Going raw

I use to think that the people who fed raw were crazies who thought that their dog didn't evolve to eat kibble. Now I'm a crazy.
My research on raw started late November when we took Winston to some behavioral training at K9 Lifeline (help him learn to like other dogs, I'll post about that another time) and they asked what I fed him. While his food was on their approved list they suggested maybe thinking about raw. I turned my nose up almost immediately until the trainer started telling me the health and appearance improvements on her mom's Pomeranian.

After that I started doing tons of research on raw; how to do it, when to do it, the risks, the benefits, everything.
I decided that I wanted to do the prey model raw diet instead of pre-packaged raw just because of the price (pre-packaged usually works out to $4 a pound and right now I'm buying chicken at $0.68 a pound, that cost will fluctuate a bit, but when Winston has to eat 4 pounds a day that $4 would have really added up) and I also liked the idea of the bones cleaning the teeth. I'm not going to go into everything in this post, if you want to understand the diet more or have questions go to this website or you can ask me personally.

I would have liked to start feeding all the dogs in January, but with all the meat and no freezer to store it, that didn't happen. I finally got sick of buying big bags of dog food though so I told John that we were starting all the dogs once their food ran out. We'll have to buy a freezer in the next couple of weeks.
That was last Tuesday for Winston so I stocked up on chicken quarters (chicken quarters or chicken backs are good to start off with), John helped me divide them up into two meals a day and Winston got his first raw meal Tuesday evening.

Winston waiting for his dinner to be set down outside. We fed him outside for his first meal because we weren't sure what he was going to do with it. I didn't want him dragging the chicken through the house and getting bacteria on everything.

He did pick up the chicken quarter and started to go into the yard, but John stopped him and made him come back to his bowl. He gobbled it up as quick as you can gobble up raw meat and bone.
Chicken backs are usually the way to start since they have more bone and make poop stay solid, but I only had quarters available. Because of this Winston was having a tiny case of diarrhea so I picked up some chicken backs from Harmon's and gave him one a day. His poop is now back to normal. A nice thing about poop on raw is that the dog will poop A LOT less and after a few hours it'll turn white and after a few days it'll turn to dust. No more back yard poop cleaning!

The raw diet this past week hasn't been too challenging, I just have to remember to take his breakfast out of the freezer the night before to thaw in the sink and his dinner out before I go to work so that it's not frozen when it's time for him to eat. I have forgotten his breakfast once and gave it to him practically frozen and he ate it just fine.
I also have to mop the floor after he's done eating since he takes it out of his bowl and uses the floor, I also wash out his bowl after every meal with hot water and soap. So it is a little more work, but I'm willing to do it.

Even though it's only been a week I've noticed that his coat isn't as oily anymore and he doesn't have a bad dog smell like he use to and his teeth are already cleaner. Winston also drank water like he had been in the Sahara desert for two years, it was obnoxious. I thought he was just special, but I found out at a feeding seminar that kibble doesn't have enough water in it so that's way he was constantly thirsty. He now drink a normal amount of water which is nice since it controls his drooling.
I'm excited to see the rest of the results from raw and I'll give more updates along the way.