I've just started my two Bernese Mountain Dogs on a partial raw food diet, and so far it seems to be going well (though it's only been a week), but any tips or advice on it from people who've got more experience/knowledge on it would be handy. :3
For background info on the two dogs, they're from the same line (the older dog's the great-aunt of the younger one) but almost complete opposites in their food needs. The older one will be thirteen this March, which is a great old age for a Berner, and she's still in pretty good shape apart from arthritis in her legs, hips and back, which she's getting cartrophen injections for and the occasional dose of meloxicam. She does have some mild allergies, which I still don't know the cause of but are probably mold/fungus/pollen related, so she sometimes gets an antihistamine as well, and I try to keep her food fairly hypoallergenic just to reduce the potential allergen load for her. In her old age, she's getting a lot of plaque buildup on her teeth - she used to get raw beef/buffalo bones to keep her teeth clean but can't have them anymore. She's been on a few different Solid Gold kibbles (Holistique, Hund-n-Flocken and Wolf King), but they were mostly too high in protein for her kidneys to keep up with once she got older and she got bored with all of them anyway; she's a very fussy eater, though she's got a cast-iron stomach (anything dead she finds = lunch), and usually gets bored of any food within a few months. Currently her kibble is Hill's Prescription Diet J/D, which I hate giving to her but seems to really work for her joints, and she is willing to eat it but starting to get bored with it.
The younger dog (who is almost 7 and still acts like a two-year-old) will eat anything put in front of her but is extremely sensitive to food. Beef, wheat or corn in small amounts make her ridiculously itchy, anxious and slobbery, and even a small quantity of fresh beef will often make her vomit, as will cheese or anything fatty. She had a bad bout of pancreatitis once, and she has to be on a very low-fat diet, but she's also almost solid muscle and very active, so her food has to be very carefully balanced to meet her needs without setting off her pancreas. She's always had bad plaque buildup on her teeth, and she can't tolerate beef/buffalo bones at all. Unlike the older dog, she dislikes raw meat... unless it's still living, in which case, gulp gulp. >.< She's a great mouser, and fortunately she thinks deworming medication is delicious. It took some coaxing for her to try out the raw food diet at first, but she seems to like it well enough now and wolfs it down like any other food. She used to be on Solid Gold but had allergy issues with all of them (itching, drooling and anxiety), and after that she was on Prescription Diet W/D, which she had only mild allergy problems on. Her current kibble is
First Mate Pacific Ocean Fish (which seems to be an excellent kibble, especially for dogs with allergies, but oh, the stench @~@), which she does great on, and she's about to be moved to the senior version of the same (basically the same ingredients but lower fat/protein).
As for the food they're getting now with the partial raw diet, they get kibble for lunch (at 12-1 PM) with a topping of tinned salmon, and sometimes other little extras (mostly because of the older dog, who demands that the taste be changed up every few days - hey, she's almost 13, she deserves some spoiling X3). For supper (around 6 PM), they're getting Mountain Dog food of turkey with ground bone and some mixed vegetables and apple in it, with a teaspoon of Solid Gold SeaMeal powder in water added. The young dog doesn't mind the seameal, but the older one is quite disgusted by it and sometimes won't eat until her meat has been 'rinsed' with a lot of water (which she'll then drink without too much complaint, thus still getting the seameal). Since the seameal is mostly for iodine, is there anything else that would achieve the same nutritional requirements but not have so strong a taste? I tasted a tiny bit of the seameal, and it is quite overpoweringly kelpy even in minute amounts, so I can't blame her for not liking the stuff. Apart from the seameal complaints, they seem to be doing well so far, though the young dog barfed her supper all over the carpet this evening (I could kind of tell it was coming, since she's had her 'I'm gonna puke' face on most of the day, but she didn't get to the door in time). I'm wondering if perhaps it's because they get the kibble first and then the raw food six hours later that might be causing her digestive upset there? Right now they just get the raw food in the evening because it's a little more convenient, so perhaps switching the order would help.
So far as the risk of bacteria from feeding raw goes, my older dog grew up in a place where every off-leash run would inevitably end up with her finding at least one deer carcass, sometimes multiple and usually nicely runny, as well as dead salmon in various stages of decomposition. All of these things, she would first take a good long roll on until she had a nice even coating of it, and then she would gorge on it, hide, bones, hooves and all. She never once got an infection or any serious health issues from this (she would often vomit a large amount of the stuff back up because she'd binged on it, but no blockages, perforated bowels, etc.), and neither did I. If she could handle all that just fine, I'm not too worried about fresh human-grade meat that's been kept refrigerated. :3
By the way, just going back to something that was mentioned much earlier in the discussion about feeding mice - my hand-reared wild mouse Henry was fed almost entirely on my own mixture of sunflower, millet and pumpkin/squash seeds as an adult, with Wolf King kibble on the side, and he loved it. :3 Sleek glossy coat, bright-eyed, and very active, curious and happy. He very nearly made it to two years old, which considering the extremely rough start he had in life is pretty amazing (you know I mentioned my young dog is a mouser? She's why I ended up hand-rearing a 3-day-old orphaned wild mouse baby). He never did eat the commercial mouse food I bought for him, apart from the seeds. I based his diet on what he would likely have eaten in the wild, since I could clearly see in my garden what his relatives enjoyed the most. >.>
