Fresh Food Diets for Dogs, V
By
Yvonne McGehee, from the March 2006 Newsletter
Holistic Guide to a Healthy Dog, by Wendy Volhard and Kerry Brown, DVM, is a useful oldie. The diet alone can be ordered separately for about $8 from Dogwise. Good parts: this diet has been used successfully for over 20 years. The book includes charts for different sizes of dogs, nicely broken down into amounts of each ingredient. Bad parts: it contains a cereal-only meal, which dogs may not relish; and it uses a lot of ingredients, complicating the life of the owner. Also, in efforts to balance the calcium:phosphorus ratio, it uses quite a bit of calcium, potentially a problem for growing puppies of large-breed dogs, whose joints are adversely affected by too much calcium in the diet. With these diets' calcium-heavy slant, I would not personally use them to raise a large-breed puppy. The knowledge about high levels of calcium and its role in causing developmental joint disease for large-breed puppies is relatively new, so may not have made its way into this rather old book.
Every dog is an individual. For any breed or age, there may be specific caveats, affecting both commercial and homemade diets, applying to this kind or age of dog and not to dogs in the general population. The examples of commercial foods that have damaged specific parts of the canine population are legion, simply because not even large manufacturers know all the answers. Until recently, large amounts of calcium have been used in commercial puppy foods, causing life-long suffering to breeds genetically prone to developmental joint disease. This occurred because everything regarding feeding dogs is not yet known. The typical levels of calcium in puppy foods are not damaging to small and medium breeds, but are devastating to large-breed puppies; so now we have large-breed puppy foods, learning from past mistakes.
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.
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