Barf & Biscuits

Barf & Biscuits

Barf Basics

From 2002 to 2005, I fed Skye a "Raw" or "Barf" (Bones and Raw Foods) diet. She had had a number of food-related problems and stomach/digestive problems and, for a while, the raw diet seemed to work very nicely; I was quite the proponent of it, though she continued to go through periods where I knew her stomach was bothering her, and she was never an enthusiatic eater at meal times. This isn't the diet she's on anymore (you'll find that here). But, since I know the diet works very well for many dogs, I will keep the original information I put up explaining it a bit.

The Raw Diet consists of feeding a rotating variety of about 60-75% bones and meat, 20-30% or less veggies and fruits, and 5-10% extras. Some people don't believe vegetables and fruits are necessary, but I, myself, vote FOR them. While I don't feed veggies and fruits every day, Skye does get them a few times a week.

Another general calculation used is to feed your dog approximately 2% of her/his body weight daily, but I feed my 100+ pound girl only about 1% of her body weight daily or she tends to get chubby. One's aim is to get a good, well-rounded mix of foods into your dog over perhaps a week's time, and not to worry if one day s/he'll only eat chicken wings and no veggies or fruit, or one day s/he'll simply fast and eat nothing at all; it should eventually even out over the week.

Following is a very general list of the foods one can use, but there is much more to choose from, as well as many different kinds of extras, vitamins and minerals to use depending on your dog's needs:

U Raw Meaty Bones (RMBs) such as chicken wings, necks and backs, turkey necks, beef ribs, lamb, rabbit, etc.

U Muscle & organ meat from ground poultry, beef or lamb; chicken and beef gizzards, liver and hearts. Also fish (canned and fresh) and eggs.

U Vegetables and fruits: broccoli, sweet potatoes, carrots, squash, leafy greens (chard, spinach), wheatgrass; apples, pears, berries, bananas, etc.

U Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs) which include flaxseed oil, salmon oil, cod liver oil, etc.

U Kelp and alfalfa, preferably in powdered form.

U Extras may include vitamins and minerals, especially Vitamin C, apple cider vinegar, digestive enzymes, probiotics, yogurt, nuts and seeds, large beef knuckle or marrow bones (also known as "recreational bones"), grain-free biscuits and treats.

U I also use a dehydrated food called Force, as a part of Skye's raw diet to add some variety and also as an easy way to get fruit and veggies into her. There are a variety of pre-prepared, often frozen foods out there, too, such as Steve's Real Foods, which can be very convenient additions, especially for problem eaters or simply as time-savers.

U The big No-Nos and Foods to Avoid are: Grains, Sugar, large amounts of Dairy products, Chocolate, Raw Salmon, and Yeasts of any kind.

Every dog seems to be different and it often takes some trial and error on your part to find what works best for your dog(s). Skye was resistant at first to the raw veggies and the way they were mashed up, but now she really enjoys them in another form (finely chopped but, please, not mashed!) and gets a wide variety a few times a week. She prefers poultry and fish to meat, and will hardly touch, beef, lamb or other meats. Some dogs are pretty picky, and some will scarf up whatever you feed them! We are not "scarfers" in this household!

Skye had numerous health problems when we started this diet -- constant stomach upsets, diarrhea, indigestion, she gagged on kibble, she refused to eat a good deal of the time and got quite skinny. The vet thought she might have IBS and I decided to try this raw diet before we started doing biopsies of her stomach. While still a picky eater, most of her problems disappeared the first week of the raw diet, and she's definitely not skinny anymore!

There are various books and websites that can explain the diet in detail far better than I can. I got a lot of help with this diet, and still do, from the folks on a couple of Barf mail lists and from various books on the subject, especially helpful to me is Kymythy R. Schultze's book on nutrition for dogs and cats.

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Additional Foods I Use

In conjunction with the basic raw diet, we've been trying out a very interesting dehydrated, raw, natural dog food from The Honest Kitchen. One of their new foods, "Force," is grain-free, made with 100% human grade USDA chicken (muscle meat), veggies, fruits, herbs, vitamins and minerals, etc. The food contains no added salt, sugar, chemical preservatives, artificial colors, flavors, grains or legumes. I add water to rehydrate and serve by itself, mixed with veggies, or along with meat or RMBs. I have been experimenting with using it in other forms and so far have made some "patties" mixing the Force with eggs and ground turkey, chicken, and lamb. I've also been baking our own "no-grain biscuits" mixing it with eggs, water and chickpea flour. Skye really likes the food in all forms and I'll continue to use it as part of her raw diet. It should be very handy for those who travel or board dogs as one wouldn't need to lug along all the meat, bones and veggies, or need refrigeration.

On occasion, for various reasons, I feed a very small amount of kibble to Skye. For now, I've settled on Innova dog food as the brand that has, in my eyes, the least bad ingredients for my own, basically raw fed dog. Innova uses really great natural ingredients with no chemical preservatives, added salt and sugar, or wheat flour and bran, corn, animal fat, soybean meal, etc. It works for us!

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Biscuits & Treats

I'm always looking for healthy Dog Biscuits and Treats, and while I've finally come up with my own grain-free version of biscuits, here are links and recommendations of some biscuits I've found that I think are pretty darned good, even though they're not grain-free. What's good is that they're all wheat-free, corn-free, and preservative-free, and in most cases have no added salt and sugar!

Reba's Healthy Gourmet Doggy Cookies, are homemade in Oregon by Donna Witt with the assistance of Reba, her German Shorthair. These are healthy, natural biscuits with no preservatives, and no added salt, fat or sugar. Donna makes a wheat and corn-free version of the cookies with oats, rye and barley flours which were our choice. They come in many flavors, such as salmon, beef liver, chicken, broccoli & cheese, raspberry, etc. Nicely packaged, really great prices, and a wonderful added surprise: a squeaky ball for Skye, arrived with the biscuits!

Katherine's Original Gourmet Biscuits is a bakery owned and operated by Angela Sparks & her mother-in-law in Ohio. Angela's Golden, Duke, is her aide-de-cuisine. Their biscuits are made with high quality, natural ingredients and come in flavors of shrimp, cheese, & PB&J, to name a few. They also make a special Turkey Dinner biscuit (free-range turkey and sweet potatoes) which is wheat-free and corn-free, and Angela will adjust her recipes to your taste (as she did with ours). Her tiny Training Treats are perfect little tidbits to use while hiking and even when training, too! Gooood dog!

I've come across two pretty good biscuits sold in pet food stores, though they might have to be specially ordered. Both are made using spelt and barley instead of white, wheat or other flours.

Buddy's Veggie Madness Biscuits are quite simply made of barley, spelt, spinach, carrots and vegetable oil, and have no added sugar, and salt or any other junk. To me, it appeared they might be rather bland, but I'm not the one eating them and Skye really likes them a lot!

Eagle Pack's Holistix biscuits are also natural with chicken, spelt, barley, apples, carrots and peas, sweet potatoes and blueberries, alfalfa, flaxseed, chondroitin sulfate, garlic and oodles of other ingredients.

And, of course, for some "off the diet" but very good peanut butter biscuits, made the old-fashioned way with flour, cornmeal, oats and eggs, etc., we still use our friend Tom's Peanut Butter Crunchies as very special treats!

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Food Supplements & Vitamins

I get some really excellent dog supplements (enzymes, probiotics, flaxseed oil, vitamins, etc.) from B-Naturals, Berte's Holistic Products for Dogs & Cats which is owned by Lew Olson, a very knowledgeable and helpful woman.

I also buy supplements for both myself and my dogs from Springtime, Inc., Natural Remedies for People, Dogs & Horses. I've been using their Fresh Factors for dogs and Cartilage Concentrate for people for years. Their website is not great, but they have a good catalog, discount prices for buying multiples, and very helpful phone reps at (800) 521--3212.

Barf-Related Sites

The Barf-Malamute mail list is breed-specific (see bottom of main page with instructions on how to subscribe)

The Raw Dogs Canada group is not breed-specific and of course you don't need to be Canadian to join! (see bottom of its main page with instructions to subscribe)

This Bones and Raw Foods website was very useful when I first started feeding raw; it has lists of questions and answers, and all sorts of raw feeding info which is very helpful for the newbie

Raw Ranch is another great site that shows how to feed your dog raw food, how to measure, with pictures of meals in bowls, etc. They also have a spreadsheet worked out for you to use if you have Microsoft Excel which will figure amounts and percentages based on info about your own dog(s). Really helpful for those just starting to feed raw.

Some more raw diet links to look at are: Jane Johnson's Raw Feeding E-mail Lists site with lists of lists! The Step-by-Step "How to Prepare Barf" site; Aunt Jeni's "Barf Pictorial"; the Barf World site which has much about Barf and Dr. Ian Billinghurst, an early proponent of raw feeding, who wrote some of the first books on the subject.

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While much of the above is still good information and I continue to use some supplements and biscuits and things, when Skye contacted a nasty bacteria, probably due to eating the raw food, I changed her diet to a cooked one. She still gets some of the same foods, but now they're cooked. I cook or microwave skinless, boneless chicken breasts and turkey mostly. Cook up chicken livers or beef or calf liver and gently steam a variety of veggies. She gets mostly veggies with, for example, pieces of cooked chicken mixed with veggies and about 1/2 a teaspoon of liver. I add about 1/8 of a teaspoon of powdered calcium to this (I beleive the measurement is 1 tsp. per pound of meat protein) along with some Omega three oil in some form. This diet has agreed with her tremendously, her health is great, and she lost 12 pounds with no problem.