RAW

Feeding

	Where we come from!
	Hannah - our first Dane
	Dane rescue
	Where we are today

We are the Rentcome family, living in Houston Texas.  Allan and Tracey, born and raised in the UK, are proud to be the first generation of Rentcome’s that are  Naturalized Citizens in the USA. Emma, our oldest daughter was born in the UK, and moved with us to Houston when she was 18 months old.  Jessica (Middle daughter) and Sarah (Youngest daughter) are both Native Houstonians. We live in the suburbs with our two Danes, Scooter and Stanley, our cats, Skittles, Ashley, Marty, Ellis and Kelvin, our African Grey Parrot, Charmie, Sassy the veiled chameleon and an assortment of small critters and fish.

We began raw feeding back in the early 80’s. Of course, we didn’t know that was really what it was then. We had bought our first Great Dane puppy (Hannah) and her breeder gave us a specific care and diet sheet and told us to follow all the directions. Included as part of the diet was “Green Tripe” (ground whole unbleached ruminant stomachs) and “Pet Mince”.(various “leftovers” of the  meat industry, including fat, bones, skin, organs, lungs, meat and trimmings, ground together).   Both of these things were readily available at the pet stores in the UK back then (prior to Mad Cow being an issue).

Hannah grew steadily, and slowly and developed into a beautiful, robust and healthy Dane, who rarely needed a vet visit until her very later years (she passed to the Bridge at the age of 12 years). Hannah stayed on a raw diet until we moved to the States with her, where “Green Tripe” and “Pet Mince” weren’t in the pet stores. Everyone in America fed “kibble” and we wanted the best kind for her. We started on a road of ever mundane results with kibble feeding until we added a new Dane puppy to the family.

This girl had one problem after another, immune system issues, general health issues of a fairly minor nature and at six months was showing the signs of Hip Dysplasia. I was frustrated at the lack of results with this puppy, and the constant rounds of antibiotics, prednisone and toxic dips the traditional vet was offering to “fix” the problems that were not working at all (just suppressing the symptoms).

 Around that time the “trendy” BARF diet began to be talked about in the US. Dr Ian Billinghurst, an Australian vet, was revolutionizing the lives of pets and their owners by talking about taking back control of their pets’ diets and feeding them a Bones And Raw Food diet (or Biologically Appropriate Raw Food diet). Suddenly the logic hit me and we went “back to raw”. I was a bit hesitant at first, as I had never done the whole chicken parts previously, only ground food. I can remember being nervous about feeding chicken frames thinking they were “too sharp” and keeping them stored in my freezer for a couple of weeks until I felt that my dogs could probably handle them.

Hannah was SO happy to have her “real food” back. The puppy was easy to switch and within weeks her coat was better looking, the UTI’s stopped and she appeared to be getting healthier. A couple of really NICE side effects of the raw food was beautifully clean teeth and fresher breath (well, they are still dogs after all J) and their poop was no longer a huge pile of waste grains and fillers. They were passing neatly digested firm, small stools that didn’t make you gag (of course there is some smell, it is still poop J)

Oh, I need to mention the cats too. They used to be hooked on kibble. I started to think, hmm, if this is so great for the dogs, what about the cats? I began switching them over and they liked it. They still preferred kibble given a choice, but who doesn’t sometimes pick a donut over an apple? Grain, fat, salt and sugar are all highly addictive, and when they are all in one product its kind of hard to resist!

The biggest change I noticed in the cat change over to raw was the litter boxes. With five cats, I keep four litter boxes. They used to all be in the utility room where the cats also slept at night. In the morning my husband had to go through there to get to his car. We used to call it “running the gauntlet” because it would smell so bad first thing in the morning even though I was  changing all four litter boxes out completely every day!  Within a week of switching them totally over to raw, the smell was different. I would love to say my cats poop doesn’t stink, but the reality is, it’s still poop! J  But the urine isn’t so awful, and the poop smell isn’t like it was because their poops are smaller and more digested (less waste) and I can now do my litter boxes twice  a week without any problems.

In late 1999 I began a small rescue group for Great Danes in local shelters. I put all the rescue dogs straight onto raw food when they arrived and we had some amazing results. The dogs gained weight steadily and smoothly, their coats and teeth improved immensely and we were able to not have to pay for dental cleanings. Our first rescue vet thought we were getting dentals done at another clinic because the dogs’ teeth were so clean within a week. He eventually took me to one side and said, I can give you a good price on the dentals too if you want? I explained we didn’t DO dentals, just Raw! And he was amazed that the teeth could be changed so much in such a short time with such a simple remedy.

The raw diet also brought spectacular results with anemic dogs (most rescue dogs came in infested with internal and external parasites and almost all were anemic at their first visit). Whenever we would get a new dog into the program that was sorry looking, thin, sick, whatever, my vet began to say to me after a while, take him/her home and do the Voo Doo that You Do!  We rarely planned medical steps on that first visit, as we knew that dog would look very different within a week or two of raw food and more natural care.

Over time I found that the dogs all did great on the raw diet, but it could be hard to convince a new adopter to continue on the raw once the dogs went home. I had several very willing families that could see that was the best way for their dogs, but others either didn’t have the time or the resources to keep up with it. Raw feeding isn’t difficult for Dane owners, but “more” – with a Giant breed dog, you can feed between 2 lb and 8lb of food per DAY (for a growing puppy), so to keep things more affordable, it is best to find “bulk” cases of things to buy. This leads to needing somewhere to defrost and re-bag (usually a shower or bathtub) and the desire to haul and bag and clean up that much mess.

In July of 2002, I began ordering a raw diet product that would make the keeping up with the diet thing much more accessible and affordable for the average pet owner. I ordered it for my own dogs with some extra for the rescues to go home with. From there I could see there was a bigger need for the local pet owners needing options other than the grocery store or ordering and shipping small orders via the internet (because the frozen shipping costs are HORRIBLE!).

That journey has taken me to the place I am now – with a full service store offering a variety of quality food and nutritional supplement products, dietary consulting help, books and more. I have been feeding raw to my own animals for the past 8 years, and have switched dozens of dogs over to a raw diet. I have nursed seriously ill puppies and adults through various illnesses using raw food as a core basis for better health and am able to use that experience to help others make that switch.  I keep current on the newest information by reading the relevant books published on raw diets, natural healing and more. I also participate in many raw feeding oriented e-mail lists to keep abreast of the latest information, trends, data and research as it evolves. I have a local E-mail group that is specifically for Houston area residents to share raw feeding tips, information and stories. We share advice and who has the best sale on things that week. It’s a nice group of friendly people who all share the love of their pets as a common thread. Click on the link if you think you would be interested in visiting with us in cyberspace!

A raw diet is basically a combination of raw meaty bones (approximately 60%) muscle meat (10%), Organs/offal (20%) and pulped vegetable matter (10%).  These percentages are only intended as a guideline or starting place. The beauty of this diet (and its total frustration at times!) is that there is no EXACT formula for every single dog to be fed. You can adjust the diet to include more muscle or vegetable matter if the dog is constipated, reduce organs a little if they don’t tolerate them well and so on. The components of this diet don’t have to be all fed at once, at every meal (a complete, balanced diet), but can be combined in any percentage over the course of several meals so that all nutrients are offered (and consumed). 

How difficult is it to do?

 The pet food industry has us SO totally brainwashed to think that not only does every meal our pets eat have to be “complete and balanced” But that we, as a nation are clearly too stupid to provide for our animals nutritionally.  This is simply not true. While there may be people who choose not to read the books or learn how to “do it themselves” , the basics of the diet are so straightforward that after “getting the hang of it” you will look back at your early days and laugh at how nervous you were to begin with.   

 Lets face it, if they will let women out of the hospital with a brand new human baby, with no “user manual”,  without so much as a blink of an eye, why would feeding a pet be any harder? I would far rather outsmart a dog that doesn’t want to eat veggies than a four year old!

A raw diet is just that. Not cooked. Just out of the fridge and into the bowl – so its not really that much harder than feeding kibble if you get a system down.  You may have to do some “processing” if you want to do everything for yourself, such as pulping veggies in a blender or juicer, cutting larger pieces of food down to manageable sizes to have in your house, re-bagging cases of food into smaller serving sizes and storing them in the freezer and so on.

I buy the expensive brands of pet food, isn’t that better?

Remember Solient Green? Imagine living your life, eating only “people kibble” every day. How do you feel when you eat too much junk food over the course of a couple of days? Do you ever LONG for a nice crisp apple? A fresh, cold, juicy salad?  A hot, seared, flavorful steak? A plate of perfectly prepared veggies, seasoned and cooked JUST right? Hmmm….me too! But what about our pets? Most pet owners never stop to think about what they feed their pets unless they are in the Pet store (or worse, the grocery store!) or they have a specific health issue they are dealing with and another pet food offers specific help in that area.

The truth is that most dog (and cat) foods are based on grain. This is necessary to produce kibble. The grain allows the product to be extruded into kibble “bits” and baked. However, grain (as it appears in dog and cat food) is not a normal part of a carnivores diet. The kibble industry was born to use up the “by products” of other industries. Even if your kibble lists “meat” or “meat meal” is its first ingredient, it may do so by breaking up the grain content in the food into separate “ingredients” (for example, rice, rice flour and rice bran are all still rice!) so that no one part is larger than the meat portion, but when added together, the “grains” form the largest percentage of the diet. Bad for dogs and horrible for cats!

When the nicely dressed “vet” in the TV ads is pointing to his charts and talking about chicken, lamb, rice and vegetables (among other things) our minds automatically pull up pictures of things we are familiar with – a bowl of nice white fluffy rice from the Chinese restaurant, a whole, plump fresh chicken in the grocery store meat section, fresh, individual, perfect vegetables on a produce stand. However the reality is, that is NOT what is necessarily in your pets’ food. For more information about what is IN your pets food, and what the ingredients actually are, check out this link www.doberdogs.com (Earl Wolfe’s excellent site!)   or www.ingredients101.com  (an animal feed site, based on horses but interestingly enough covers some of the protein items found in companion animal food).

Instead of what you picture in your mind when you think of chicken try this – whole or partial chickens with a reason why it can’t be accepted into the human food chain (abcess, cancer, incorrectly processed and contaminated with feces and more). Now add a denaturing agent required by law to keep unapproved meat OUT of the people food chain (charcoal is one of the most common, so is bright green dye). Some dog food companies will tell you that the USDA doesn’t approve meat for the dog food industry. While that is true, it DOES approve meat for human consumption. There is no reason why your dog food can’t contain USDA inspected and approved meat, other than cost to the manufacturer or the manufacturers personal preference. There ARE pet foods out there that use USDA inspected and approved meat sources.

Now let’s think of the grain. Forget the nice fluffy whole grains; imagine what is left on the floor of a processing plant when they are done with the people food. Yep, the sweepings from the floor, damaged or unapproved for humans grains. Yummy…NOT! Also, lumped in with the grains we can take a brief look at “fiber”.  It seems fiber can be pretty much anything in dog food that is not digestible, that will produce “acceptable” stools and not kill your dog. This can include beet pulp (horse feed, check it out when you add water to it – it swells for four times its own size! For a very funny beet pulp story – check out this link 

http://www.shadyacres.com/susan/squirrel.shtml 

 Peanut Hulls – yep, not even the whole peanut, just the shells! In the bags of food on the shelves of most every practicing vet in the USA. Can anyone say “conflict of interest”? (this would also fall into the category of why you shouldn’t be overly concerned when your vet tells you NOT to feed anything but commercial or home cooked dog food) – you need to know what their perspective is when forming that opinion, including how many raw fed dogs they actually see in their practice and what books they have actually read on animal nutrition and feeding).

So, back to“dog kibble”. When you take these less than great ingredients, add them together and then cook the hell out of them to make them “safe” to eat (By whose standards?) then you have basically made an unpalatable dry pellet. So now you have to make them appealing to a dog (or cat). That is where fats, dried digest and tocopherals come in. Not all fats are equal, but for generalization, the ones in pet food will be considered to be the most cost effective (i.e. cheap).

What about fats?

 What about fats? What do you think of when you read that? A pristine slab of butter? Maybe a bottle of cooking oil? A tub of lard? Keep going you aren’t even close yet – basically, for pet food purposes they come from rendered products.

From www.renderers.org

To Render: “to reduce, convert or melt down (fat) by heating” from French “rendre” – “to give back” and indeed rendering does give back.  Animal by-products that would otherwise have been discarded (my emphasis ) have for centuries been rendered into fat which is an essential ingredient in the manufacture of soap, candles, glycerin, industrial fatty acids and more recently of animal and protein meals as feed supplements for companion and meat-producing animals, poultry and fish (again, my emphasis). YUK!

That big vat of grease behind the fast food restaurants? Rendered. All the out of date bad meat from the grocery stores, including the packaging plastics and meat tray liners? Rendered. In some instances, euthanized pets, including their flea and tick collars, regular collars and tags, drugs they were taking prior to death and the drugs used to kill them? Rendered. UMMM – anyone hungry yet? For more on rendering check out this (but not if you are eating!) http://www.purehealthsystems.com/render.html

SO, that’s pretty much the basics that got ME started back on the path to raw. If you are now also considering it, feel free to join raw feeding lists on the internet, do lots of research, read books (Anne Martins “Foods Pets Die For”, Sue Johnsons “Switching to Raw”, Kymythy Schultz “The Ultimate Diet” and Dr Ian Billinghursts original book, Give your Dog a Bone are all excellent places to start. Then consider Dr Marty Goldstein’s “The Nature of Animal Healing”, and if you have a strong stomach Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation .

My dogs and cats eat meat, bones, organs, veggies and occasionally “GASP” table scraps. How about your pets?

How does Bones2Go! Work?

Basically, you are going “virtual” shopping. Grab a cup of coffee or a large iced tea and shop to your hearts content.  I carry quality prepared food products from Bravo! Raw diets, Aunt Jeni’s Home Made 4 Life, whole meat and bone Buddy’s Natural Chicken and many other items. I also have the full line of B-Naturals pet supplements including Green Blend, Daily Blend, Immune Blend, Bertes Zymes, Probiotics, Salmon Oil, Flax Oil and more. I even have raw feeding books if you want to study first!

Whether you are a brand new to raw food person looking for total convenience (ground, pre-mixed foods), a raw feeder with some experience looking for a few convenience items (pulped veggies, ground organ meats or smaller “volume” purchases than a 60 lb case), or even if you a very experienced raw feeder that doesn’t hardly ever feed ground anything, but might be looking for some variety or exotic items not easily found in the local grocery stores (Kangaroo, green tripe, beef cheek meat and so on), there will be something for everyone (well, at least for their pet!).   Just fill up your “cart” and when you are ready to check out you can choose to pay online (via PayPal) or mail a check.  You will be contacted with a pick up date for your food. I keep most things in stock, so can usually fill an order within 24 hours, sometimes a little longer for “specialty” items.

I am interested in learning more about raw feeding – where do I start?

 Regardless of whether you are feeding a dog, a cat or a ferret, the principles of the raw diet are the same. Balance over time. Cats and ferrets require a little closer attention to their diets as they are true obligate carnivores, whereas dogs are a little more opportunistic in their feeding habits. If you want to learn more about raw feeding, or if you are already raw feeding and your friends don’t appreciate your tales of chicken necks with the head still attached, I  would recommend that you join the e-group   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HoustonRawFeeders/  for support, general raw feeding based chats and information sharing. While I would LIKE to be the sole meat supplier to the entire Houston area, sometimes Wal-Mart or Krogers has me beat and this is the place to find out about it! J Even non-locals are welcome to join, we have a nice friendly list atmosphere and all are welcome.

If you want to get started raw feeding right now and want a feeding plan customized for your pet(s) along with enough food to last a month, contact us about our “RAWing Start” packages for small, medium, large or giant sized pets.

If you have any questions feel free to e-mail us at traceyr@ev1.net or bones2go@sbcglobal.net

We Look forward to MEATING you!