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feeding your Cocker Spaniel

What Should You Feed Your Dog?  What you feed your dog is one of the most important choices you will make concerning their care. Today, there are kibbles, which are hard nuggets, canned foods, raw foods, dehydrated raw foods, natural or organic foods — what food choices should you make for your dog?  The answer is Informed Choices. Personally, I feed my dogs a mixed diet of cooked and raw foods because, after all I've learned, I've decided it's the best I can do for them.

Grace in SnoodChoosing your dog's diet should be your decision, not one pushed on you, and you should find a vet that will respect your choices and work with you.  Did you ever hear the expression You Are What You Eat?  Food is not just about filling the stomach.  The quality of the food that our dogs eat will directly affect their overall health.

Unfortunately, as America has found out, commercially prepared food, as well as the meat we buy in the supermarket, can be contaminated by mold, poisons, chemicals, hormones, and more. Until we lost so many dogs in 2007 to contaminated ingredients from China, the people of our country had no idea that we, as a nation, have so little control of our food supply. So what are we to do to gain control of what we eat and feed our animals? Each person has to start questioning and learning and begin making the changes necessary to provide foods that promote health and well being that they want to see.

No one can bring you and your dog good health but you. In this section on feeding, I am providing you with many wonderful reference books that will teach you about animal nutrition, will lead you step by step in preparing your own dog foods and will expose the commercial dog food industry and what really is in commercial dog food. Whether you choose to empower yourself to take control of your dog's health is up to you. Here are some good books to start with:

After you begin your research, the answer to the question, “What should you feed your dog?” becomes obvious: feed your dog what it is made by nature to eat – meat, vegetables and grains recommended for dogs as minimally cooked or processed as possible, and a variety of organ meats to provide optimum nutrition.

It's only common sense that the food that your dog eats should be food that their bodies are made to digest and utilize.  There is no question that an elephant and a horse are powerful animals, yet they only eat plants.  That is what their digestive system is made to digest.  Dogs, on the other hand are carnivores.  Their digestive system, their digestive track and digestive enzymes are designed to utilize meat, not grains, unless the grains are prepared in certain ways. Did you know that when dogs eat kibble it takes many many hours to digest that kibble?  If your dog eats breakfast at 6 a.m. and vomits at 5 p.m. it’s more than likely you are going to find hard kibble still in their stomachs.  However, if a dog eats raw meat, their digestive system processes the meat and eliminates it from their bodies in about five hours.  If you feed your dog kibble, then your dog’s digestive system is basically working 24 hours a day every day of their lives. Common sense tells that's not a good thing. And, if you feed the same kibble every day for years, you are going to create vitamin deficiences and allergies.

How to Prepare Your Own Dog Food You can feed your dog raw foods, cooked foods and combinations with commercial dog foods. To start you can prepare your own raw diets in two ways:  

  • Prepare your own raw diet, or
  • Purchase a prepared raw diet (mixing meat, ground bones, tripe, vegetables and fruits) which can be either a raw food or a dehydrated raw food which you add water to and rehydrate

I’m listing a few books that will help you learn how to prepare your own raw dog food.  PLEASE VISIT OUR AMAZON BOOKSTORE for many other valuable books and magazine subscriptions (such as The Whole Dog Journal) that will teach you about animal nutrition, provide recipes, as well as educate you about the economics and politics of kibble and the commercial dog food industry.



Here are great websites that will explain how to feed dogs naturally, feeding either home prepared raw or cooked foods:

Mary Straus maintains the website Dog Aware. Here you will find homemade diets for your dog, information about commercial dog foods, diets for specific illnesses and conditions, as well as her articles that were published in the Whole Dog Journal that you can print in their entirety:

  • "Have Dinner In An introduction to home-prepared diets, including information about adding fresh foods to a commercial diet, and using dog food pre-mixes.
  • A Raw Deal Home-prepared raw diets that include bone.
  • Now We're Cooking! Home-prepared cooked diets, and those that use raw meat but no bones.
  • Reality Cooks! Owners share their home-cooked diet recipes and strategies.
  • Keeping it Raw! Owners share their raw dog food diet sources, strategies, and home prepared dog food recipes.
  • September 2007 Final notes on home-prepared diet series (coming in March, 2008) "

From Mary's article: "As a reminder, there are three basic rules to feeding a homemade diet: variety, balance over time, and calcium.

All homemade diets need to contain a variety of different foods, including different types of meat and raw meaty bones, different parts (especially organs), and different foods, such as eggs and dairy. A lot of people depend on chicken since it's cheap, but if your dog gets nothing but chicken, even if you feed organs along with muscle meat and bone, he will not get all the nourishment that he needs. As a general rule, you should never feed one kind of food as more than half the diet, and preferably less." READ MORE ON HER SITE!

If you want to purchase a prepared raw diet instead of making your own, here are a few manufactures you should research: