Feeding Raw

Was sifting through old photos in my flickr account when i came across this:

Cow tongue sashimi

Sheryl ate it while she was there earlier in the year. Generally, we normally do not eat sashimi of any kind but cow tongue sashimi is a rare delicacy even in Japan. According to Sheryl, it was very yummy and she would eat it again!

Anyway, it got me thinking of the food we feed our doggies. Our dogs are on a mainly chicken and beef diet. They get a chicken leg (about 350 to 600 grams each) for breakfast and 200 grams of beef for their dinner.

Originally we were feeding them slightly more than the recommended 3% of their ideal body weight but we realized it was too much forthem when 1)they started becoming unable to finish their meals as quickly and willingly as previously and 2) All of them started putting on weight. (At 25.6kg, Panda is overweight!) Also, when they first started raw, and ate 2 chicken legs a day, it was too much bone and their poop started becoming smaller. Hence, beef leg was introduced and the dogs are loving it! Besides the above, they get fish once a week, mutton once in a while and dehydrated organs everyday. Why dehydrated and not raw? The reason is because they get their organ intake via us giving them treats. This helps prevent them from taking in too much organ. If we were to give the dehydrated liver on top of raw liver at meal times, it would be too much for them and end up in soft stools…Not a very pleasant experience. Organs we give are liver, lung and gizzard. We also give hearts, tendons and chicken feet.

While the chicken does not need any preparation, the beef needs to be cut down into chunks for them. Theoretically, it would be better to give the dogs the beef in slabs rather than the chunks that i cut the beef into. However, feeding them in chunks is A LOT neater than feeding them a slab so that’s the way we are going. When you have multiple dogs, efficiency is vital. Any measure that can be done to prevent messy situations is taken. rotfl. We are definitely VERY glad that we now have an electric knife to cut our meat for us!  Our beef cutting efficiency has gone up by a lot. Woohoo! Recently, we received a few emails about how to use the electric knife and what it looks like, so we thought we would do a photo blog post about how we prepare our dog’s beef meals.

Prepare Electric Knife

Get thawed meat slab out of fridge

Make the cuts. Its easier to follow the cartilage line. Do note that it can be tough sawing through tendon.

Continue sawing the meat till it becomes meat chunks. Using a traditional knife simultaneously with the electric knife helps too.

Weigh meat

Seal packet and freeze!

While feeding raw is a lot more work as compared to kibble as well as more costly, i think its worth all the effort! From next week, we will be adding kelp as a supplement and D.E as a natural pest preventive. We’ll update on any changes/improvements we see with the kelp supplement.