How do you guys get such a variety of meats? Do you just happen to have a lot of hunter friends? And how do you keep giant animal remains? Do you just time it so that they eat as soon as they're dropped off? I have this mental picture of you guys in your butcher's smocks!
Haha. No, fortunately I've never had to gut/dress a carcass.
I don't deal with "giant animal remains" - I get them cut up into nice little manageable portions (usually 1-2 lbs., 10 lbs. at most) and 99% of the time, I get them frozen.
A Canadian winter is my best friend. Currently, I have about 60 lbs. of meaty bones more than my freezers can handle. The meats are frozen in plastic bags, which I keep buried under snow/ice in the yard during winter.
As for the variety, I got really lucky because my puppy's breeder works for two butchers and hoards away HUGE loads of wonderful goodies (green tripe!). Normally she'd charge for them, but in my case I have a deal with her. I build and maintain her website and in exchange she keeps my freezers full of dog food
If I didn't have her to help me out, I'd still be able to manage most of the variety, only it would cost me more.
I didn't have any hunter friends before starting to feed raw.
I just did a whole lot of searching - supermarkets, butchers, meat shops in the market, meat wholesale, farms etc.
Spent hours on the phone trying to make as many "contacts" as possible and I did what I could to spread the word that I'm always on the lookout for prey parts.
This may take time, but eventually people will pop up with some great offers. For example, I made friends with the people at the local meat wholesale/restaurant supplier.
Sure enough, one of the people there (the owner) happens to be an avid hunter. I'd never even met the guy, but he'd heard of me and my dogs from his employees and one day when I showed up to pick up an order, he offered me a huge case full of wild moose meats from a moose that he'd killed recently.
He got bored of eating moose burgers so he was quite eager for me to take the extra meats off his hands!
I asked him to spread the word with his friends (many of them hunters) and the donations poured in
Carbon on the other hand...if he gets any more energy...well, I'm afraid I'll wake up to a smoking crater where my dog used to be!
I don't think he'll be getting more energy at this point since he's so young and healthy and you're feeding him a quality diet already, but chances are, he'll be far more enthusiastic about mealtime!
The Corgis on the other hand... they'll probably experience the greatest benefits. I wish you the best with them!!
Is there anything (aside from really hard bones) that I should avoid in the first few weeks? Things that are hard for a dog to digest when they're just starting out?
Nope. He'll do fine.
How do you guys crush the bones? With a mallet?
I used a meat cleaver/giant Chinese butcher knife for the pork riblets when Taro was still a baby. The trick is to avoid hitting the bones so hard that they break off into pieces. That can be dangerous because of the sharp ends you'll create.
I just repeatedly hit the bones partway through so that I had one giant flattened ribblet by the time I was done.
Again, that wasn't necessary. I only did that when I didn't have an hour to wait for my pup to work his way through the riblets
That was until he was 3 - 3.5 months old. After that he could crunch up the hardest steak bones faster than I could smash them up anyway...
One important physiological benefit of feeding the meats and bones whole and not ground is that this prepares the dog's digestive system.
When a dog chews, rips, crunches, salivates and works away at his meal, his body alerts and activates the stomach and other digestive organs. As bits of meats and bones slowly make their way into the stomach, the stomach is ready to contract, the digestive acids and enzymes get pumped out, the gut starts moving as well and the dog's entire digestive system gets a chance to coordinate and prepare for the oncoming meal.
When people feed the meats and bones all ground up, they are, in effect, short circuiting this entire "alert and ready" physiological process that the dog has in place.
The dog goes GULPGULPGULP and in 5 seconds there's a large mass of food just dumped into the stomach. The digestive system has to scramble to get itself ready to process the mass of food.
Can you imagine how you would feel if you took your entire dinner, ground it all up into mush and gulped it all down within seconds? You'd have your entire meal just sitting like a lump in your stomach. How uncomfortable would that be?
Now if you're young and healthy it probably won't be too big of a deal (after the initial OOPMH! feeling, hehe), but the older you get the harder it will be to eat that way.
If you happen to have a sensitive stomach, or a chronic digestion problem, then it just makes it worse...
On the other hand, when you smell the food, chew it, take the time to enjoy it as you eat it, it goes down much more easily and comfortably
Same thing with dogs, but probably to a lesser extent. They're designed to rip and chew their food before swallowing of course, but they're also much better adapted at gorging (when needed) than we humans are...
Re: How long untill you see results of raw feeding
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