Making your own food: Wendy Volhard’s Natural Diet for your puppy

Making one’s own dog food is hardly a new idea. Every dog alive today can trace its ancestry back to dogs that were raised on homemade diets. The dog food industry, in comparison to dogs themselves, is young — maybe 60 to 70 years old — although canned meat for dogs was sold at the turn of the 20thcentury. Originally, the commercial foods were made to supplement a home-made diet.A homemade diet allows you to tailor make it for your dog’s nutritional needs, and it’s ideal for all dogs. The drawback to this type of feeding is that it takes time to make and gather all the ingredients.

Many, but not all, present-day dogs are the beneficiaries of poor breeding practices, a lack of understanding of genetics on the part of many breeders, and 30 years of overvaccination and poor nutrition. Because of poor genetics (whether pure bred or a mixed breed), many can’t thrive on commercially prepared rations. They exhibit disease states, which often are mistaken for allergies. These disease states can be deficiency diseases caused by feeding cereal-based foods or foods where the fat has turned rancid. Making the food from scratch often is the only available option for these dogs.

We began making our own dog food almost 40 years ago. Based on the pioneering work of Juliette de Bairacli Levy and the National Science Foundation’s guidelines for dog food, our homemade diet was a 12-year labor of love to get the balance required. The results were amazing, as seen by Pavi, a Newfoundland who competed in both agility and obedience com-petitions until he was almost 12 years old. He garnered more than 20 titles.

You can see Pavi in competition in Figure 4-3. The diet increases health and longevity, contains a lot of moisture in the natural ingredients, and produces more manageable stools. Plus dogs love to eat it. We’re still seeing great results today with the newer dehydrated versions of the food. See the later section “Using the Natural Diet Foundation (NDF2)” for more information.

For more information on raising your dog holistically, transferring to a purely Natural Diet, making the diet and storing it, as well as a list of suppliers for ingredients, go to www.volhard.com. You also can look to the Holistic Guide for a Healthy Dog,2nd Edition, by Wendy Volhard and Kerry Brown, DVM (Howell Book House). The easiest way to travel with homemade or NDF2 diets is to make the required number of meals and freeze them in portion-control plastic bags.

Keep the bags in a cooler, adding ice every day. You can travel safely up to 10 days using this method of packing the food.

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