Right now, Oscar is a kibble dog.  He gets a mixture of Nutro and Beneful (plus a little taste of whatever I’m eating - I know, bad…) every day and he seems pretty happy about the situation.  He’s only 2 and a half, but seems to be pretty healthy, his teeth are very clean and he rarely has “dog breath”.  So, if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it, right? 

Maybe, but I have a few friends who feed their dogs a raw diet and they SWEAR by it - they believe that their pets have increased energy, thicker/shinier coats and a healthier weight since they switched to feeding them raw food.  Plus there have been a lot of scares lately with processed dog food… 

Experts who recommend the raw food diet cite studies where animals who are fed processed food appear to be healthy when they are young, however, as the animals reached adulthood, they supposedly begin to age more quickly (than dogs fed a raw diet) and also develop chronic degenerative disease symptoms.  These proponents claim that your dog would be healthier if his diet more closely resembled what he would eat in the wild.

And mimicking the type of diet they would have in the wild does make some sense to me.  I was also pretty surprised to find that Oscar seemed to LOVE the raw food meal that he tried at his friends Arnold & Giuseppe’s house.  So, as long as it won’t do him any harm, why not try it?

Well there’s cost and effort…depending on the raw food diet you choose it will probably take more effort that throwing down some kibble and will definitely be more expensive.  Okay, well that’s no problem - I love to feel like I’m spoiling King Oscar. 

My friend recommended the Volhard Natural Diet Foundation (NDF) - AM & PM. 

I’ve also heard good things about The Rotation Diet from Nature’s Variety.  What I especially like about the Nature’s Variety plan is that they encourage switching between types (raw, kibble, cans) of food.  I like the idea of keeping some kibble in Oscar’s diet to keep his teeth clean and breath smelling…well, not like dog breath!  I’m not really into canned food, but the combo of raw and kibble is appealing to me.  I really like the feeding guide on the NV website…it’s easy to use and helps you to figure out how much of each type of food to feed your dog each day. 

So, what do you think?  Should I give it a try?    I would love to hear about your personal experiences with a raw food diet.