Quote: Nora Ferrell

Also, I know that raw is best, and that may be in my future, but what is the basic difference in cooked vs raw, all things being equal nutritionally?

She is such a small dog that doing a raw will be really inconvenient. I am trying to experiment with ready made food for the time being, but if cooked is nutritionally equal to raw, I can see me being able to make it at home.

Enzymes are destroyed when food is cooked, so raw would be superior to cooked in that regard. Also cooked fat in large quantities can cause pancreatis in dogs, but not fresh raw fat. Based on that I think that raw fat is superior and safer than even small quantities of cooked fat, and fat is an important component of the diet. Raw animal fat also has an anti-stiffness factor (Wulzen factor) that is destroyed by cooking.
If you think cooked is more convenient than raw let's do a sample meal. Chicken is on the menu. You don't want to feed cooked bones so you would have to cut the bone out, discard the raw bone (only because it's raw, and buy calcium, bone meal or tablets/powder, to replace it). Then you cook the meat, and if you are adding organ meat that day the lovely liver/kidney smell wafts through the house (I don't like it), let the cooked food cool, transfer it to the dog's bowl, then wash the dirty cutting board, knife and pan.
Now compare that to raw for a little dog: Buy legs or thighs and a package of chicken livers. Place one raw leg or thigh, and a liver once a week, in the dog's crate (because if you put it in a bowl she will just pull it out and eat it on the crate floor). Wash your hands. You don't actually have to touch the chicken if you let the dog take the meat out of the package.
If you feed hamburger you would need to add the calcium but you can still skip the cooking step.
Salmon oil and vit E should be added unless you are feeding grass fed meat. Hand one of each to your dog. If she won't chew them you may have to pierce and squeeze them onto the meat.

I think feeding raw is pretty easy. It took me a while to convert to raw from kibble, but now I won't ever go back to kibble.

 Quote: Debbie Bruce

Salmon oil and vit E should be added unless you are feeding grass fed meat.

This confuses me, could you explain this. I have never heard this before.

Slaughter meat used to have good stores of Omega 3s in the meat and fat like game meat has -- this was from the forage/grass they ate. Grain-fed animals are lopsided in Omega 6s.

This is a huge part of the reason for the Omega 3 dietary shortage in humans AND dogs.

We feed Omega 3s because of the human disruption in the natural food chain of the last 100-150 years.

Thanks for the input, Debbie.

You really make it sound convincing, but I thought you had to add vegetables and stuff like that.

If it's just a matter of a piece of meat or chicken, then that would be very convenient.

When I referred to cooked, I was mostly thinking that what I ate along the line of meat, chicken, fish, etc., I could feed to her.

Also, are the pouch and canned food cooked? Probably a dumb question, I guess they would have to be. The local grocer has two flavors of the Newman's Own and some organic dog biscuits and I got a pouch of Three Dog Bakery Entree that I am mixing with the organic, natural kibble. The kibble is apx 24% protein, the Newman's in a can is 9% protein and the pouch is 10% protein. So that's why I was mixing it with the kibble because the pouch didn't have as much protein, crude fat, etc.

P.S. about giving fish oil and E: Whether or not they are feeding an imbalance of 6s and need to supplement with 3s is pretty much a given -- and is not something the vast majority of dog owners needs to think about before doing it, IMO.

I think that the modern diet (for humans and dogs) in this country and most others is almost universally short on Omega 3s and heavy in Omega 6s, and that this is probably the biggest factor in the huge and growing upsurge in the number of cases of inflammation-related disease (arthritis, diabetes, some cancers, human coronary artery disease, and many many more).

3s foster the production of a group of anti-inflammatory hormones and 6s foster the production of a group of pro-inflammatory hormones. Inflammation is a crucial part of the healing process, but inflammation run amok (unchecked) can turn into a source of disease symptoms instead.

The Omega 3-Omega 6 balance that is thrown so far off in the modern grain-fed meat diet (along with all the types of oils used in processed foods, and the damage done to the 3s in fish by either farming it or deep-frying it or both) is brought back towards balance when we ingest and feed long-chain 3s from marine sources.

That's the simplified version; a real discussion of the subject can be easily googled.

WOW! Connie. As I have been recently (this summer) diagnosed with rheumatoid, I find this very interesting. I've always been a meat eater, too, and I'm horrified at what our food is in this day and age. Difficult to combat.

As an aside, you are such a good teacher in your explanations. What is your occupation/background.

 Quote: Nora Ferrell

You really make it sound convincing, but I thought you had to add vegetables and stuff like that.

If you are feeding a prey model diet that would include the guts and the contents (chewed and partially digested veggies) which my dogs voluntarily eat. When I tried feeding them sanitary prepared veggies they wouldn't touch it. I think tripe would be a suitable compromise. You can buy that ground or chunked. My dogs absolutely go nuts over unwashed tripe.
An alternative would be spirolena, available in bulk powder or capsules that you could sprinkle on the food.
Unfortunately there are no long-term studies comparing the longevity/health of dogs fed meat and bone with those that are also fed green stuff. Maybe somebody on the board has some experience with it.

I didnt have any idea not to mix kibble with raw-OOPs
that is what I do at night, give some kibble with either turkey necks or chicken quarter, so what exactly is the reason to not do this? Someone said kibble digests slower? So what does that do to the dog? guess i better do some switching around.

Nora, have you seen this Q&A?

http://leerburg.com/feedingarawdiet.htm


There are actual photos of two good sample diets, too, at

http://www.leerburg.com/diet2.htm

 Quote: Kathy West

I didnt have any idea not to mix kibble with raw-OOPs
that is what I do at night, give some kibble with either turkey necks or chicken quarter, so what exactly is the reason to not do this? Someone said kibble digests slower? So what does that do to the dog? guess i better do some switching around.

Many people do that and many dogs do well on it.

I don't do it because I still believe that kibble slows down the passage through the system of fresh (raw) food. (Kibble digests at a much slower rate.) To me, that means that the raw food is unnaturally slowed, giving food pathogens much longer than they would have without the addition of kibble to colonize and reproduce.

The short fast digestion is one of the reasons for the dog's low susceptibility (compared to humans) to food pathogens. (Another is their more caustic stomach acid.)