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Opinions on the barf diet

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Our puppies are now six weeks old and will soon be going to new familys I have weened them onto the barf diet to give them the best start I have also put their mum on this now any any other pet owners on here using this method and what are your thoughts

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just search the posts, its been talked about a lot in the last couple of weeks

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I think evei is the person to talk to on here, or medusa. Im sure both of their dogs are on this :)

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Thanks for links Evei, very helpful. :)

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My vet said would you eat raw chicken?

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Vets are generally not the best people to ask about BARF to be honest. If your vet believes that dogs evolved eating only cooked meat then my opinion of their skills would go sharply downhill.

 

The whole concept of the BARF diet was to feed dogs what their guts evolved to eat. Until we started playing with their diet a couple of hundred years ago dogs ate carrion, small prey and occasional vegetable matter. They generally really like raw chicken and it's completely natural for them to do so, and for it to be good for them.

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My vet said would you eat raw chicken?

 

Would you eat dog food normally? :hihi: Seems an odd comment :)

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Would you eat dog food normally?

 

:hihi: This made me laugh out loud-and I'm in the library. Thanks for that :hihi:

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Vets are generally not the best people to ask about BARF to be honest. If your vet believes that dogs evolved eating only cooked meat then my opinion of their skills would go sharply downhill.

 

The whole concept of the BARF diet was to feed dogs what their guts evolved to eat. Until we started playing with their diet a couple of hundred years ago dogs ate carrion, small prey and occasional vegetable matter. They generally really like raw chicken and it's completely natural for them to do so, and for it to be good for them.

 

Neither did we! But then I do like nice bit of sushi!

 

Seriously though a dog could get salmonella from raw chicken as we can, but apparently it's quite unlikely because they, well, poop it out before it has chance to take hold! Dogs I think have a shorter digestive tract than we do so everything goes through quicker, which is how they can eat random dead things they find on the floor and be fine, where we probably couldn't do that :gag:

 

Personally I just totally couldn't be bothered messing about with raw feeding, my dog is fine on kibble.

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Actually, our guts have evolved over a thousand years or more to the point that it's now very hard to eat enough food to meet our needs if you only eat raw food. We absorb and process far more from cooked food than we can from raw food and so our guts have shortened and our stomachs reduced in size over the last thousand or two years to accommodate that change in our diets. As a species we've been eating cooked grains and meat for at least that time, possibly longer.

 

Such a change is not possible in a spell as short as the time that we've been feeding dogs dog food or human food scraps, which for most dogs is only a hundred or so years. In evolutionary terms that's just a blink.

 

If your dog is fine on kibble then that's great; the BARF diet was designed for dogs who don't process cooked food at all well and for those dogs it's the difference between a healthy dog and a really ill and unhappy dog. Nobody's trying to tell you that you have to feed one thing or another, it's just another option.

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When i took Wittmann my DSH last week to be spayed the girl said heres a bag of 'free' trats for her, i said no thanks, i dont want none of that scientific human designed junk for her..i said i give her raw meat.. the girl didnt know much about it, but said one of family who breeds akitas only uses raw.

 

when i took Wittmann to have her stitches checked up last night, another girl on reception tried to give Wittmann some treats, so she could get close and look at them, but Wittmann just looked at me.....as i taught her never to take food from strangers.

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