Am I a bad parent?

[Amboaman]

I hope I don't come off as a bad pet owner but I am new to owning a dog and have just adopted a puppy that I think is a DS (or at least a DS mix), he is about 4 months old. At the suggestion of the foster, I just went out to the local petsmart and bought a puppy food for large breeds that has meat as the first listed ingredient.

As I am reading the posts in the section it seems a lot of people are doing a raw diet, which I am embarrassed to say I had to look up because I didn't even know that was an option.

Can I get some thoughts from the user community about this? I know that the regular pet food is easy but I am willing to spend some extra time preping food on the weekend if it means a happier, healthier best friend.

[Dutchringgirl]

feeding raw is feeding uncooked food. It is better but there is work involved. It took me months to get my head around the whole thing, expecailly the bones. Ill buy a big slab of meat then cut it into sections. There is alot to learn and I found it overwhelming at first but then, like anything , it will become second nature. Then I found Honest Kitchen dog food. Its a dehidraded food that you just add water to. There are times I dont have time to prepare the raw food and a good healthy alternative works better. There are plenty of healthy alternatives to raw if you want to do some reaserch first, get used to your new pup and not rush into anything and get yourself and your pup upset.

Find a local healthy pet food store and pick their brain too. My local health food pet store will spend time talking to me, he has articles and such.

Orijen is another popular feed on here ( right?). Its easy and pour and go.

On Yahoo, there is a raw group too, dont have it handy but its on here somewhere too. Do a search for Raw on here and you will come up with alot of good things.

Hope that helps and no, you arent a bad parent. You came looking for advice, that makes you a great parent, AND you adopted a pup too!!!

[Olie]

Its very simple.
1 Feed 80% muscle, 10% organ, 10 bone. BUT it doesnt have to be that strict! It´s most important to give majority of meat, and less organ and bone. Part of organ must be liver (not more than 5% meal).

2 Start chicken, next week add turkey, next week beef. At least that´s what´s recommended, I transitioned "cold turkey" from kibble to beef, and it was ok.

3 Organs make stool soft, bones hard. Monitor the stool and add or deduct organ and meat accordingly

4 Dont buy premade raw, go to the butchers, its much cheaper

5 feed 2-3% of your dog´s body weight daily

How to start? Just buy a chicken, chop it to 4 pieces (you´ll have 2 days worth of food). Give on in the morning, and one in the evening. Enjoy watching your dog crushing the bones.

[Manstrom]

I hate to spam forums but http://www.bigdogsporch.com/raw-homecooked-diets/ has a lot of people who feed raw. Great resource of info. I personally feed iams large breed puppy but have been researching raw myself.

[LyonsFamily]

There's two facebook groups (and a sister yahoo group) that talk about Prey Model Raw. That's what we feed and the basis behind Olie's suggestion. There are files that you can read that help guide you. You absolutely don't have to feed raw. I prefer raw because I want more control over what my dog eats. I got sick and tired of all of the recalls and keeping up with formula changes and making sure the bags weren't moldy.

We've done Orijen before to help Odin gain weight and he did very well. Recently Orijen has been having some problems with availability. They normally stop producing the kibble if there is a shortage of ingredients (they never substitute to maintain quality). To add on top of that there were some recent problems with a warehouse. In the midwest, there's one distributor for 14 states and that happened to be the one with the problem. Food was sitting on trucks and couldn't go out. Stores couldn't order the product and there's till shortages of it. There's a rumored formula change as well.

There's a newer brand on the market called Horizon. One of the suppliers to Orijen started the company and it's literally right down the street from Champions. The food is Grain free, potato free, and tapioca free and is not as expensive as Orijen or Acana. I use kibble to help with clicker training and Odin likes the samples we got of the Horizon Legacy stuff.

Orijen is also coming out with a dehydrated raw and a freeze dried treat. Supposedly they'll be available in March, but the date might get pushed back because of all of their issues. It will probably be too cost prohibitive to feed these solely to a dog the size of a DS, but you could mix with one of the kibbles and get a more rounded diet.