Raw Education

It’s the natural diet dogs and their ancestors have evolved to thrive on. A proper raw diet will be perfectly balanced to meet all of the nutritional requirements needed for your dog. It will include high quality meat, bone, fruits, vegetables, and probiotics. The food is consumed raw to provide the most natural way of absorbing their meal.

Transitioning a dog from any diet to a new one can be very easy if done with patience  and care. Some dogs have strong stomachs that can tolerate anything and switching for them could be as easy as just giving them the new food. But for many dog owners the process might not be so easy. 

You want to introduce the food slowly. First, add a little bit of the new food, maybe 90 % old and 10% new, to get the dog accustomed to the new food and see how they do. If the dog seems to have any issues or try to pick out the old food, great! Try and add a little more of the next food for the next meal.

If in the first round they seemed a bit hesitant or picked at the food around, do not increase the amount of the new food until the dog eats all of the current ratio.

If your dog turned its nose to the whole meal and gave you a dirty look, I wouldn’t worry about it. They might not be that hungry even if that is the normal feeding time. Give it a little time and if they still won’t eat the food, put the food away in the fridge. Try again in a few hours. 

When transitioning to the Raw Dino raw dog food, you will receive a complimentary Raw Dino Transition Kit. The Raw Dino Transition Kit will include a few pounds of specially prepared meals to make the transition as smooth as possible for both you and your dog.

Just like people, most dogs are not a huge fan of change, even if it is for the better. So to make things easier and extra tasty, we created a special Raw Dino Transition Kit. 

The Raw Dino Transition Kit will have a few pounds of food formulated the same as the regular raw dog food, but what is different is how it’s prepared. There are 5 stages to the transition. 

The first stage will have the food cooked all the way through and some of the fat reduced to introduce your dog to the new ingredients. The other 4 stages gradually become less and less cooked until they graduate to their first raw meal. The whole transition process should last between 4-8 days.

We love our furry little friends just as much as we might love another human, maybe even a little more. Raw dog food hasn’t always made it easy on our wallets, so many of us pull up our sleeves and get down and dirty to make the most delicious meals for our pets. Which is great, except that most homemade raw dog food recipes are not complete and balanced. 

Many recipes might be complete and balanced, but there is just no way of knowing unless extensive research is done on each recipe, which includes over 50 minerals, vitamins, amino acids, and calories, and certain levels not only have to meet a minimum or maximum but also be properly balanced against others. After all that, the recipe will need to be submitted to a lab for testing.

Many adult dogs get their complete and balanced nutrition long term from all different meals, snacks and left overs. But for puppies, it is a big risk to take as they grow fast and inefficient diets can cause minor and major health problems. 

This part is not designed to scare anyone, but to highly recommend starting your dog on a complete and balanced diet from a trusted brand. As the dog gets older and you get more comfortable with it, then DIY raw diets can be looked into.

This is a very popular question and a lot of people assume that you cannot. 

But in reality, there is nothing wrong with feeding raw or cooked chicken bones. The trouble is with those delicious fried chicken bones. We all had fried chicken and saw our little fur ball with those eyes just begging for one, like real hard. You feel really bad and just want to give them a little piece but before you know it, it’s all gone except for the bones. It’s a shame to throw them away.

So what is so special about the fried chicken bones? Well, normally the dog would break the bones into smaller and more palatable pieces and the acidy stomach would take care of the rest. But with fried bones, the bones tend to split length wise creating a very hard, long, and sharp piece of bone. And as you can imagine that is not something you want to feed your dog. 

So go ahead and give them that raw chicken wing during the barbeque, just not after a late night run for some greasy fried chicken.

Yes. It all has to do with pH levels and we will get to that in a minute.

Dogs have the perfect design for eating raw meat and bones. For one, they have a strong acidic stomach that can break down just about anything the wild has to offer. Two, they have a short digestive system, which allows any harmful bacteria that doesn’t get destroyed by the acid to pass through quickly. And three, naturally dogs and species alike don’t have an issue with sensitive stomachs or any of these issues. So why do domesticated dogs do?

Let’s dive into this topic a little deeper and get a little nerdy. 

To help with breaking down the raw meats, bones, fur, bacteria, and other things dogs might encounter in the wild, their digestive process has an extremely corrosive stomach acid. Dogs use their stomach acid to help break down meat, bones, and kill harmful bacteria among many other important things in order to survive and thrive in the wild. 

So what is this pH level that was mentioned earlier?

pH which is a scale used to measure how acidic or basic something is on a scale of 0 – 14, 7 being neutral, and the lower the number more acidic it is. In comparison, a human’s stomach pH level is around 4, where’s dog’s pH level is much lower, hovering around a 2, but this can fluctuate to as low as a 1 when needed, which is as acidic as a car battery. 

The dog’s low stomach acid breaks down not only the raw meat but also the bones as quickly as an hour. The acid is strong enough to kill most harmful bacteria such as salmonella, clostridia, campylobacter, and E Coli. On top of the strong acid, they also have a short digestive system, which allows any harmful bacteria to pass through quickly. 

So if the dog’s digestive system is pretty much a miracle, why do some dogs get sick from eating raw meat and bones? The answer is pretty simple actually.

A dog’s stomach acid is as strong as it needs to be. Remember how we mentioned that the dog’s acid fluctuates and can reach as low as 1? Well, it only gets that low for short periods of time, maybe a couple of hours max, for it to do its job and once that level of pH is not needed, it goes back up. 

Dogs that are fed kibble or canned food, do not need a low pH level to break down the food, so the stomach does not create the acid with a low pH level. This causes the dog’s stomach to be more sensitive and have health issues. 

If done right, your dog can adjust their pH level, little by little, taking somewhere between 5-10 days. It is because of this reason why Raw Dino created an industry only gradual Transition Kit to raw dog food.