Malamum

I tend to try and add things that contain vitiman E naturally such as raw eggs or wheatgerm.

I feed RAW because it means I can control exactly what my dogs are eating. They only get fresh food that is fit for human consumption. Commercial pet food in large quantities worries me.

I've never really made either of our dogs heel on walks but they know they must walk on a loose leash at all times. There is to be no pulling. However the length of the lead is at my descretion and they have learnt to adjust where they walk based on how much lead I give. If it's the full 6ft then they walk out in front, however if we are walking through a crowded area etc I'll fold the leash up in my hand and as the amount of leash given is much less they just walk nicely by my side. So rather than focusing specifically on heeling I focus more on no pulling regardless of leash length. That we we can go straight into a heel with no dramas simply by shortening the lead.

When it comes to commercial food, rather than just feeding what others do, I would suggest learning what all the things in the ingredients list are so that you can make an informed decision based on your own knowledge.

We have the snooza pet futons in ours - however our problem was finding a futon that was big enough to fill the crate. ;) The below picture is not actually the snooza futon - it was Indy's previous bet which he destroyed. He seems to leave the futon alone though.

The jointguard treats sound great. Will be keeping my eye out for those.

I've got a big dog so according to the pack I should be giving a full scoop in the morning and half a scoop of an evening. It's a fair bit of powder so I'm worried about him not ingesting it all if I just sprinkle it over the top of his food.

Jointguard comes in a powder form and needs to be given morning and night. In the morning we mix it with a tablespoon of yoghurt and in the evening it gets mixed with the veggie mush. How does everyone else give their dogs powder suppliments?

I have a girlfriend who has just gone through the same thing. She knows I have been feeding my two dogs BARF for years and rang me in a bit of a tiz as her vet had told her she was feeding her new puppy all wrong and was going to do her harm. I asked if the vet then tried to sell her the commercial food that they stock for $100 a bag.. and of course the answer was yes. I can understand that vets get a bit concerned that people may just be feeding one type of meat (mince for example) and that is all their dog get, however if people are feeding the barf diet correctly I can't understand how vets can honestly think an extruded pellet is better that fresh real food.

When it comes to commercial food, I think people are better off learing what the ingredients on the back of the pack mean so they can make a decision themselves, rather than just relying on what someone else says is a good or bad food.

My two also get fed twice a day, but the morning meal is very tiny.

We use the savlon anteseptic drying powder. We also use the dryer on the spot multiple times a day.

I would recommend the book Give your dog a bone by Ian Billinghurst. It's really good and explains everthing nicely.

When I was feeding commercial food I used to feed Innova and thought it was great. However buying it from PP really ate away at me. Having no where else to buy it from was one of the main deciding factors in me feeding BARF instead.

Good luck! Let us know how you go.

My guys aren't real fans of raw liver either. However I confuse them by combining their absolute favourite food with the liver. On liver night they also get a can of mackeral and all the juice from the can gets poured into their bowls. Their love of anything fishy over rides their dislike of the liver.

In regards to offal, I feed it about once a week. It's mostly chicken liver as that is what I see in the shops the most. However I do keep my eye out for other stuff.

Take her to the vet and see what they say. They won't jump straight into x-rays unless they really think they are going to show anything (mine didn't anyway). They should spend a bit of time watching her walk and seeing what her gait is like. Our vet also spent a fair bit of time manipulating our boys legs to see how much movement he had. Straight off she said it was very unlikely he had HD becuase of how she could manipulate his rear legs and the movement he had in the hips etc... We did end up having him x-rayed anyway and he doesn't have HD but he does have arthiritis.

I just feed my guys a bit of everything. Chiken makes up the bulk of their diet but they also get beef, lamb and pork depending what's on special and what I can find.

Lamb shanks dissapear without a trace very quickly around here too.

One of my dogs decided she didn't like liver. When she realised that if she didn't eat her liver she didn't get anything else, she changed her mind about not eating it.

Cassie I'm assuming that with the size of your dogs feeding store bought patties on a long term basis would be very expensive. We used the patties when our dogs went into boarding and I'll use them again when taking the dogs on holidays etc. However for every day feeding I just make my own. ( I don't make patties though) I go to the chicken shop about once a month and buy 5kg of backs, 5kg of necks and 5kg of casserole pieces. This costs about $40.00. I buy bags of bones from the butcher $3 per bag. I then just keep an eye out in the supermarket for red meat that is on special.

The best prevention I found was making sure my dogs were kept dry. My dogs (double coated breed) are prone to them in wet humid weather. I try to keep them inside out of the rain and if they do go out and get themselves wet I make sure they are thoroughly dried. We bought one of the forced air dryers and it's out best friend in hot spot weather.

I made liver cake for my dogs once. They liked it but putting the liver through the blener nearly made me spew. Never made it again. :D

For training classes when I need something good I would use any of the following cheese cabonisi bbq chook dried liver etc works fine at home but at class I found that any of those above things seemed to work better.