How to provide a balanced diet when feeding RAW
It is important to provide your dog and cat with a complete and balanced diet so that their nutritional needs are met. However, you may be surprised to know that it is not required at each meal.
As long as your pet receives what he or she needs over a period of a week or two, often referred to as a ‘balance over time’, this is completely sufficient.
Let’s take a look at the eating patterns of a wild dingo…
When a pack of dingoes hunt more than its members can eat, they will bury the remaining food and then dig it up at a later period when food is scarce, similar to your dog instinctively burying a bone. When natural prey is scarce, dingoes will eat eggs, grubs, wild fowl and fruit, in fact, non-mammalian prey makes up about 10% of the diet.
My point is, the diet of a wild dog will vary from meal to meal, depending on what it eats at the time and whatever food is available, but the nutritional needs are always met over a period of time therefore achieving a natural balance.
Your dog isn’t a dingo and he doesn’t have to scavenge for his food, so why is this relevant? Even though your dog is a domestic pet, his digestive system is no different to a dingo…and your cat’s digestive system is exactly the same as a wild lion.
Evolution may have changed many things, but not how the digestive system functions in both your dog and your cat.
Still confused, let me explain…
Do you eat exactly the same food every time you eat a meal? No, you most likely eat a variety of different foods in a period of a week or two, and if these are healthy options, you probably do quite well and show no signs of nutritional deficiencies (a bit like the wild dingo).
If our pets feeding patterns are met in much the same way, there is no interference with the absorption of minerals as the diet is complete and balanced over time.
Commercial pet food cannot provide complete and balanced nutrition, full stop…
Pets fed the same food such as dry or canned food continuously day in and day out will have “overworked” kidneys due to an overload of bad quality, overcooked protein and phosphorous in the diet.
Because the food is highly processed, laced with synthetic supplements and contains an abundance of chemicals, this can lead to kidney disease and a myriad of other health issues later in life. In fact, kidney disease is the top cause of death in our domestic pets, including cancer. How scary is that?
To remain healthy, your pet must be fed according to their prey model, and that is by providing a variety of raw foods over a period of time and not at each meal time.
How do you achieve a complete and balanced diet in a modern world?
We live in a fast paced busy world where it is sometimes impossible to prepare healthy meals for ourselves, let alone our pets. Preparing a variety of healthy meals at each meal time for our dog and cat sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be.
You can achieve this both easily & conveniently with a barf diet…
A BARF diet provides convenience in a modern world. You can easily achieve a balance over time by providing different proteins and vegetable matter on different days and by making the meals in advance.
Intrigued? Check out my RAW Meal Packages.
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