Digi is sick again... Can Vegan be an option?

[king2005]

I'm kind of confused... do you mean Orijen tells you how to make a home-cooked diet?

Not really.. what it does tell me is that 70% of the recipe is meat & 40% is veggies/fruits... I was going to use it as a ratio to aid in how to make food for Digi. I was also going to try to get all the veggies they list so I could add it to my recipe. This way I know what veggies are safe & prob the better to have.

http://www.dogaware.com/wdjhomemade3.html

I only skimmed through the site to take a quick peek at it.. It looks awesome!! Its the best site I have seen so far. I haven't been impressed with most sites so I have felt quite lost & somewhat helpless.

That's a really good place to start, with some example meals/supplements. It also has lots of raw info. First and foremost, make sure you are balancing out phosphorus and calcium. That means, meat and bone. You must provide a bone meal in addition to meat, hence why raw diets are so easy (not to mention that bones are built-in teeth cleaners). I would not recommend pressure cooking bones into mush, as much of the nutritional value will be lost. It's way easier to just feed muscle meat, if you cannot feed raw bones, and measure out exact amounts of bone meal or ground eggshells.

What I was planning on doing was buying a whole chicken, as I can get them for 5.00 for 1 or 2 birds (LOVE the area I live in!). The bird is typically gutted & de-feathered & thats it.. it has its head, wings, tail, legs & neck still attached (they are not easy to look at). Some might come with the gizzards, but I can buy them in small packs of a specific organ (heart/liver).

So I was going to Pressure cook the whole bird (no veggies, just bird) so the bones would be safe.

After reading the site quickly I saw the ratio of egg shell I can use... 1/2 /1lbs meat.

My next plan was to cool the meat & then blend it into nothingness. Add the powdered eggshell (can't use bonemeal) & mix together.

Then I was going to blend a mix of raw veggies & cooked Sweet Potato (read somewhere today that potato has to be cooked for dogs) together.

Add 70% of the cooled meat mixture to a container & then add 40% of the blended veggie mixture to the container.

& in theory that should be a healthy meal... What do you think?

It does sound like a really good idea to feed homemade. I would never, ever, ever force an opportunistic carnivore to eat vegan for life. Is there any reason that you have an aversion to raw? Just curious.

I don't have an aversion to raw. But with Digi's gut we can't afford to add any sort of "bad" bacteria to her gut, & giving her something easier to digest is best (raw bones take time to digest & her body might try to pass it onto the intestines too quickly or her system could freakout).

Also Digi has no body fat (zip) so there is no padding on her belly to absorb any shock to it, so when shes playing, she easily can put a lot of pressure on her stomach where the bone can be forced to hit the stomach wall roughly (which happened in the past when I fed her raw).

This is why I'm going with cooked. Its just safer for her gut. I plan to buy supplements to help with the food loosing some nutrition as its being cooked (well the meat anyways). So in theory this should work, or at least I hope it does