Completely Convenient

Completely Convenient - Commercial frozen foods make feeding a “natural” raw foods diet easy.

by Nancy Kerns

Despite what many makers of conventional canned or dry pet foods would have you believe, raw diets for dogs are not a modern fad, but a return to the dog’s not-so-distant past. While many who advocate “biologically appropriate raw foods” (so-called BARF diets) for dogs point to the canine’s evolutionary diet as justification for this feeding paradigm, the fact is that dogs were thriving on bones and raw meats (and other table scraps) just a hundred years ago – not so long as to imagine that they have since “evolved” out of easily digesting these foods! Kibble and canned, if anything, constitute the modern feeding “fad.”

Do you want to feed your dog a raw diet, but are afraid of leaving something important out? Today there are many “complete and balanced” raw diets on the market, and many other products that can support a home-prepared diet of your design.

Most of our grandparents knew how to do a lot of things that most of us don’t know how to do anymore, like canning fresh foods or cleaning a fish. In the name of convenience, we’ve allowed industry to remove us from the process, and we’ve thus lost a lot of common-sense knowledge about the end product. Our grandparents’ generation knew how to feed the family dog – as well as the Best of Show winner at Westminster – on a home-prepared diet.

Fortunately, for today’s over-informed but under-smart dog owners (myself included!), there are companies that offer our dogs a source of food that has the convenience of a prepared diet, the nutritional benefits of a biologically suitable food, and confirmation of space-age laboratory testing that it contains all the nutrients a dog needs (as far as we know so far!).

To read the whole article and see the list of approved dog foods pick up your own copy of The Whole Dog Journal at The Brookside Barkery and Bath or have it delivered to your home by subscribing on The Whole Dog Journal website.