Well I wasnt sure if this post should have gone here, under cooking, big game, or under boars but here it goes...
My wife and I have a little sight hound, a whippet. My wife has become crazzed about feeding the dog a "all natural" meat diet of wild game, which suites my line of work just fine. My question is... what game is best suited for dogs? How should I butcher it(cuts, ground etc)do you have any dog recipes? I dont mind just waltzing into the whole idea but thought I would ask a few fellows here first. Ill probably take an wild boar first. How about other game... deer, pronghorn elk.

Oh no! Have you ever seen a fat wolf or coyote outside a zoo? I asked my vet once and that's the first question that he asked me. Although they are considered carniverous, they are really, at least part, omniverous. To get the "right" nutrients, your dogs would have to eat mainly organs and the content of the stomach and gut. This is what animals, in the wild, do first. There is also the big possibility of disease transfer if the meat is not cooked properly. sorry to be so negative, capt david

Yep I used to feed our dachshunds sheep tripes and beef & sheep liver as well as some lean pork and varying amounts of animal fat for their coats. This was added to a mix of brown biscuit, carrots,garlic, oat and cormeal sometimes and brown rice. It smelled pretty bad, but they loved it.

Essentially dogs are alot like us, they are ominivores, who like mostly meat. ha ha. My vet says that the problem with all natural diets even if you have access to good sources is simply the smell. In the tropics, doggies go smelly on a heavy meat diet.

My mini dachs now eats a combi of dry biscuit and expensive canned dog chow and is actually better muscled and healthier than my previous dogs that had an all natural diet. Weird.

good luck with feeding the dogs, at least it'll be a fantastic excuse to shoot more.

tm.

I made the terrible mistake one time of feeding our terrier raw pork, he had to make a trip to the doggie doc and cost us around $150.00. It seems their pancreas (spelling?) cant stand a lot of raw pork, so I was told to boil it first or plan on spending more time in the vets office, not to mention almost haveing to sleep on the couch because I made our "child" sick. I still give him lots of raw deer meat, (it does tend to give him gas), when I am trimming steaks or whatever, but no more raw pork for my little critter. Take heed or you might be on the couch also.



Good luck and good shooting,

Eterry

Uh, yeah! Morphologically, dogs are scavengers, not predators, according to the latest developments in DNA analysis, etc. So an "all natural" diet will require a good vegetable garden along with the game meat and I suspect that pupdog will prefer seasoning and all the savory goodness that comes along with cooking. They've become so much like us over the last 10,000 years that we need to treat them kind of like we treat ourselves, not like wild animals.

I had a German Sheppard that would not eat raw meat, lol. i had to cook it first. He prefered medium.

well these are all good suggestions, trust me... I will try not to make any rash decisions. I feed him vegis' already and he eats them. Thats funny about the coyotes... in areas lower in elevation then mine many many of the coyotes eat mesq beans . I have always been amazed by their adaptations. The coyotes near my property eat lead. They never seem to digest a 130 grain lead sausage at 3150fps fast enough, it just passes right through their system.

I was surprised on my recent pig hunt to see the dogs afterwards eating the innards of the pigs, the stuff from the chest not the stomach/bladder. I asked the guide about it and he said when they hunt that is what they get to eat when the day is over and it has never got them sick or anything else. they didn't seem to go after the intestines much, but they were liking other stuff, liver etc.

Red