Sleeping Beauty

It was a glorious night. Porter slept soundly and was not disturbed even when I got up a couple of times myself. He would take notice I was up but stayed relaxed and calm. I got up at 6:15 since I didn't want to push it. I think he had been awake off and on for the last hour but he remained quiet and only changed positions here and there. When I finally got up and opened his crate he lay there looking at me and took a few moments to slowly come out. I think I'm going to turn him into a late riser! :)

It's amazing how fast he's growing. When we brought him home two weeks ago he looked tiny next to Indigo. Now, he's only a couple of inches shorter. He still loves sleeping partially under the couch but there's not as much clearance. He was really skinny when he came home, which was hard to tell with all that fluff, but I could feel his hips a little more than I wanted but now he's filled out nicely. He's still trim since it's important to keep excess weight off of dogs, especially growing puppies and even more so with the larger breeds. I can still feel all his ribs so I like the weight he's at now. Witht he way he's growing I'll need to keep a constant watch on it.

On Sunday I switched Porter back to kibble (Solid Gold Wolf Cub for large breeds). He was doing great with the raw diet and absolutely loved it but I started second guessing myself and the diet. Indi has always done well on this diet and at 9 year old she's perfectly health, has clean teeth, and great blood work. But I found myself questioning the claims of this way of feeding and started looking up animal nutritionists.

I found one website which had a very large FAQ that I read through. It really gave me pause that animal nutritionists (who should be the most educated people on dog diets out there) do not agree with the raw diets at all. They are ok with home cooked diets that have been properly balanced. So this got me thinking...why am I ignoring the opinion of very educated and qualified people and instead listening to the claims of random people on the internet (ok, there are a couple of vets with books out there, too, but they are not nutritionists). I do find the claims of the raw diet to make a lot of sense. They just resonate with me. But I'm also very logical and like scientific backup to claims. It's like training. The training I do is proven by science to be effective. Some other methods used are shown to have fall outs yet for some trainers seem the most nature and the way that makes sense to them, yet I discount those feelings because I go with science. So why not with food? One raw website showed the skulls of carnivores and omnivores and compared them to dogs and it's true, dogs had teeth that mimics the carnivore teeth. So that science is something I need to investigate farther.

Everyone says how vets don't get enough education in nutrition so to take their diet advice with a grain of salt.   So then what would be the argument against listening to an animal nutritionist? Who would be more educated then they are?

The one thing that caused me to doubt the animal nutritionist's advice/education is she thinks Science Diet is awesome. Really? Come on. How can a food that has corn as the main ingredient and no real meat (only chicken by-products) be one of your top choices?? For someone so educated I was really shocked and it almost invalidates all the rest of her claims.

But for now, I put Porter on a large breed kibble since that is the recommendation by the animal nutritionist I was reading about. He seems to like it ok. And the biggest benefit is our training has increases tremendously since 4 times a day I dole out most of his meal as rewards for training.

I love the teeth cleaning benefit of raw so if I continue to feed kibble I will also supplement with turkey necks and such so his teeth do not get nasty.

Who knows, maybe in another week I'll flip flop again, but for now, since I am unsure about the raw diet I wanted to make a switch. Indi has always been able to flip from raw to kibble and back again without any digestive issues so that is not a concern for me. If Porter gets used to a varied diet now he should be the same.