Raw Food, Kibble or both?
If you are a pet owner that is exploring other and better means of feeding your pet, you often end up pondering this. Should I convert my dog to raw feeding, should I really stay with kibble, or should I do both? My personal belief is that the greater percentage of your dogs diet that is made up of raw food, the better. But if you have several dogs or find it hard to bring yourself to swtich fully that I do think adding in some raw is much better than sticking solely to kibble. Doing a bit of good is better than doing nothing. And once you see the difference in you dogs you may decide that it's worth it to increase the amount of raw. It's how I started out with my dogs and it was a nice ease into raw for me, who had many reservations.
You will find heavily entrenched advocates both for kibble and raw feeding who will either say you are killing your dog by feeding raw or killing them by feeding kibble. Now I can respect how the raw people feel it's quite normal that when you decide to go over to doing raw that you see what a difference it makes and that anyone who is not doing all raw is killing their dogs. Just as I can see from where I was before on how the kibble pople who have been brain washed to feel incapable of feeding their dogs anything that was not completely formulated by a big dog food company. I understand, I was there, but have now chosen a different alternative. What you need to realize is that between these extreme ends there is middle ground. You can feed a mix of both raw and kibble for various reasons, starting out in raw, economic reasons, numbers of dogs being fed, or whatever. My point is, trying a bit of raw along with kibble does not mean you are not trying to do something better for your dog. A little bit of good is better than nothing.
Having fed raw just just a fairly short bit of time, about 2 years or so, I have found where it is useful for the dogs to have some available kibble. My dogs have full time access to kibble, but the bulk of their diets is raw meals. This means if I see kibble consumption going up, I make sure that I'm uping raw intake to counter that. But it's been very convienent when traveling to have kibble available at times when it would be unfeasible to carry raw for that many dogs and days, etc. I'm hoping that with a fridge/freezer in an rv that will be easier, but I do admit that kibble was a godsend for those trips. And because they are somewhat used to it and are able to sample it, I don't have the GI readjustment that I would if they were on solely raw.
In conclusion, I recommend learning and reading more about eaw diets and trying them for your own dogs. I think you'll be surprised at the difference.
If you do make the choice to switch to raw, I recommend doing your homework to make the best diet possible for your dogs. There are several online email groups for support, books to read and co-op groups to try and now prepared raw food to take out some of the mystery behind it. When you take on raw you have the responsibility to make sure you do your best to balance the diet, not at every meal, but overall. This is especially important for dogs in certain stages, such as fast growing pupies and pregnant girls. Those have very different nutrient requirements and can be harder to balance.