Know all about Raw Foods for your pets in Miami

Raw foods for pets in Miami has emerged as a popular alternative to industrialized pet food and mass-produced kibble. It urges pet parents to follow the feeding habits of wolves and wild cats. They cite a wide range of health benefits, but there are hurdles to a complete raw diet, including complexity, expense, and safety.

If you want to learn more, then read on and decide if it’s time to let them eat meat!

History

Work animals like sled dogs and racing greyhounds have a long history of eating raw. The practice expanded in the late 1980s, when select veterinarians emerged as advocates of raw meaty bones for household dogs and cats. In 1993, Dr. Ian Billing hurst, coined the term BARF as an acronym for the Bones and Raw Food diet which later changed to the Biologically Appropriate Raw Food diet.

BARF remains a leading raw feeding model today. It recommends diets consisting of raw meat, bones, organs, fruits, and vegetables. A competing model, Prey Model Raw (PMR), recommends only meat, bones, and organs without fruits and vegetables.

Recent incidents regarding commercial pet food have led to a surge of interest in raw feeding. For instance, in 2007, the FDA investigated contamination of pet foods with melamine, leading to a recall on over 150 brands of pet food. Conventional kibble continues to be recalled at an alarming rate today, as evidenced by the FDA’s continuously growing list of recalled feeds.

Raw Foods diet is basically the practice of giving your dog raw meat, bones, fruit and vegetables.It is becoming a popular dietary trend among pet owners. The idea behind the concept is that dogs will thrive on an evolutionary diet of foods which is based on what they ate before they were domesticated. If the very thought of this makes you slightly uncomfortable, there are alternatives that can provide similar nutritional benefits and will move your dog from simply “survive” all the way to “thrive”.

The Pros Of Raw Feeding

Protein is the ingredient that seems to get the most attention from dog owners. However, according to a professor, we must consider not only the protein requirement of the animal, but also the required load of the microbes and gut bacteria. When feeding dogs according to their species  you should design an almost raw diet that is ideal. Including highly digestible protein along with prebiotics, is the ultimate nutritive goal. This concept has been utilized in the poultry and swine industry for years with consistently positive results. However, the trend is yet to migrate to the canine world.

Wherever you stand on the concept of Raw Food Diet, the following rules can help you fine-tune your raw-feeding practice or determine if a raw diet rules for your canine companion. 

• Go lean with your meats

Raw food diets tend to be high in fat, which can cause problems for many dogs, especially those prone to pancreatitis, obesity and gastrointestinal issues. Fat also contains more than twice as many calories per gram as protein and carbohydrates. Because dogs typically eat to satisfy their need for calories, dogs who consume less of a higher-fat food may not obtain enough vitamins, minerals and other important nutrients, while those who consume more may become obese. Fortunately, customizing a raw diet enables you to control the fat content.

• Balance the bone

Edible bone refers to the bone without the skin, fat, connective tissue and muscle meat. Edible bone fed in the appropriate amount provides the calcium and phosphorus that are needed without the use of separate supplementation. If your raw diet does not include bone, and you’re feeding an adult dog, you must supplement their diet with calcium. Growing puppies, regardless of breed, require more of both calcium and phosphorus than adults, so puppy diets without bone must include both a calcium and phosphorus supplement. You should also avoid feeding excess bone, which can pose health hazards such as hard stools that are painful to pass and hypercalcemia, excessive blood calcium levels that can lead to organ damage.

• Don’t skip the dog supplements

In today’s modern world of depleted soil, environmental toxins, even raw diets benefit from supplementation. As mentioned earlier, bone-free diets for adults require a separate calcium supplement, while bone-free puppy diets need a calcium or phosphorus supplement. Diets with bone still often come up short in several nutrients which includes vitamins D and E, linoleic acid especially if using red meat rather than poultry, EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids and trace minerals such as iodine, manganese, selenium and zinc. The more variety the diet has, the fewer the supplements that will be needed and the more likely the diet will be balanced over time.

• Beware of leaky gut

Healthy intestines contain a barrier of cells that lead to the absorption of desirable nutrients from the digestive tract, while blocking harmful molecules from crossing into the bloodstream. Leaky gut is a condition in which the channels become compromised, creating a permeable, or leaky intestinal environment. Dogs with leaky gut are at increased risk of pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli from raw foods crossing from the digestive tract into the bloodstream.