I've decided to try putting Missy (7 y/o Border Collie) on an all raw diet for a few weeks to see how it goes. I've been feeding her a diet of about 50/50 raw and kibble for a little over a year now (one meal of raw, one meal of kibble a day).

So last weekend I figured out roughly how much she would need for 2 weeks, then mixed up the ground beef, canned fish, eggs, etc and supplements divided it up into daily portions, added a piece of heart and a piece of kidney to each and froze it. She gets one meal of that, and one meal of RMBs (turkey necks, pork necks, etc). I'm staying away from chicken for a few weeks, as I think she may be allergic to it.

Everything has been going great, except for the past two nights she has vomitted up some small pieces of bone - the size of a marble or smaller. She's been eating RMBs like this for a year, and has only done this one other time.

Any idea of what's going on? Should I be doing something a little different? Or just not worry about it?

I assume the RMB's you are feeding are the same variety you were feeding before??

I'm sure others will have ideas - and I'm not sure if our situation was the same. We had a couple of random pukes that included small pieces of bone, like you describe, when we first started feeding raw. We were given the advice here to add a big plop of plain, live culture yogurt with their meals for awhile to aid in the change of digestion process. That worked great for us!

Best wishes..

Beth

I wonder if it has to do with feeding to much meat with bone in a day? My dogs did that too when I first started and then I started to feed one meal of meat and then the second meal was veggies and supplements. Before they were getting meat and veggie/supplements twice a day.
Now no more vomiting up bone. Or vomiting for that matter.

Yep, same thing happened to my 10-year-old female shepherd.

It was when I first started feeding raw and didn't quite get the meat/bone balance right (too much bone).

Feeding more meat and less bones should fix the problem quickly for your girl

I'm not really a fan of the Billinghurt/BARF type diet where too much emphasis is placed on bones and vegetables.

I try to follow the prey model by approximating what a wolf or coyote in the wild would get from eating fresh whole prey.
They would get much more meat and organs in relation to bone and would be getting very little vegetable matter.

For example, if you feed fresh whole prey, you would get something like 80%+ meat/organs to less than 20% bones.
And when food is plentiful, wolves don't bother chewing up every last bone on a carcass. They always focus on the organs and muscle mass.

In the BARF style diets, one is led to believe that chicken backs have the ideal bone/meat ratio, when this is nowhere near what you would get from whole prey. It just seems too much like a fad to me.

This site is useful in explaining the science behind this: http://www.rawfed.com/myths/

It also provides good evidence against feeding vegetables, and certainly against feeding grains.

The best way of seeing this is to watch a program that follows wild wolves. You can see for yourself what the animals eat and what they leave behind. I have yet to see a hungry wolf or coyote start by ripping the excess meat and organs off a fresh carcass and nibble on the ribcage and spine of the prey in order to get a 1/1 or 2/1 ratio of meat to bone

(It's usually when prey is in very short supply and they're starving that the predators will bother crunching up and consuming all the bones.)

Best of luck with the switch, and trust your common sense when it comes to feeding (too many weird fad diets out there)!

Thanks for all the ideas

Yes, she is getting the same type RMBs she has had all along.

Hmm, I could try the yogurt. What about probiotics? Do you think that could help?

Nothing comes up but the bone. Both times it has been 12-14 hours after she has eaten. I could try feeding veggies seperate, but I doubt she'll eat veggies alone. And I don't really have that many veggies in the mix - I had one large cooked mashed sweet potato in the mix (10-14 days of food), along with some alfalfa powder.

But thinking about it now, she didn't vomit for the few days when she was eating turkey necks for her RMBs. So maybe she's getting a little too much bone with the pork necks. I'll guess I'll tinker around a bit with her food and see what happens.

 Quote: yuko blum

Feeding more meat and less bones should fix the problem quickly for your girl

For example, if you feed fresh whole prey, you would get something like 80%+ meat/organs to less than 20% bones.

Not such good information, Yuko, in my opinion. Try feeding your dog 80% meat and 20% bones, and you'll have an extremely obese animal that poops all day long, not to mention one that is way off kilter in regard to calcium/phosporous.

The "fad" diets you discuss are covered in numerous threads here, and you would be surprised at the number of experts we have who explain all the facets of raw feeding. It really is very interesting, and worthwhile, reading. All it takes is a simple "Search".

I would try enzymes, for example Prozyme. It's great to transition a dog to all raw until their bodies start producing enough on their own. I feed it to every animal I have with every meal. Google it; it's cheap, harmless, and quite beneficial IMO.

I agree with Jan, I feed the recommended meat to bone ratios but split the meals into a meat meal and then a veggie meal. The bones are the source of calcium/phosporous although they do get a calcium supplement a couple times a week.

My veggie meal is a "glop" of sorts that is put through the food processor, it includes but is not limited to green beans, broccoli, carrots, whatever is in the fridge that needs to be eaten, eggs (shell and all), plain yogurt and sometimes I will put a half a can of mackerel or canned salmon in it for enticement.
Meat is turkey or chicken necks, backs, wings, legs (only chicken legs) venison, beef or buffalo. I split the organ meat and RMB's and Connie taught me that if you run out of organ meat and RMB's at the same time you running a pretty good ratio. (I hope I said that right....hee hee :grin
The dogs get recreational bone with meat and fat on them about three times a week, the more meat and fat on the recreational bone, the more I cut back a bit on that days feeding. Dogs are maintaining well on this diet.

 Quote: jan williamson

Try feeding your dog 80% meat and 20% bones, and you'll have an extremely obese animal that poops all day long, not to mention one that is way off kilter in regard to calcium/phosporous.

That's simply a matter of adjusting how much to feed in relation to how much activity your dog gets. I'd rather feed my dogs less (or exercise them more) rather than use bone as a "filler" in the diet. My older dog used to throw up pieces of bones back when I still followed the BARF ratios.

As for the calcium/phosphorus ratios, isn't the "ideal" what a predator would get from eating whole fresh prey??

I find it hard to believe that wolves and dogs in the wild have an "unbalanced" diet and that this newly discovered bone/meat ratio is better for them. Isn't this how the whole kibble fiasco started in the first place? When some scientist decided that they'd discovered the "perfect" nutritional balance?

As for the poops, can't argue with you there, Jan
Then again, my dogs are very fit and slim (you can see a hint of rib when they move around and they're very athletic) so I'm not feeding massive amounts ot meat to them every day and the poop is still way smaller and less frequent than the kibble-dogs. I'm more concerned about my dog's overall health and condition than I am about how hard and tiny I can get their poop to be.

My common sense tells me that a whole prey model (which is what all wild predators have evolved to eat over millions of years) is best, no matter how popular a particular diet is.

I actually have read a lot about observation with spotters' scopes by U.C. of grey wolves feeding in Yellowstone (and other places, but the Yellowstone study was long-lasting, multi-seasonal, and well-documented).

I think we all read certain people's essays (or actual studies, which I prefer) and maybe draw slightly different conclusions.

For example, I disagree with the vegetation "myth" on the site provided. One reason is that I have watched video in my canine nutrition seminars of wolves eating berries and fallen ripe produce, but biggest for me is the UC research referenced above that found this: The first activity at the kill is evisceration and gorging on the stomach and other organs in the abdominal cavity - except for the first stomach cavity of large ruminants (see below).

L. David Mech made different observations of consumption of ruminants, reporting that the first stomach cavity would usually be shaken out and the walls eaten, the contents consumed only if there was a last stage of wolves feeding on that carcass (when those contents, and the brain and hide and as much as the wolves could manage of the weight-bearing bones would be consumed). (A last stage depended largely on number of observers, closeness of competition, etc., but also the plenty or dearth of prey.)


However, it's almost a moot point, because even the "myth" site linked above points out that QUOTE: Only if the prey is small enough (like the size of a rabbit) will they eat the stomach contents, which just happen to get consumed along with the entire animal. END

That is, the food many of us are feeding, which is small animals like poultry and rabbits, is consumed in its entirety by wild canids.

Although I try to make the diet varied, I do admit that poultry is a mainstay for me. And I feed the whole bird.

When starting out, I feed backs and necks, true, but they are supplemented by additional muscle meat. (You will see this on both Leerburg's feeding examples and on the NJ Boxer site, which uses a modified Billinghurst diet.) The amount of added muscle meat is intended to make up (with the RMBs) the prey's muscle-bone ration "on the hoof."

So, while I now feed whole birds (and I personally prefer the weight-bearing bones to be ground, so the butcher packages up the front end as is and the legs ground up; that's just me, I repeat) plus organ meat and plus produce, I remain confident in the Billinghurst model.

I think we can all read authoritative studies and books and make our own educated decisions.

One of my decisions was not to exclude anything I believe the wild canid would ever eat on his own, because as complete controller of my dog's diet, I know he can't correct my inadvertant omissions on his own. But someone else may read the same material and conclude that produce is optional.

And like the prey-model proponents, as far as the bone-meat ratio goes, my goal too is to feed the same ratio that the whole small prey has.