Quote Originally Posted by Glacier
Wow! That's alot of food! That's why you'd be hard pressed to find a serious musher who feeds exclusively raw. It's just too hard to get enough fat and calories into a working dog. I supplement heavily with raw--mostly wild game, but the hard keepers especially, need the kibble too. I always giggle a bit when people say you can't mix the two. Every musher I know does it, usually in the same meal, without any problems.
Totally -- I have tried and tried to keep with just raw, and it just isn't working to keep their weight up with their activity. Took me a while to realise that wolves in the wild running however many miles daily may eat only raw but they also eat an entire deer LOL.
As for mixing the two, I always used to be afraid of it -- you hear the "kibble may keep the raw back and the bacteria in the raw will make the dogs sick" theory. But my dogs tend to have loose stools when I feed them kibble, so the way I look at it, it's the raw keeping the kibble back! Dogs are dogs -- they will eat rotten things covered in bacteria and not get sick (my garbage hound is living proof). So I don't see the big deal mixing kibble and raw.