Natural Instinct/Prey Model Diet - help needed

[letrec_fan]

Hi there,

First off, please excuse the long/convoluted post! Any help is appreciated!

I currently feed our dogs NI. However, I think the company is changing and there is talk that perhaps the quality of the food will reduce? I don't know, but I am looking at potential alternatives.

I think we have been on raw long enough now that we could make a good go of doing our own raw food. However, I would still like to feed a mince if possible for some bone, as one of ours is still a little possessive (but couldn't handle some of the stuff I know raw feeders feed) and the other was sick last time I fed her bits of chicken carcass. I do not know if this was coincidence but now I am struggling to convince the rest of the family that she should be fine eating some bone. I held it in my hand and made sure she chewed it properly so I hope it was just coincidence or her not being used to whole bone yet.

Anyway, I found a company that do free range chicken pet mince - which is cheaper per kilogram than the NI (but I would expect it to be as it doesn't have all the added veg/oil/vit C). Just sent them an email and he averaged the % as 70% bone, 30% meat - this sounds like an awful lot of bone - can this be right? I wonder if perhaps it is the other way around.

If I were to feed mince with bone, how much extra whole bone do you think would be necessary? (The pieces of chicken carcass seemed to go down okay, so I was thinking of trying wings/necks - is this sensible?) They also sell organ meat, which as far as I am aware, NI don't include in their working chicken but I will double check. Of course the other problem is that this company ONLY do chicken so it limits variety but I was thinking perhaps about doing alternate orders, not sure.

I have looked at raw2paw who deliver around our area, who sell DAF and MVM but not sure of the quality of these? I have looked at the MVM website and they seem reasonable but of course it is not free range/organic as the other company is. Not even sure if I could afford the added bits anyway if it was all free range, I need to completely work it out! (And of course it would only be free range chicken, any other free range/organic meats would be way too expensive for me to feed!) For the moment, they will stay on NI, just throwing a few ideas around!

Thanks for any help, I know there are a lot of raw feeders on here.

 

[jodie3]

Have you tried 'theyloveit' dog food?

They do chicken mince and carcasses and I think they are starting to expand their range now too.

 

[letrec_fan]

Thank you for your reply. No, I haven't heard of them, I will have to take a look. Thank you.

 

[{97702}]

MVM definitely do organic options - I know this as I feed MVM to my dogs They are superior in quality to DAF from the feedback I have seen.

I would recommend you feed more variety than just chicken to your dogs, MVM do a great range of minces with and without bone as you will have seen. As an example the minced chicken carcasses that MVM do are 50/50 bone ratio, so you would not need to feed additional bone to achieve the 80:10:10 ratio over the week unless you wanted to for teeth-cleaning etc.

If you are on Facebook there are MVM pages on there which have spreadsheets which show the bone content of all the relevant MVM minces

 

[letrec_fan]

Thank you Picklenash. I didn't realise MVM did organic options. I quite liked the idea of the free range chicken but I couldn't afford to order from two different places really and I would prefer to feed variety, as you say. The 50/50 ratio is ideal for us, so that sounds good. As I said, our big dog seems to enjoy the bones and is relatively safe with them, doesn't gulp, but I would worry about higher value bones like a big slab of ribs or something! She could potentially get food aggressive with something like that, which is why I like feeding the chicken bones. I will have a look at the Facebook pages, thank you! Do you know whether MVM themselves deliver in the south east? I know raw2paw stock them and deliver in our area, just wondering.

 

[letrec_fan]

Just had a look at the MVM facebook page and I see there is a lot more variety avaliable than there is on the raw2paw website.

 

[michelleice]

I use west fife raw feeds there are based in Scotland but deliver all over the uk

They will do a meal plan to your budget and there raw is top quality with out the high price tag