Moving kibble fed pup on to BARF/Raw - is 7 weeks too young and other questions.........

[Olihan]

Our 2yo lab is on a raw food diet and I want to put the new puppy on the same. At the moment she's on BETA Puppy but the stinky poos are bleurgh and plentiful.

Is it okay just to give her chicken wings at this age? Or should I be giving her minced RMBs?

Lab1 has bio yogurt and a whole egg for breakfast, sometimes with a bit of olive oil and seeds or a tin of tuna, for tea she has primarily chicken wings, some beef mince/lamb bones/pork bones/green tripe plus a small amount of kidney or liver. Then she has occasional veg/fruit/leftovers as well.

I give her approx 2% of her body weight but I'm sure pup should be having more than that but a quick google isn't being very enlightening - 10% seems to be the only figure I can find, is that right?

Would she be okay going straight onto a very similar regime? She happily ate a bit of egg shell she found yesterday but is a whole egg too much for a tiny pup? Do I crack it and beat it and just give her a bit?

Any help would be very gratefully received - the quicker I can get her off the BETA the better .

7am isn't the best time to start a thread is it?!

Early start dear?

Can't help on the puppy/barf front although there was a lady on Labrador forums who starts her pups on barf (mince and chicken wings, although she may have poultry scissored them up a bit when the pup was very small). Are you on Brit Barf, the yahoo forum? You'd get loads of good advice there too.

Have you tried Landywoods yet? I have been so pleased with their food, especially the various different meat sachets with green tripe mixed in. Really good value for money.

As a complete aside I have found a trainer/training school that is APDT recognised but also does gun dog training. After Elsie is spayed we are going to do the KC Bronze award (well classes ) to improve her obedience a bit more around other dogs and then we are going to start sat morning gun dog classes. Am so excited. She's not too far from you (I think).

5am AND a wee/poo combo in her bed

Oh dear. Yes 5am is a little early to be starting on poo cleaning up duties.

Here is the training school. I've exchanged several emails with Denise who sounds lovely. The Saturday morning classes sound great but she said as they were outdoors and working on retrieves and stops plus whistle work it would require a bit more concentration and er, restraint on the dog's part, hence why we are starting on the indoors Good Citizen award first. Would be hilarious if we ended up doing dog training together after our previous royal icing experiences

Back to barf the mixed meat and tripe pouches are more mincy than chunky. The liver chunks are BIG chunks so I only give them to her two or three times a week.

I can see awesome cakes (love your wedding one btw) and Mabel but no new addition she is a yellow lab yes?

Having completely failed the Resizing and Adding Photos to Profile module I've added her to my FB cake page instead! Fingers crossed this works

Natural choice is pre packed BARF food they do food suitable for puppies make sure you change over gradually to avoid tummy upsets. Hope this helps

Oh looooooooook

Look and her oversized lab paws.

OK that is puppy cuteness level 11

Baffledandbewildered, your name sums me up right now .

How does Puppy BARF differ from normal BARF? Surely wild puppies just eat what the adults eat, which is part of the prinicple behind BARF, no? Or am I totally confused?

I can't work out if it would be the chewing/crunching up of bones that could be the problem if she's physically not big enough to do that or whether it is something to do with the combination/balance of the foods as she grows.

But wild puppies thrive perfectly well without specific puppy food

See, it took me 34 minutes to get that typed out, what with the forays into the garden for various bodily excretions.

Slubber, she is a proper Andrex puppy, have just taken another of her sitting ever so perfectly with a Look At Me, I Am A Perfect Labrador, Look How Beautifully I Can Sit face on .

going to check out puppy moggling sites

Lol @ puppy moggling. She is just beautiful

fwiw when I spoke to the natural instinct bloke I asked about their puppy range. He said they only make it as people request it (and don't want to buy the standard range for their puppies) because we have all been so thoroughly brainwashed educated by the dog food manufacturers that puppies need special food. He was very helpful on the quantities and weights I needed to feed Elsie when we took the barf plunge [nice]

Iirc all that is different is that you feed a puppy a different % of their body weight than an adult dog, can't for the life of me remember what it is now though

I bet minimu will know, as will the folk on Brit barf.

I started the BritBarf process but there was an email requirement that I didn't have - non-internet based or something? All mine flag me up a Potential Troll Material .

You have confirmed my gut (fnar fnar) instinct re. BARF puppy food. I don't need it, do I? I might just go straight onto the minced chicken stuff, bit of tripe, bit of egg, bit of liver and see what happens.............................

And get DH to just buy a blooming freezer so I can get a billion tons of meat from Landywoods.

No I don't think you do need to do special barf puppy food. All I remember is that the %s are different and i would probably check about offal %s too.

Took me a few attempts to join britbarf but I got there in the end. Invaluable info there, is it worth e-mailing the bloke who runs it to see if you can join that way?

Have finally found the Raw Food book I used when switching Mabel over in the huge teetering pile of crap on the kitchen chair my filing system.

It says chicken wings from the get-go, along with anything else you fancy. 10% of current weight or 2-3% of predicted adult weight spread over 4 meals, same proportion of offal, etc. No need to phase the kibble out either.

Yippee - bye bye icky smelly BETA poos .

If it's any help my breeder (whippy not lab) told my not to give raw eggs until 6mo+ until then to stick to scrambled.

Okay, may give the eggs a miss for a while then. Do you know why?

She had a chicken wing for breakfast - took her about 15 minutes to demolish it, some minced chicken and beef for lunch & supper with leftover veg from last night and another chicken wing for dinner.

I think she thinks there's some kind of Food God in the house, she nearly falls over as she runs to her bowl, her tail is wagging that hard .

No I never asked, sorry. Actually I wonder if it is rather outdated advice. At one time eggs would have carried a higher Samonella risk than they do now and puppies are more susceptible to Salmonella than adult dogs. However I just stuck to giving them scrambled with a little goats milk twice a week.

Bless her, she sounds lovely.