Pipers Mummy

Jacqui, So sorry to hear the very sad news about Molly. Louise x

Hi Rebanne, yes, some areas of the diet have to be updated to suit our modern lifestyles. Burying Piper's meat under branches of a tree is certainly one of the things I do not do The other main thing that I have had to adapt is her breakfast cereals being mixed with goats milk or buttermilk - both of which were too hard to locate in the UK. Instead I use a mixture of cows milk and water. Other than that I would say I follow the guidelines in the book - including during the week, one meat free day where she is fed fish and brown rice and one fasting day - most dogs seem to naturally fast themselves from time to time and this goes back to when they were in the wild, where they would not eat every day. I am new to Australia, so I have yet to find out what is available in the health food shops, however, in the UK all of the herbs such as parsley, rosemary, dandelion, nettles etc. are readily available so I trust it will be the same here. I was introduced to this diet by my father in law who gave me a 1960 edition of the book by Juliette when my last dog was seriously ill. When the vet advised us that it was a 'matter of time' I began to follow and administer the herbal remedies. She lived a full life for a further year and the vet (who is quite supportive of raw diets etc.) was amazed and said that she should have died 10 months earlier. That was enough for me to make up my mind that this diet was the right one for me and Piper so prior to her coming home I got myself organised and started the diet 24 hours later. This diet is quite dissimilar to the BARF, however, it is an alternative and whichever diet an individual choses the most important thing is to ensure that we have a good understanding and knowledge of what we are feeding and why Louise

Hi Maxi, I feed Piper a raw meat diet. Like others have said, I think the area where some of us 'fall down' is when we are enter into feeding raw without perhaps ensuring we know exactly what we are doing I took the time to read through the BARF books and scour the internet prior to starting with the diet so that I knew exactly what I was dealing with and to prepare myself - after all we change to raw to provide our dogs with a healthier diet than they previously had. This is where I throw a bit of a spanner in the works, I actually decided to follow a raw food diet devised by Juliette De Bairacli Levy - her book is entitled 'The complete herbal handbook for the dog and cat'. I'm not saying that this diet is the right one for you, but the more choices you have the better really so it may be worth reading. Anyway, back to your buried bone question - again as others have already said, dogs are designed to eat raw meat and therefore their digestive tract is equiped with the applicable enzymes etc. to allow them to digest bones and raw meat. Even if meat is 'high' (a bit smelly - as I'm sure those bones might be ) the dog is equiped to eat it without becoming ill. That said, I do always look after Piper's meat in much the same way as I would look after my own..... I'm new to Australia, so I was delighted to see that so many of you are following raw meat diets with your dogs. Hope this makes sense and helps Louise