an observation about dominance

for some notes on diet see below on this page

other pages with pictures include:

an essay on the animal mind

muscle tone: the poem

drawings of the dogs

the little red piece of glass: a poem

Toxic foods

vetinfo is a great source of information on things like grapes (dangerous), onions (less so), chocolate (a bit)! see below

Rita: 12 Dec 1997
          - 29 Jan 2011
a beagle

Lucky: DOB 9 Jan 1998

an australian cattle dog
or "blue heeler"

Diet

Rita and Lucky had skin problems when younger. Sharron Kopnick(? name?) said, feed them anything you would eat yourself, and nothing that you wouldn't... which rules out all the commercial dog foods...

Diet Update

onions?

Dogs develop hemolytic anemia if they eat enough onions. I don't think that it matters too much whether the onions are cooked or not. The quantity of onions required is high enough that dogs can generally tolerate small doses of onions without any problem and moderate amounts of onion without clinically apparent disease, even though there may be measurable changes on lab
test results. Cats are probably a little more sensitive to onion toxicity than dogs...
Large amounts of garlic will produce similar toxicity problems... Mike Richards, DVM vetinfo

I have to confess that I haven't studied the BARF diet...

So what do Rita and Lucky eat?

(Now, I'm not recommending this diet. This is just what I've been doing, improvising without deep research. So you could take a look at the BARF diet for a more deeply researched approach.)

Treats

Mornings

• grated yam and carrot, and a little grated burdock root,
• raw meat, i.e. ground chicken (from the Menonites),
• hot/warm water,
• bone meal andnowadays I supplement with vit D, yeast, kelp, and glucosamine.

chicken necks

Lucky and Rita get chicken necks for treats...

"commercial" chicken necks might have hormone pellets injected in them! Not good for your dog. Not good for the chickens.

Menonite chicken necks are Lucky's favorite food in the world, just about.

and chicken necks for treats (which must be Menonite or organic) and must be raw! (cooked chicken bones become brittle and splinter - they can be deadly. Raw bones is part of the dogs natural diet. They are digested to a large extent)

they mooch commercial treats in the park and when Rita is particularly successful her eyes will start to run a goo/pus.

Evenings:

• vegetable and poultry-parts stew (I cookenough for a week or so, and freeze some) mixed vegetable, diced carrots, beets, celery, yams, broccoli, parsnips, zuccini, whatevery, and chicken livers and hearts [Menonite or organic],

When I first steeled myself to give the dogs raw chicken necks (I "knew" that raw was fine, but still, "chicken bones!"), Lucky was so delighted with them that he wouldn't eat anything else. We had to withhold the necks and it was two days before he would consent to eat his old diet. Then once, a year later, I ran out of chicken necks and he wouldn't eat anything else for two days!

To begin with, Rita didn't eat the necks until sometime, well after Lucky had been focused on them for mor than a year, I chopped off a small piece of a neck for Rita, which she ate. Did that a few times and then she was fine with eating them whole.

(A few months ago Rita ponced on a raw shish kebab dropped on its way to the barbacue and wolfed it, stick and all. {I wasn't there [bath room].} Every day that week when I got home from work I'd say, with delighted surprise, "Ah, you're still with us." No symptoms at all! (I imaging she has the bits of stick inside her still.) So, during that week when I'd pick up her poo, in plastic, of course, a few times I palpated the poo to feel for the sticks. No sticks, but, and this is the point of this dog turd tale, the chicken neck vertebrae are not fully digested. Please pardon the dog poo story.

Norman Allan

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