A long overdue update.

It's been quite a while since I've posted! I have a terrible memory, so I have idea on timing, but some time after my last post, I decided to stop the raw diet and go back to kibble. We were dealing with vomiting 2-3 times per week. I tried my best and never could figure out why. Sometimes she'd produce only bile, which I attributed to "hunger pukes" and learned to adapt her schedule to prevent that from happening. Still, she would sometimes vomit her meal 2-3 hours after eating. This frequently happened as we were either getting ready for bed or already in bed. My husband was not thrilled with this, and I'll admit I wasn't either. I tried varying her diet, and I tried to figure out which foods were most likely to cause upset. I never could figure it out.

In addition to that, my job was becoming more demanding, and making the time to prepare raw meals was becoming a hassle. Call me lazy, but I missed the convenience of kibble. Granted, that was not my reason for stopping the raw diet, but it was an influencing factor. Raw feeding takes a lot more work, and I didn't have enough time to make sure it was done properly. In order to make raw feeding economical, it requires buying larger pieces and portioning/prepping them yourself, and that was getting harder to do. I also found myself forgetting to thaw things in time, so I was sometimes stuck running out at the last minute to buy meat, or feeding her half frozen meals.

So, Mona has been on kibble for probably two years now at least. She does well. We have no vomiting to speak of. I rotate her food with the purchase of each new bag. I stick with a few preferred (grain-free) brands that I trust, but never buy the same bag twice in a row. Most frequently Mona is eating Earthborn Holistic, Nutri-Source, Merrick, or Natural Balance. Were she the kind of sensitive dog who became itchy or had other reactions to commercial dog food, I probably would have worked harder to make raw feeding work. As it is, though, Mona does wonderfully with regular dog food, and the time it saves me convinces me it's worth staying with for now.

For now, I'm trying to focus more on documenting day-to-day life. You can read more about that at my other blog, ourholmestead.blogger.com.

Introducing: Liver!

Cue the Sad Trombone.  That sums up our first experience with liver.

Today's meal consisted of a drumstick, a couple gizzards, some extra skin, and her very first chicken liver.  I served it all up in a bowl, and she went straight for the skin the second I put the bowl down.  Next came the gizzards, then the drumstick.  Then she examined the bowl, still containing the liver, very closely.  She licked all around the bowl, even licked in the bowl, but would not touch the liver.  After a couple minutes of licking around it, she left it.  Over the course of half an hour, she kept going back to the liver, but would not eat it.  At one point, the cat even snuck up to it and enjoyed a little nibble, but even that didn't entice her to eat it!  After 30 minutes I gave up and put it back in the fridge.  We rested for about 45 minutes, then went to the dog park.

Back from the dog park, round two: The liver reappears.  I set it back out, and she did the same licking/circling/revisiting routine.  After probably another 20 minutes and no progress, I picked up the liver and tried to coax her to eat it.  After much hesitation, she eventually, ever so slowly, took the liver from my hand and ate it.  Ugh.  All that for a piece of liver no more than half an ounce!

Tomorrow I think I'll try a different approach.  I'll feed the liver first, and only serve her "main course" once the liver has been eaten.  Fingers crossed!

Otherwise, Mona's been doing great!  I've bumped up her meals from 8 ounces to about 10, and have been giving 3-4 ounce "snacks" if her meals are going to be particularly far apart.  She seems to be happy, and hasn't shown me any signs of being hungry at all.  All seems well to me!

Adding to meals.

Raw feeding is going great!  Mona's been eating 8 ounce meals approximately once a day, although sometimes those meals are more like 18 hours apart instead of 24.  I'm wondering though if it just isn't quite enough.  She seems to weigh the same as when we started last week (using the good old "hold your dog and stand on a scale" method), but she feels slightly thinner to me.  Which leads me to the easy way I've found to add an ounce or two to her meals...

Remember when I mentioned that my mom had snagged me a couple packages of chicken gizzards, hearts, and livers that were marked down?  I didn't know how to use them at first, since I couldn't keep an entire package in the fridge and use it up quickly enough, but I didn't want it frozen either.  So, I spread them out on cookie sheets and froze them all individually, so now I have bags with ready-to-go individual organs!  It's super easy to pull out one or two and thaw them in some warm water in just a few minutes.  The fat and skin didn't want to lay on the cookie sheet very well, so I came up with this:

An ice cube tray!  This worked perfectly.  Once they were frozen, I popped them out and bagged them up.  It's been very convenient.  For the last couple of meals I've fed an 8 ounce meat portion, plus a gizzard or two and some skin (roughly 2 ounces worth).  I also plan to use these as "snacks" on days when her regular meals will be a little farther apart.  A couple "cubes" of skin/fat, 3 or 4 gizzards, and a liver works out to about 4 ounces, so that seems like a good in-between meal.  We'll see how this works!

Let's talk about poop.

Now is when you squeamish folk should stop reading and go watch The Price is Right instead.

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Face it, if you're a raw feeder, or even thinking about it, poop is an inevitable subject.  I'm learning that, as a raw feeder, you become a veritable Poop Expert.  I've always given some thought to my pets' poop, as I do feel like it can tell you a lot about their health.  Nine times out of ten, Normal Poop = Healthy Pet.

Day Three.

Day number three!  Today it was two smaller drumsticks.  Mona is definitely getting the hang of it now.  She only licked it for a couple of minutes before she really started to tuck in.  It took her about 25 minutes to finish off both of them.  She tried twice to bring it up on the couch this time, though!  I'd like to give her at least a week, if not more, to get the hang of eating on a towel, but I suppose if she continues to bring things to the couch, we can switch to feeding her in her crate.

Day Two.

Today Mona had an 8 ounce chicken thigh.  It was pretty much the same routine as yesterday.  She spent the first 30 minutes making little progress--simply licking and nibbling at little pieces of the skin.  After that half hour mark, though, she got some good crunches in and had it finished off in 10 minutes.

Once again, she tried to bring it up onto the couch.  I set it back on her towel and she stayed there for the rest of the meal.  I think she might be getting the hang of this towel already!  I also had better luck with my camera tonight.

Notice that Mona is using the "no-hands" approach.  I'm interested to see if she becomes one of the prissy raw eaters that refuses to use her paws.  Personally, I'd love to see her get her paws dirty and grab on tight!

It has begun!

We have officially been raw feeders for one whole day!  For Mona's first meal, I started her off with a decent sized chicken drumstick, weighing right under 8 ounces.  She licked it for a while, moved it around a lot, had no idea what to do with it for quite a while.  After over half an hour, I finally started hearing some good crunching noises.  After that, she really got going, and had finished it off in about ten minutes. She's now sitting contentedly on our bench at the front window, watching passersby.

I served her meal in her old stainless steel bowl on top of an old bath towel.  She'd pulled the drumstick out of the bowl within the first minute, so I don't think I'll continue with that.  No point in dirtying up a bowl if the food won't even stay in it!  The towel, however, I'm hoping to keep.  She carried the chicken off the towel onto the carpet a couple of times (at one point, she even attempted to bring it up on the couch), but each time I picked it back up, set it back on the towel, saying "towel".  She's a smart girl, so hopefully she catches on pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, the battery on my camera doesn't want to hold a charge anymore.  I snapped one quick photo of the chicken in her bowl, after which my camera shut itself off and refused to come back on.  I'm going to attempt to charge it again tonight in hopes of getting raw eating pictures tomorrow!

The last day of kibble.

This afternoon I took the kibble container, turned it upside down, and shook the last few pieces into Mona's stainless steel bowl.  Mona munched on it throughout the evening, and finished it about an hour ago.  Maybe it's because the metal reflects light so well, but when I walk past that bowl on my way to the kitchen, I notice how empty it is.  The kibble is gone.


It sounds silly, but the big change we're making has really hit me.  No more conveniently and absentmindedly dumping kibble in a bowl.  I'll now be making a conscious choice every day as to what Mona eats.  And, of course, I'm anxious to see the results of this change we're making.


So... here's to a healthy dog!

I bought my first meat!

I took the plunge and bought my first actual raw food!  We're getting down to the last bit of kibble, so the switch is imminent.  Tonight I bought a 10 pound bag of chicken leg quarters--unenhanced, 75mg sodium.  I spent about an hour working on the contents of the bag and dividing it into meal-sized portions.

Let me preface by saying that the only meat I've ever worked with prior to tonight was the kind that has already been cut up and cleaned so that it's ready to throw in a skillet.  Chicken leg quarters are nothing like the nicely packaged boneless, skinless chicken breasts I'm used to!  Not only are the much messier, but they're much bigger than I was expecting.  Most weighed in at over a pound each!

I know that in the future, once Mona is able to handle all the extra skin and fat, preparation time will be much less.  But after much reading, I've decided to start her for the first two weeks with as little skin and fat as possible to avoid digestive upset.  So I spent well over an hour hacking away at these legs, first pulling off as much of the skin and fat as possible.  I cut each leg at the joint, and broke/cut it into drumstick and thigh pieces.  The thigh pieces were almost all a perfect 8 ounce portion.  Since the drumstick pieces were usually more like 5 or 6 ounces, I grabbed a couple frozen breasts from the freezer, cut them into thirds, and used those pieces to top off the bags.  All in all, my $6 bag of chicken leg quarters (plus a couple extra chicken breasts thrown in), I ended up with 19 bags in the freezer, each with 8 ounces of chicken leg.  I also saved all the fat and skin and stuck it in a bag as well... Surely there's a use for that?

On another note, I've enlisted my mother, Queen of Bargain Shopping, to help keep an eye out for good deals on clearanced meat.  Already, she snagged me a couple packages of chicken livers and gizzards for dirt cheap.  In a couple weeks, these livers and gizzards will be perfect to start adding to her chicken legs when I introduce organs to the diet.

Hello, all!

I'm beginning this blog with the intention of closely documenting my adventures in living a raw lifestyle.  I have decided to take the plunge and feed my dog, Mona, a completely raw diet, specifically a whole prey model diet.

I do not hate kibble, nor do I judge those who choose to feed it.  It is all I've ever known, and I actually make a living selling premium dog foods at our local pet store.  I have no complaints about the kibble I've fed.  I've spent the last couple years learning everything I possibly can about commerical dog food, and I feel incredibly confident in my ability to explain the differences between a high-quality food like Evo or Wellness and the crap you get at the grocery store like Ol' Roy.  It has become my passion to educate people about the vast differences in pet foods.  I have converted many unknowing customers from a junky grocery store food to a premium brand, and have enjoyed hearing about the great changes it has made to their pets' health and wellbeing.

I'm finding that a lot of raw feeders are incredibly anti-kibble.  I get the feeling they think all commercial pet foods are bad.  However, I'm pretty passionate about the importance of a high-quality kibble (versus something full of fillers and by-products).  It will be hard, if not impossible, for me to completely abandon my support of kibble.  Perhaps raw feeding really IS that much better, but the fact of the matter is that many people do not care to deal with the "hassles" of raw--locating reliable and affordable meat sources, learning about the proper ratios of meat/bone/organs, storing large quantities of large meat, and dealing with thawing and freezing that meat.  Let's face it, kibble is convenient!  And for those who do not wish to live a raw lifestyle, I will still be able to show them the best kibbles out there.

However, as good as I  feel the best grain-free/holistic/organic/high-meat-content kibble out there might be, I'm thoroughly convinced that raw feeding is even better.  At least for my family.  In particular, I'm anxious to experience the benefits raw feeding will have on Mona's skin, coat, teeth, and energy level.  And of course, the poop.  I've learned raw feeders love to talk about poop.  So, lucky you, you'll get to hear about poop from me too.

And, as my thoughts are typically all over the place, I'm sure some of my blog entries will be too.