WHY WE WENT RAW

We currently have a 2 year old Maltese. Her name is Jak and she is our baby.

In 2002 we lost our 2 girls, Buffy (Cairn Terrier) and Tiffy (Staffy X), both to Cancer. They were both 13 years old and we lost them within 6 months of each other. Needless to say we were devastated.

Why did our girls die from that insidious disease and why had our girls been constantly at the vet over the last 7-8 years? It seemed that every second person we spoke to had lost their pet to cancer. It also seemed that the other half were constantly at the vet with allergy problems, weight problems, tumours etc.

Did this happen 50 years ago?

These question led to hundreds of hours of research and eventually to this site.

We have separated the facts from myth and have waded through scientific babble and consulted numerous experts in various fields to decipher what we didn't understand to bring you the cold hard facts about how your dog should be fed for ultimate health and freedom from the ill effects of manufactured dog food.

In essence – feed your dog RAW FOOD

What qualifications do we have to be able to say this? The answer is quite simple – none!

We are not Veterinarians and we have no background in science or nutrition (human or animal).

What we do have, however, is a true love of animals and a great deal of common sense combined with logic and extensive research skills.

We decided to build this site for people like us, or rather, people like we were a couple of years ago. We were totally confused and were looking for the answer to one simple question: “What we should feed our new best friend to make sure she was being fed in the best way possible.

Thanks to the internet and a multitude of books, there is a lot of information out there for people to be able to make their own informed decisions on the correct way to feed their dogs. Most people will, however, be faced with the same dilemma that we faced. While there is an abundance of information out there, you need to sort out the wheat from the chaff and also separate the “mindset” information from FACT.

It didn't take us long to come to the unquestionable decision that our new girl should be fed a raw diet. We thought that was it – simple – We'll just get a couple of samples of what to feed and we'll be right! WRONG!!! This is where our work really started. We have trawled the web, spent months in the library and joined endless internet lists.

What frustrated us more than anything else is the fact that there are all of these good people out there who are feeding their dog/s a raw diet (in one form or another) but they seem to spend half of their time boo-hooing each other instead of banding together and saying “we are all on the right track and even if we don't totally agree, the basics are the same and we are all doing a much better job by feeding our dogs raw meat and bones than feeding them manufactured food”.

The focus of RAW feeding is to feed your dog to ensure that they are being fed as close as possible to their “natural” diet. Unfortunately, this is where it all starts to fall apart. While it is certainly an option in a rural setting to throw your dog a chicken or rabbit carcass, or perhaps a pigs head to demolish in the paddock – it is not an option if you are a city dweller, especially if you live in an apartment. We could not find any reliable statistics in relation to rural housed dogs vs house or apartment housed dogs, but we should imagine that the latter would far outnumber the former.

Now having said that it's not practical in a lot of instances to feed the “whole carcass” way, we do believe it IS the best way to feed your dog. We have waded through reports, data sheets, historical reports and numerous other sources of information and we do believe that this is how your “home wolf” should be fed. Unfortunately, we cannot feed Jak (our dog) this way. Not only is it impractical, but we also have another issue - we are vegetarians. We also love all animals and could not cope with this way of feeding. While we know that Jak is a carnivore and needs to eat raw meat, we personally could not hack up a chicken (complete with head, feathers, feet etc) and give it to her to eat. We also could not throw her a poor little rabbit to tear apart. Even if we could do these things, we can imagine our neighbours wouldn't be too happy about it.

Do not let the fact that you can't feed your dog with his or her “ultimate feast” deter you. Initially we felt guilty that we wouldn't be able to do this. It took a lot more research and disillusionment before we woke up to ourselves. Now we just think of it this way..... In the wild, the wolf eats when he can find food. When he can find his “ultimate feast” he is lucky. When he can't – he makes do with whatever he can find. Wolves are opportunists as far as food is concerned and they will eat most things in order to survive. Sometimes they are undernourished and suffer from malnutrition. In an ideal world, their territory would not have been taken over by farmers and they would not have a food supply problem – but then again, that's man's doing and the wolf suffers.

We can take heart in knowing that although feeding our dog/s raw meat and bones may not perfect – it's pretty darn close and so much better than feeding them manufactured dog food.