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Posts Tagged ‘diet’

I bet you have heard the tip of activating your dog by hiding treats for him to find. Today, I did that in reverse, and found myself activated as well as the dog. I gave the dog two small meaty bones as he needs 325 grams of stuff per serving, and I didn’t have the right size handy, so I gave him two. So he picks the other one, puts it in the middle of the yard and then runs to get the other one from his bowl. He then runs with this piece around the garden trying to find a place to hide it while he eats the other one. He is the funniest dog when he is on a mission. His head sinks into line with the body, and his steps turn steady and haste, making his long fur fly around him like the cape of a super hero.

Looking very determined he snoops around the yard and then hides the bone behind a rose bush. I don’t know if he dug a hole for it, but I could see his tail sticking out of the bush for some time before he got out and ran back to the first piece of bone to finish that one off. You betcha, that when I let him out the next time he’ll be straight at the bush – that is if the big bad black dog comes in first and finds his stash, which I think he might…

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Australia is a fantastic place for dogs – at least if you compare it to Finland, where we came from. One of the advantages is an easy access to butchers scraps, that make excellent and inexpensive dog food. Quite surprisingly, not all people know what excellent food it is! I mentioned “barfing” to a veterinarian, who looked at me with wide open eyes and said she’d never heard of such diet, and a shop keeper asked what we were planning to cook of lamb neck that we got. She said a lot of customers buy them for dogs, but she could not phantom her dog, a German Shepard of all things, to eat raw meat! We told her that raw meat and bones is excellent food, and cooking only makes the bones splinter and create a danger of cutting holes in their intestines, but raw stuff is just the way the nature intended.

BARF comes from words bones and raw food, but as simple as it sounds, there is a whole science behind it. However, it can sound more complicated than what it is – after all, unlike what you think, a piece of meat probably contains more nutrients than any processed dog food you can find on the market shells. (Sometimes when I forget to go to the butchers, I do buy a can of dog food, but cans only. Dry food is mainly useless.)

One thing that clearly tells you how much of the food your dog actually uses, is the size of his poop. I can tell you that the difference between the size of dry food poop to a beef poop is MASSIVE. Most of the dry food comes back literally untouched.

I’m far from expert at this myself yet, but I am convinced that if you have a butcher near by, you should take advantage of his services and ask for some off cuts and scraps for your dogs. Some even give them away, but the others take a dollar or two for them. And it is all usable. (So if you’re tight with money, and you don’t have a dog, there’s a tip for you. Some of the pieces the butchers throw away, look absolutely lip smacking good.) Like my husband said: “A dog never misses out in Australia.” :p

If you want to know more, please check out this FAQ for beginners for example.

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