By Yvonne McGehee, from the July 2005 Newsletter

There is currently a lot of interest—and controversy—regarding feeding home-prepared, and often raw, diets to dogs. When I first fed my dogs an entirely home-prepared diet, I was so enthusiastic about the positive results that I encouraged all of my puppy buyers and owners to feed their dogs this way too.

Since that naive but enthusiastic start, seven years and a lot of experience later, I am still a firm convert to home-prepared diets for dogs. However, I am no longer as assured in encouraging every puppy buyer or every owner to feed this way. This is not because of negative experiences with parasites or bacteria; indeed, my own dogs have not had infections of any kind resulting from being fed a raw diet. In fact, I have had dogs get seriously sick from bacterial contamination and mold toxins in commercial dog foods, which are by no means sterile products either. For the owner, the same precautions regarding raw foods as you use when feeding your family apply to sanitation when handling raw foods intended for dogs; immunosuppressed people, pregnant women, or others with concerns should check with their health care professional beforehand.

My own concerns about home-prepared diets for dogs stem from the unfamiliarity many people today have with foods for themselves and their corresponding unfamiliarity with what a dog’s diet actually needs to contain. Fast food culture affects our own diets, our knowledge about foods, and even our table scraps. The table scraps successfully fed to Fido 75 years ago may bear little relation to what future anthropologists may look back to see us leaving today. After encountering homemade diets consisting of 100% hamburger, or chicken quarters, or pizza crusts and whatever else is going bad in the fridge that day; and after finding that many people just don’t want to spend the time and effort it would take to learn about how to feed a quality homemade diet to their dog; I realize that, well, this just isn’t for everybody.

That said, if you are interested and willing to put in some effort, read a couple of books or three, and feed your dog a “slow food” diet knowledgeably designed to meet his needs, you can do him no greater favor, in my experience. For those who are interested, in upcoming issues of the newsletter I’ll begin by reviewing books, some good and some not-so-good, on the subject.

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Yvonne McGehee has been breeding elegant borzoi dogs for the past 30 years. She feeds them a fresh food diet. See them at http://personal.palouse.net/valeska.

Copyright: Copyright on articles and recipes are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op and the respective authors, except were otherwise noted.

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