. Kale, spinach, sprouts, celery, broccoli, pumpkin, apples, cucumber, berries are all fantastic additions to the bowl.