Natural homemade food for dogs: the right choice for your pet

I have been singing the praises of raw meats and blanched and blended fresh vegetables and fruits as a healthy homemade recipe for homemade dog food. And I stay with that. But what about dogs that have dental or digestive problems? Since you knew it would, I have an answer for that too.

Rice is good, but barley is better

Lean white meat chicken breast, boiled until tender (but not overcooked) and cooked barley is the perfect food for a dog with a sensitive digestive system or severe dental problems. Simply mash it up so less chewing and digestion is needed. Some sources will recommend rice over cooked barley, but barley has many more nutrients than plain white rice. That is, after all, the point of this. Homemade, natural and healthy food for dogs. Less nutrients means less healthy. Why give your dog fillers when you can give him something nutritious and delicious?

You say natural, I say raw

It couldn’t get more natural than modeling your dog’s food after what he ate before housebreaking. Packs of wild dogs would attack live prey and eat it; not only benefiting from raw meats, but inadvertently receiving nutrition from predigested vegetables and fruits that their prey had eaten. I have yet to read in any history book about a pack of dogs sitting around a campfire roasting their rabbit to perfection. The lack of opposable digits probably largely prohibited them from striking a match. Although humans can have health problems from eating raw meats, dogs’ digestive systems are equipped to handle most of the bacterial problems raw meat can be responsible for.

Why do I have to grind the vegetables?

While raw meat doesn’t present a problem for most dogs’ digestive systems, vegetables are a different story. By the time the wild dogs got their greens, they had already been at least partially digested by their prey. Dogs’ systems have some problems with hard, raw vegetables. Blanching them removes some of the gas they cause in a dog (of course, who needs that!) and grinding them simulates the partial digestion that their prey’s digestive system would have achieved.

What to avoid

Now I know what you’re thinking. If certain vegetables and fruits are bad for dogs, how come they can eat animals that don’t discriminate in their choice of fruits and vegetables? This is something that has been altered by our domestication of dogs. Wild dogs had a sense that allowed them (most of the time) to stay away from things that were bad for them. They might still eat the fresh (or even ‘spoiled’) raw meat, but they might ignore the internal organs that contain digested food; to the delight of the scavengers.

Today’s dogs will eat almost anything you put in their way. I refer to one of my dogs as ‘Hoover’; he will pick up anything in his path and make it disappear. Unfortunately, this is something the dogs would have been better off if they hadn’t given up; their ability to discern between eating well and eating badly.