Day 58 (4 March) – Variety & Rotation

Don’t change your dog’s/cat’s food or they’ll get an upset stomach and have diarrhea!

So would you if you ate the same thing over and over and over again ad nauseam and then suddenly ate something different. Think about it in this way: say you eat general American fare most of the time for months on end; cheeseburgers, potatoes, spaghetti, etc. and then one day you decide to go out for spicy Thai food. Yep. You know what that means. It’s exactly the same for your dog or cat.

If you’ve read this far, then you know that I’ve been feeding Ziggy all sorts of different proteins: chicken, turkey, venison, lamb, buffalo, beef, etc. Once your dog or cat gets used to variety and rotation they’ll be able to switch to different flavors and brands of kibble, canned, or raw no problem!

Why rotate? Good question. No diet can be 100% balanced for long term feeding. It may be well balanced for that particular meal but for weeks, months, and years on end it’s not. You couldn’t do it and neither can your pet. By varying the brands, flavors, kinds, and types of food you’ll provide your beloved companion with the maximum amount of nutrition. Remember that your pet is very closely related (at least internally) to their wild cousins and the mother nature model is a good one to go by. In the wild, they would not eat chicken & brown rice for every meal. Sometimes they’d manage to catch a rabbit perhaps, or possibly come upon a deer carcass. Some days their hunt would be unsuccessful and they’d fast for a meal. (As a side note here, in her book Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats: The Ultimate Diet Kymythy R. Schultze explains that “Fasting is a normal occurrence for wild carnivores. It enables the energy used for digestion to be used elsewhere in the body.” [p 40] She and others recommend that dogs and cats over one year of age fast at least one day per week.)

Click here for more information about variety and rotation in your pets diet.

- Mag & Ziggy

Day 53 (28 Feb.) – About your pocket-book

Sometimes when I talk to people about raw food at work they take a look at a package of raw food and quail at the price. Let us just get this right out here in the open. Raw food IS more expensive than kibble and can be more costly than canned on a pound-per-pound basis. There’s one important thing to keep in mind, though and that is that because it’s much higher protein than either kibble or canned and much, much healthier for your animal (because it most closely resembles their natural diet) they’ll likely eat less. When you eat more nutritious foods and higher protein ones, you eat less than you do of, say, french fries or ice cream. Also, a higher protein content means you’ll stay fuller for longer and need to eat less often!

Ziggy continues to do well. According to the scale, she’s shrinking little by little. We’ve been rotating around and she continues to enjoy her meals, eat heartily, and seems satisfied with the amount of food she’s getting.

- Mag & Ziggy

Forthcoming

Dear readers,

I had some difficulty getting onto WordPress to produce my weekly blog updates.  However, I faithfully wrote them long-hand using old fashioned pen and paper. The problem has since been resolved so you’ll be seeing them all up soon (as soon as I make the time to copy all of them to the blog)!

- Mag

Day 47 (22 Feb.) – Raw food and travel

It’s getting to that time of year when people begin travelling. Nobody wants to take a package of raw meat on a long car trip or in their suitcase on a plane. Freeze-dried raw is the answer!

I know of two brands of freeze-dried raw: Nature’s Variety and Addiction. Nature’s Variety freeze-dried diets come in four flavors chicken, beef, lamb, and venison. It is the same exact formula and size as their raw frozen medallions, only freeze-dried. I’m familiar with two flavors of Addiction freeze-dried: the Venison & Fig and the Brushtail.

Simply add water, let soak (re-hydrate) and voila!

- Mag & Ziggy