Natural Homemade Dog Food – The Right Choice For Your Pet

I’ve been singing the praises of raw meats and fresh blanched and blended vegetables and fruits as a healthy homemade recipe for homemade dog food. And I stick by that. But what about the dogs that have either dental or digestive issues? As you knew I would, I have an answer for that, too.

Rice is nice, but barley’s better

Lean white meat chicken breast, boiled until tender (but not overcooked) and cooked barley is the perfect meal for a dog with a sensitive digestive system or severe dental problems. Simply grind it up so that less chewing and digestion is needed. Some sources will recommend rice instead of cooked barley, but barley has far more nutrients than plain white rice. That is, after all, the point of this. Homemade, natural, healthy dog food. Less nutrients means less healthy. Why give your dog fillers when you can give them something nutritious and delicious?

You say natural, I say raw

You can’t get any more natural than modeling your dog’s food after what they ate back in the days before domestication. Wild packs of dogs would attack live prey and eat it; not only benefiting from the raw meats but inadvertently receiving nutrition from pre digested vegetables and fruits that their prey had eaten. I’ve yet to read in any history books about a pack of dogs sitting around a campfire roasting their rabbit to perfection. The lack of opposable digits likely greatly prohibited them from striking a match. Though humans can have health concerns from ingesting raw meats, dogs’ digestive systems are equipped to handle most bacterial issues that raw meat can be responsible for.

Why do I have to grind up the veggies?

Whereas raw meat does not present a problem for most dogs’ digestive systems, veggies are a different story. When wild dogs got their veggies, they had already been at least partially digested by their prey. Dogs’ systems have a bit of trouble with hard, raw vegetables. Blanching them takes away some of the gassiness that they promote in a dog (of course, who needs that!) and the grinding up simulates the partial digestion that their prey’s digestive system would have achieved.

What to avoid

Now I know what you’re thinking. If certain veggies and fruits are bad for dogs, how come they could eat animals that were indiscriminant of their choice of fruits and veggies? This is something that has been altered by our domestication of dogs. Wild dogs possessed a sense that enabled them to (most of the time) steer clear of things that were bad for them. They could still eat the fresh (or even ‘spoiled’) raw meat, but might ignore the internal organs containing digested foods; much to the joy of scavengers.

Dogs today will eat just about anything you put in front of them. I refer to one of my dogs as a ‘Hoover’; he’ll pick up anything in his path and make it disappear. Unfortunately, this is one thing that dogs would have been better off not giving up; their ability to discern between good to eat and bad to eat.