I’m a total geek about what people feed their dogs. Curiosity abounds, you know? So consider this my long-winded and geeky contribution, not raw-food evangelism. Although I’m happy to evangelize, too, if you’d like.
Silas has food allergies. Most relevantly here, he got increasingly less interested in eating his kibble as his allergies got worse, then once I figured out the problem I couldn’t find one that met both my nutritional criteria and his allergy-diet needs. So we switched him to Primal’s Turkey and Sardine Formula frozen raw food. Allergy symptoms: gone. Picky eating: gone.
(Nothing’s more delicious than a stick.)
The only problem was that he was starving. For the first time, he had a real appetite, and it was insatiable. For good reason, too–at the same time that his stomach was better than ever, his weight dropped two or three pounds. Hesitant to feed him even more of a food that was already costing $50 a week, I started giving him some raw turkey parts. His first turkey was wings, and he did well enough to send me out on a quest for some turkey necks. Turkey neck=doggie bliss, apparently.
We stuck with just the supplemental raw turkey necks for a while, but after looking around and considering the cost we eventually abandoned the Primal food. These days Silas eats a pretty good variety for a dog who can only eat one thing. (It’s really time to start branching out of his allergy diet, but his skin is still too bad from the obedience class treat incident.) Necks, wings, hearts, gizzards, liver, and tails are the staple rotation, and every now and then he gets a turkey back or some ground turkey thigh. If you’re wondering where on earth I find this stuff, I must confess that I am considerably blessed in local resources, including a raw-food specialty store. I could feed him pretty easily out of our regular grocer if he could eat chicken or beef, but turkey organs are hard to find.
He has beautiful teeth, soft fur, fresh breath, and excellent digestion. The cost of this is about $60 a month and me having to–blech–chop up raw turkey parts. I quit eating meat my own self because I didn’t like handling it, and now I do it for the dog.
My Imperfect Dog 
Both my dogs eat raw with (thankfully) no allergies, but it is expensive. I wish I had a great resource near me, their food costs me well over $200 per month and with money so tight, it would be nice for a break in there.
Amazing the things we do for our pets isn’t it?
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Oh, I hear you. For a while there we were spending $200-$250 to feed one thirty pound dog. I was glad when his pickiness learned how to eat “parts and pieces” raw and dropped our cost. But, Silas stopped throwing up two or three mornings a week (now he only does it if we vary his eating times by more than an hour or two), so I would still be paying the $250 if I had to.
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My gosh, I hear you on this one. I’m currently feeding Leia K-9 Naturals, which is blessedly cheap compared to the primal, but still a lot more expensive than a homemade diet. Unfortunately she won’t chew bones/eat liver and so I’m sticking with commercial foods, but I do hope some day we’ll be able to just throw her a bird (chopped up of course!) instead.
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