Switching a dog to a natural diet couldn’t be simpler and if you are concerned that raw feeding will be complicated, time-consuming, risky or expensive please put such thoughts right out of your mind:

• All you need to know to be a successful is what ingredients are suitable for your dog and in roughly what proportions.
• With a little bit of planning it won’t take you any more time than opening a can.
• Dogs are biologically designed to eat raw food and it is 100% safe for them to do so.
• Your dog doesn’t need prime steak! He or she will thrive on all sorts of inexpensive ingredients, as explained below.

Unless your dog has certain health issues, there’s no reason not to make a straight switch. Having said this, there are a few dogs (maybe one in a hundred) who don’t take to natural feeding immediately.

Incidentally, if you can withstand the looks of reproach it is no bad idea to fast your dog for a day before the switch. This will help your dog to rid its body of toxins built up while on a diet of processed food.

A simple three-step plan

Our straightforward feeding plan for adult dogs is a summary of decades of experience and it rests on three basic ingredients (all raw):

1. meat

2. bone

3. vegetable

The plan itself can be distilled into three simple steps:

1. Take any meat (chicken, beef, lamb, pork, whatever) minced or diced.

2. Grate vegetables into it (anything but potato) so that it is roughly 2/3 meat and 1/3 vegetable.

3. Get some meaty bones from the butcher and give your dog one every day or two.

For portion sizes follow the instructions below. Vary the types of meat and vegetables you use. That’s it.

The rest of this article contains supplementary information, tips and various refinements but the simple diet described above is difficult to improve upon.

Do all dogs thrive on a natural diet?

With only a very, very few exceptions all dogs thrive on raw food.

Indeed, the only dogs that shouldn’t eat a 100% natural diet are those with a compromised immune system or that have recently had bowel surgery. What’s more, a well-planned raw diet can really help dogs with health issues.

Remember, too, that Honey’s Chief Veterinary Surgeon is available to supply dietary advice, free of charge and without any obligation on your part.

What dogs need from their food and how they get it

Food has two core functions. It provides energy and it helps the body to remain healthy.

With regard to energy the amount required will depend on a variety of circumstances, including how old the dog is, the amount of exercise being taken, whether the dog is pregnant or feeding puppies and the temperature.

Interestingly, dogs do not need a lot of carbohydrates or simple sugars for energy, as they can’t digest it.

Their core dietary requirements are fat, essential fatty acids, protein and a wide range of minerals and vitamins.

What a dog needs for energy is obtainable in its natural diet. All processed dog food companies are trying to do is replace what dogs ought to be eating with low-quality, inadequate, adulterated, inappropriate ingredients.

Suitable ingredients

Below is a list of all the different things you can feed your dog. An asterisk (*) means that this is vital to your dog’s health. The other ingredients are more by way of providing additional nutrition.

• Lean muscle meat* – Chicken, beef, lamb, venison, rabbit, turkey, pork etc.
• Internal organs* – Heart, lung, liver, tripe etc. Liver should never be more than 10% of the total diet.
• Fish – Any fish but especially fatty fish such as herring, salmon, pilchards and sardines.
• Dairy – Cheese, probiotic yoghurt, goat’s milk and/or small amounts of cottage cheese.
• Eggs – Any type of whole egg, as an egg two or three times a week is an excellent source of protein, vitamins and omegas.
• Bones* – Ideally raw, meaty bones and including chicken/turkey carcasses.
• Leafy vegetables* – Spinach, winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower etc.
• Root vegetables* – Carrots, parsnips, swede, turnips etc. but not potatoes.
• Fresh fruit – But not grapes or avocados and be sparing with dried fruits.
• Vegetable extracts – Brewer’s yeast, kelp and/or a modest quantity of molasses.
• Extra oil* – Once or twice a week you may care to add some cod liver, safflower, hemp, flax seed or sunflower oil.

Some useful tips

• The easiest way to meet your dog’s nutritional needs is to serve them meat, offal and vegetables in their bowl and give them raw, meaty bones on the side.
• There is no magic proportion when it comes to the percentage of meat, offal and vegetable. I recommend 2/3 meat and offal and 1/3 vegetable.
• Any raw meat will do – beef, lamb, pork, chicken, rabbit, venison, tripe, squirrel – anything, in fact, so long as it comes from a reputable source.
• Grate in the vegetable or put it through your food mixer. Any vegetables will do, but not raw potatoes.
• Vegetables should always be fresh. Vegetables really begin to lose their nutritional value a week or so after they have been picked.
• Mix the ingredients up well, as some dogs have a small child’s aversion to vegetables.
• Don’t forget to buy your dog raw, meaty bones. These contain vital nutrients, ensure healthy teeth and keep their stools firm.
• If you are going to make your food up yourself, you will probably find it saves you time to prepare a decent supply in advance and freeze it.

How much to serve

To begin with, you will need to monitor the quantity of food quite closely but once you get the hang of it, providing your dog is about the correct weight and looks fit, you can do it by feel.

There is no hard-and-fast rule but for a dog over 10kg roughly 2% of their body weight in food (including edible bones) every day should be about right. In other words, a 20kg dog should be eating roughly 400g.

If you have a working dog, an underweight dog or a dog that exercises a great deal then up this amount to between 2 and 5% of body weight per day. If you have an elderly or overweight dog then reduce the amount to between 1 and 2% of bodyweight per day.

You can serve it in as many meals as you want and at whatever time, but it should never be left down for the dog to eat when he or she feels like it.

For dogs under 11kg in weight try:

• 1–2kg: 10% of bodyweight
• 3–4kg: 7% of bodyweight
• 5–8kg: 5% of bodyweight
• 9–10kg: 3% of bodyweight
• 11kg+: 2% of bodyweight

If you would like more detailed advice please get in touch with Honey’s. These percentages are for guidance only.

How to tell if your dog is the correct weight

The easiest way to tell if your adult dog is the right weight is to make sure that your dog’s ribs are easily noticeable. For a hairy dog run your hands over the rib cage. If it is easily felt, your dog is the right weight. If there is any fat the dog needs to go on a bit of a diet!

A word about the ‘recommended daily intake’ figures

Dog food labelling makes great play of the ‘recommended daily intake’ figures for individual ingredients. By and large you can ignore them completely. They have almost no basis in fact.

In America bodies such as AAFCO and the USFDA have laid down figures based on ‘the assumption that the animal should be able to survive on those quantities, with no observable ill effects for at least 3–6 months’. Hardly meaningful.

The pros and cons of green tripe

If there were only one ingredient you could feed your dog, it would have to be green tripe. Nothing else offers such a variety of digestible proteins and your dog would thrive if fed nothing else.

It is called green because it has a green, fluorescent shine to it, although in colour it tends to be anything from light brown to black.

From a dog’s perspective it is almost a wonder food, but from a human’s perspective it has a couple of potential drawbacks.

To begin with, it contains a great deal of bacteria, some of which may be harmful to humans (but not dogs). For this reason, it can’t be kept in the same fridge or freezer as food for human consumption. It must be handled and served carefully so that no contamination occurs.

Then there is the smell. This is not only strong but also lingers. It’s not a bad smell when you get used to it, but it’s difficult to wash off and so it really is best to handle tripe using rubber gloves.

In short, it is a nuisance to deal with but well worth the effort if you can be bothered, especially as it is relatively inexpensive.

One final point, bleached tripe is worse than useless as the bleaching process strips out most of the goodness and leaves a potentially harmful chemical residue. Tripe that has been washed in plain water is not as good as green tripe but a less bothersome alternative and safe for human handling.

Reassurance about parasites

The major dog food manufacturers clearly feel threatened by the natural feeding movement and there is definitely a campaign to discredit raw feeding.

As part of this campaign it is sometimes suggested that there are dangerous parasites in raw meat. This is incorrect.

The main reason why you don’t have to be afraid of parasites in a ‘prey’ animal being transferred to a ‘predator’ is that if this happened all predators would have become extinct long ago. Wolves simply wouldn’t have survived.

Also, one has to remember that, in the wild, carnivores frequently target sick and old animals as they are easier to catch and kill.

So, not only is it safe for wolves to eat raw meat, but it is safe for them to eat raw meat from poorly prey. Another reason not to be concerned is the acidity in a wolf’s (or dog’s) stomach. This is so strong that no known organism can survive exposure.

The parasites that survive on a herbivore are, by and large, very different from the parasites that attack carnivores. There is one exception to this: tapeworm. These can be caught from fleas found on rabbits; so, if a dog eats a whole rabbit (as opposed to rabbit meat), there is a risk. This won’t affect you, though, unless you are giving your dog whole rabbit carcasses.