Grains in dog food...what do you think?

oh, and humans don't need grains either. My household is almost entirely grain-free at the moment-- humans, dogs, horses, all eating natural diets. Which don't include grain. Grain is for birds and mice.

Just curious, do you eat meat?

Lori, Barking At the Moon is small. It's about the size of Nutro's small bite kibble, or Hills small bite (smaller than Pedigree's small bites).  I don't know any of the super premium's small bite sizes.... It's smaller than Natural Balance, or Eagle Pack, or regular Solid Gold, or Chicken Soup.

oh, and humans don't need grains either. My household is almost entirely grain-free at the moment-- humans, dogs, horses, all eating natural diets. Which don't include grain. Grain is for birds and mice.

 
 
Are you talking grain free as in NO regular or whole wheat, or any other type of sandiwch/toast bread, hamburger buns, hotdog buns, bagels, Enslish muffins, plain muffins, pancakes, waffles, biscuits,dinner  rolls, sweet rolls, cornbread, cookies, pies, cakes,  brownies, noodles and everything else that is made with or uses wheat flour or cornmeal or any other ground up grain?  That might last half a day around here.

I'm not sure if you meant adding pumpkin separately, but there's pumpkin in the food. It's pretty far down the list so I doubt Willow would be able to taste it, but then I wonder how effective it is down there also

 
 Tomato pomace, which is listed right after the canola oil, provides fiber and is also a good source of lycopene.

Is there anything else besides pumpkin because I've tried that in the past and she refused to eat it

 
 Jessie's stools are nice and firm but we've been adding pumpkin to make them bulkier to see if it will help empty her anal sacs. We just mix it with her kibble; perhaps you could try doing that.

Here's my $.02 FWIW.

I've fed a grain free diet to my dogs for the past 8+ years (I think it's actually 9 but can't remember right today).

I've fed a grain-free, CARB-free (as in no veggies) diet to them for the past 5 years.

They get meat and bone, organ meat and (for the most part) that's it.  They get the occasional green tripe or cooked oatmeal (if I forget to defrost something).  But 99% of their diet is meat and bone.

They do not have loose stools.  They do not have stomach troubles.  They are not consipated.

They are healthy.  They are a 14+ yr old German Shepherd who can still run and chase her frisbee.  They are a 8 yr old Cocker Spaniel that has NEVER had an ear infec tion and has epilepsy that we control with diet alone.  They are a who-knows-HOW-old Husky mix that we adopted and brought her back to life just with diet changes.  She went from this:


To this:


In just a few short months.

In the 8+ years I've been feeding raw I've fed over 10,000 pounds of raw meat and bone.  No bacterial infections, no e-coli, no Salmonella, no punctured intestines.  One case of near choking - that's it.

I've fed raw to 4-5 week old puppies, pregnant moms, immune compromised dogs, dogs with severe allergies, dogs with little to no teeth (Sadie above), every foster dog or puppy that came through my house and a couple cats.

I have no degrees in nutrition (himan or animal).  I'm not a vet.  I have no formal education in what to feed dogs.  I just go by my experience and the experience of those that came before me and taught me what they knew.

Wow, Lauri. Sadie looks FANTASTIC!!!! How is she doing, now? I remember she had some issues that needed resolving, when you got her...

You're probably the one to ask this, so I thought of it when you said, "immune compromised dogs". Ever heard of a dog who doesn't break down bone? Like, at all? Emma is immune compromised, and full of issues (always has been). She's on a grain free, carb rich (liver probs), home cooked diet. Her epilepsy is well controlled. Her demodex has calmed down, quite a bit. She's easier to keep weight on (though still quite thin) than she was, when she had kibbles or grains. Lots of good effects.

  Last time she got a bone, she chewed it well, before she swallowed. Two days later, the fragments were mostly still in her stomach. She passed a few small fragments, screaming hysterically. We did a barium series. Five hours, and the barium hadn't moved, at all. They did "one last xray" to make SURE it wasn't going to move, before they prepped her for surgery, and it moved. She passed more fragments, that night, and was sick for a week with a very irritated GI tract. It was just a little peice of a pork shoulder bone that her sister had been chewing on. Before that, she'd gotten sick from other bones. Now, she has absolutely NO access to bone, of any kind. The other dog gets them ONLY in her crate, and there is never one lying around.

I've heard of dogs having trouble breaking down some types of bone (like the harder beef bones) or getting too much bone and having troubles.  But I've never heard of a dog not breaking it down at all.

There's always a first time.   How were her stools while all this was happening?

If I was feeding Emma raw I would feed ground RMBs - just so her system didn't have to work any harder than it already is.  That's what I started Sadie on.

Sadie is doing great.  Her eyes continue to trouble her but we manage to maintain them.  They never will get better but at least they aren't as bad as they were.  She had Pyo bak in January and managed to survive an emergency spay.  Sometimes I think the old gilr will outlive me!

I haven't been updating her website (or my own for that matter) - been kinda distracted.  I'm hoping to get some new pictures and such up there in the next few weeks.

If I was feeding Emma raw I would feed ground RMBs - just so her system didn't have to work any harder than it already is. That's what I started Sadie on.

I've been thinking about getting her some ground rabbits, from Hare Today, to try. I'd get the rabbits, with the fur. She seems to do ok with stuff she catches, for some reason.

Her stools, before she started passing bone, were fine. When she started passing the bone, it was bloody, with obvious bits of bone in it. The blood was fresh, and the vet says it was not stomach bleeding, but from her colon. After she passed the bone, she had diahrrea with small amounts of blood for a  few days (on a soft, bland diet), and then straightened out. She has trouble breaking things down, in the first place, I think. She's only 17 pounds, and she eats close to 1 1/2 pounds of food a day. You can usually see every rib, though she's put on some weight, lately, and it's shadows of every rib. I haven't found a vet that is concerned, at all, about this. She has great muscle mass, and it's obvious she's being fed, and being fed well. Her coat is nice, she rarely gets fleas (no chemical flea preventatives [*cough nuerotoxins*]on the epileptic dog, thanks), she smells good all the time, and her nails grow so fast I have to trim them twice a week. She is getting nutrition, but not a pound and a half of it! If her sister, the Dachshund, ate that much (they're roughly the same size. Teenie is 13 pounds), she'd shoot back up to the 23 pounds she was when I got her, in no time.