I do the prey model method as well. BARF, etc. seems like way too much work and my dog does best on just meat.
I don’t buy the frozen patties - they are way too expensive. I buy discount meat at the grocery store, load up when there’s a sale and buy the bulk of it at the asian market.
Start out slow and with an easy to digest protein like chicken. DO NOT add organ or offal meats until your dog has had time to adjust. I recommend chicken quarters for the first week or so. Variety of proteins IS the key, but not at first.
Then do the math. A prey model method is around 70% muscle meat (liver, heart, gizzards, shoulder, tongue, etc.), 20% bone (chicken quarters, turkey necks, turkey wings - only if dog can handle the bone, oxtail, whole fish, etc.), 5% offal (kidneys, spleen, etc), and 5% liver. I tend to go closer to 15% offal/liver and I include green tripe, whole eggs, etc.
Most dogs typically need 2-3% of their body weight in raw food. My 75 lb flat coat retriever eats between 1.5 to 2 lbs a day and holds his weight readily, even with two hour walks a day. My brother’s 80 lb lab/great dane, however, needs closer to 5 lbs of food a day. But he’s always had a high metabolism and when on kibble, ate 4 cups of high calorie food (EVO) a day to maintain his weight. You can play around with it. If your dog is losing weight after two weeks and 2 lbs a day, you can increase food. If he’s gaining weight, decrease.
Sometimes I feed my dog once a day or twice, depending on what he’s eating. There’s no way I’m cutting pork lungs so he gets one 4 lb meal on those days. Then the next day I give him closer to 1 lb so make up for the bigger meal the day before.
It’s complicated at first and I highly recommend you weigh the meats to make sure you’re close to the 70-10-5-5 ratio and then adjust from there. (This AFTER the first few weeks of letting your dog adjust to the diet and introducing new proteins slowly). White poops and straining to go means too much bone. Loose poops is too much fat or too much offal. Even after 3 years of raw, I don’t feed my dog more than 3 meals in a row of pork or he’ll get the runs. I usually do muscle-liver-bone-muscle-offal-muscle, etc. so the offal and liver is sandwiched between bone and muscle meals to help offset the possibility of loose poops - especially when offal and new proteins are first introduced.
Chicken is the easiest to digest and pork is the hardest. Introduce meals with bone at first to ease the digestion process. DO NOT FEED COOKED BONES. I think the OP mentioned cooking chicken?? THAT IS NOT RAW. Sorry for the caps but feeding raw bones is healthy…feeding cooked bones is a disaster waiting to happen. Cooking the bones makes them brittle and prone to splinting. Raw bones are soft and easy to digest/chew.
As for veggies/grains that’s more for a BARF diet and if your dog has allergies, that doesn’t seem a logical way to go. My brother’s dog is on raw because he has mad allergies so we cut out all grains and his skin cleared up in a few weeks. He went from raw red HOT skin with no hair to regrowing a nice coat and his skin inflammation died right down. (He even developed a staph infection from all the scratching he did while on kibble).
If you want to keep with veggies, you have to either cook them or blend them on high to break them down enough for them to have any benefit for a dog. I’m too lazy, so i buy canned green tripe and that gives my dog all the greens he needs…though I do occasionally pour some of my green smoothies in his bowl as a treat.
Either way, research, research, and more research before you change your dog’s diet. Feeding a healthy raw diet is beneficial but do it wrong, and you’re putting your dog’s health at risk.
