My dog eats a medium quality dry food and a high quality wet food. Since I travel it's impossible for me to do raw full time. For treats he gets Mother Hubbard dry treats, Canine Carry-Outs (I know Walmart crap they dyes him poop funny colors but they're SUPER high value for him), Real Meat Brand, and whenever I have meat he gets some as well.

Normally I buy local steaks which are cheap and tasty and since I buy them in bulk I'll give him a whole smaller raw steak to chomp on whenever I cook one for me. Recently I got a few pounds of all natural local ground beef. Now I ate a couple of burgers from this batch and gave the cat some raw meat as well. I haven't had any issue and the cat's fine but Ryuk got some stomach upset after I gave him some of the the raw burger. I know for a fact I didn't mishandle the meat however it's the ONLY different element. He had diarrhea for a day or two and was noticeably not feeling well (he turns into an obnoxious cuddle muffin). Is it possible there was something in the meat that made him sick? Should I not feed him ground raw again and stick only the steaks?

Hi Jamie,

I've seen warnings on the forums not to combine raw and kibble as the raw takes too long to pass through the digestive tract if kibble is in there as well. They have much different digestion rates.

I'm on the Blackberry so I can't do a search for you.

Poor Ryuk. Hope he's feeling bettter.

I have read the same thing about kibble/raw diets.

I do feed my dogs both kibble and raw. Never together though. I always space the meals out at least 12 hours from each other. I am definitely not recommending what I do to anyone, but for me it works. I like my dogs to have a varied diet, and when we do travel we can switch them completely to kibble, stress free!

For 3 of my dogs they only eat once a day, so there is 24 hours between meals and for our newest girl, she is completely raw fed, as she was having some problems on kibble. So once she is older we will try integrating kibble back into her diet.

Although I have found a bizillion more good reasons to feed completely raw, for my lifestyle, it doesn't really work.

I would absolutely caution you against mixing raw and kibble. Kibble takes much longer than raw to get from one end of the dog to the other. That slowdown gives food-borne pathogens opportunity to colonize that the dog's natural system does not.

The dog's two huge (not foolproof, but huge) defenses against food-borne pathogens are his extremely caustic stomach acid and his swift route from mouth to poop, not allowing pathogens time to settle down and raise a family in the gut.

So I don't feed raw to a dog on antacids and I don't cause the digestion rate of a dog eating raw food to be unnaturally slowed down.

About the recent diarrhea. "I haven't had any issue" doesn't mean anything unless you ate yours raw too.

However, a sudden addition of beef to his diet can trigger diarrhea unless it's gradual. How much did he eat and how much does he weigh?

Another thing is that if you add boneless muscle meat to the diet in any significant amounts over any length of time, you have to start considering the alteration you are making in the calcium (bone) to phosphorus (meat) ratio. It doesn't sound like you are feeding half the diet as boneless meat for days or weeks, so I'm just throwing the warning out there. (Unless he is a growing puppy, the addition of less than 25% of the diet as boneless meat is, IMO, fine as long as it's not long-term.)

Still, I would not mix raw and kibble.

I think most of the E.Coli outbreaks from meat (maybe all) have been from
hamburger.
Hamburger has a lot of little surfaces. Also, hamburger grinder folk tend to leave the machine on while they are forming roasts/steaks etc. and just keep putting the trimmings in the hamburger machine. Recent DNA tests showed that a grocery store hamburger often has >100 cows in it.
So I think steak/chicken/anything whole is maybe safer. The bugs tend to be on the surface, not inside the meat. In hamburger, anything that was on the surface is now all mixed in.
I have 0 experience as a raw feeder -- that's just info from a "Meat Science "viewpoint.

Yes. In this country, when the food sources of an outbreak of Salmonella, E.coli, Campylobacter, Arcobacter, and Helicobacter, are traced back, last time I read, the most common (but definitely not exclusive) meats traced to are poultry and ground meat.

Most dogs are not going to have a problem with even a pretty high pathogen load (think yummy bites of rotten roadkill and snacks of poop) because of their system's design, but yes, poultry and ground meat are way up there.

Could it also have been that the hamburger meat contained more fat than the dog is used to? I would guess that most ground beef is considerably fattier than a steak--if that's the only previous exposure the dog has had to raw meat.

the days he gets raw "treats" his last meal of kibble is early in the morning, they never interact.

I'm going to just stick with the steaks I think...I usually get those anyway and maybe I'll just give a bit of the cooked meat when I do burger (once again, these are treats)

 Quote: Tracy Collins

Could it also have been that the hamburger meat contained more fat than the dog is used to? I would guess that most ground beef is considerably fattier than a steak .....

It certainly could.

Healthy dogs handle raw fat very well, but not so much when it's a sudden large amount.

So fatty meats (and organ meats) are worked up to gradually.