That’s good to hear Lfsea. It’s all about being patient, most dogs will respond to that in the end.
With regards to raw feeding (apologies in advance for the amount of poo talk!!)...
Assuming you’ve an adult/fully grown dog (rules are slightly different for puppies) then you want to feed around 2-3% of their body weight a day. So for instance if you’ve a dog who weighs 20kg then you want to feed around 500g (2.5%).
Few caveats - if they are over or under weight then you can shift this up/down, same if they are very/not very active. Once they are settled on raw then keeping an eye on their body shape and the size of their poo (shouldn’t poo that much, and it should be ‘normal’ in appearance, so not too hard or soft) should tell you if you’re feeding enough. Just for ref, too hard poo is not enough, too soft poo is too much (although are some other things which can affect this which will mention below).
Once you know how much you need to feed in total, you need to split this into the 3 main parts of a raw diet. I’m ignoring veg here as dogs really can’t process it all that well and it’s not something I feed. I go by the 80/10/10 rule, roughly, which is 80% meat, 10% organ and 10% bone. Some do around 70/15/15.
Meat consists of your standard chicken, etc, along with the likes of heart and most fish. Organ is anything like spleen, kidney and liver (def feed some of the latter as it contains important nutrients not found elsewhere). Bone can be anything which isn’t weight bearing from anything larger than a small animal (so no bones from cow/pig legs as these are too dense). Don’t forget most bone will be surrounded with meat so if you have a 100g chicken leg then it’s likely to only be half bone.
I used to weigh stuff pretty much to the book, but these days I do it by eye as been feeding for a while now. You soon get the hang of it and it becomes second nature. With the ratios, too much bone can cause hard light coloured poo (a raw dogs poo will turn white after a few days so that’s normal) and too much organ will give fairly sloppy poo.
I feed once a day, which tends to be later on in the day as that’s just when he seems to prefer it. Also means he can laze around after eating over 1.5kg of meat to let it digest - then again all he does is laze around anyway
With switching to a dry to raw diet, most say to start with a simple single protein like chicken and then add in different ones one at a time to give them time to adjust, but you can also just make the switch entirely. Either way you can sometimes get a few days where their stomach may seem a little off but that’s just their digestive system producing the different enzymes required to break down their more natural raw diet as opposed to the shite filler filled dry food.
Ermmm... I think that’s most of the info. I’ve prob missed loads, so just ask if you’ve any questions.
