In 2010 when Sirius (houndmix) was young, I began to look for other options to kibble feeding because of his ongoing yeast and intestinal problems. We did try a lot of differend kibble brands but nothing seemed to be appropriate even after months of trying, so I started to read about raw feeding. Back then I wasn't so sure about my skills with feeding my dogs fully with raw food only, so we tested so called "50-50"-feeding. Half of the meal raw food and another half with kibbles. Relatively quickly we noticed the difference in Sirius and his stomach began to work properly too, so we changed all our dogs eating habits from 50-50 to raw food only. We thought it would be easier to buy our dogs food from the same place, instead of buying differend brands for each dog from different shops. And we are on that same road ever since.
We feed pork, beef, chicken, turkey, deer and other game, minced meat, sheep, horse, variety of fish (eg. whitefish, perch, pike, salmon). Depending on what have available in the freezer at the moment.
Our dogs eat organs about once a week from all the animals mentioned above, as well as organ mixtures and liver.
On their bone meal we feed pork and chicken trunks, pork feet, whole chickens, chicken wings or feet, turkey necks or wings.
In addition from time to time I put eggs, buttermilk or kefir, rice or cooked buckwheat, as well as four grain porridge to their bowls. Occasionally also bananas or carrots if I happen to buy them to us too.
For food supplements we feed in varying degrees variety of ouls (eg. Fish oil and flax seed oil), seaweed or dried nettle, zinc, calcium, dried and crushed egg shells, biotin and other vitamin supplements as needed.
In winter we replace their normal food to a bit more high-fat food and add extra pork fat because cold weather increases energy consumption. In particular the dogs who spends a lot time outside, needs more energy from food.
Our dream would be getting some rabbits, chickens and sheep at our place for us and dogs to eat, but it is still a long way to go and the time is not right for them yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we'll see.
Feeding a dog with raw food is definitely not rocket science, but we strongly recommend to study about differend feeding methods (raw feeding, BARF, prey model just to name few) before you decide to change your dog's eating habits. All feeding methods are obviously not suitable for all dogs and monotone feeding as well as ignorance can do more harm than good to your dog.
If I have to say something positive about raw feeding, then it would be the fact that you know what you put in your dog's food bowl and you can also impact on the feeding 100% and change the diet if needed. I recommend to use natural ingredients (nettles, berries, fish) and if found near, the slaughterhouse or hunters. You can obtain from them those parts of the animals which are not suited for humans to eat.
