Mija Basenjis are BARF dogs

Feeding Your New Puppy

AT LAST I HAVE MY NEW PUPPY!

Most folk, as soon as they get their new puppy home want to feed it straight away. Usually that is not a great idea. My advice is, if you must feed the pup, do do not let it eat a lot. If it is allowed to eat as much as it wants to, which a lot of new owners just love to see, it drastically overeats. It eats as if it had never been fed before. It overeats because it is used to competing with a heap of hungry puppies for food.

That new puppy has no idea it has been removed from it's mum, it's brothers and sisters, from the humans it was used to and from the surroundings, which it loved and called home.

Sometime in the next 24 hours all this will dawn on your new puppy. The realization of being lost and lonely and miserable. Meanwhile, with all that food in it's little tummy, particularly if it's food it's not used to, you will almost certainly see digestive upsets, colic and diarrhea.

That pup which a few hours ago seemed like a bottomless pit, now refuses to eat anything, including what the breeder assured you it had been getting as it's full time diet.

That is why so many folk turn up at the vets within 12 to 24 hours of their new pup's arrival. They present their vet with a miserable, lethargic bundle of puppy suffering from putrid watery diarrhea, and maybe some vomiting.

Wolf Cubs Growing Up

By looking at young wolves growing up, we are actually observing our young puppy's ancestors. If we couple that with our modern scientific discoveries about diet, health and aging, we should be able to produce a realistic, health promoting, puppy diet.

Wolf cubs grow up hungry, they grow slowly and they eat a lot of bones. They spend their day in play, in sleeping, in scavenging, and eating. Eating little bits all the time, and bigger meals as food becomes available. They are not fed on any sort of regular basis. Sometimes they go for a couple of days without much food.

All their food is raw. Nothing is cooked. That single fact is vitally important. Wild dogs eat totally raw food all the time. Their whole digestive system, their whole physiology demands raw food.

Your puppy is no different. For your puppy's health sake, most of it's food should be raw.

Wild puppies eat or try to eat just about everything they come across. This includes soil, the stomach contents of their parent's prey, mostly chewed up and fermenting grass; raw meat, raw bones, raw offal such as heart, kidneys, brains, eyes etc; raw vegetables, raw fruit, raw grass, raw berries, raw insects, raw bark, raw roots, raw faeces etc.. You name it and they eat it or try to eat it. All raw, nothing cooked.

Young wolf cubs do not seriously hunt. They play. When they have finished playing they stop and rest. No long boring walks on a lead for wolf cubs......

In the wolf family, eating is based strictly on an individual's position in the pecking order, or order of dominance. When times are tough, a wolf who is low on the pecking order goes hungry. This is important when it comes to understanding how to feed domestic puppies.

Weaned wolf puppies, puppies abandoned by mum, are left to fend for themselves. They are at the bottom of the pecking order. This means they are the last ones to eat. No preferential treatment like our modern pups.

Those half starved puppies, fighting amongst themselves do not get to eat a lot. Mostly, it is whatever the adults leave. The result is that what they do manage to eat, the central theme of their diet is raw meaty bones, and not much else.

The "not much else" is important however. It includes material such as bits and pieces of internal organs, bits of intestines with their finely crushed grass and other vegetation-type contents, some faeces, and whatever else they can find that seems remotely edible.

The pup's hunger is important. Firstly, it drives those wild puppies to supplement and balance their diet by scavenging and hunting. They learn to eat a wide array of food types. Whatever they find in the way of fruit, insects, roots, edible fungi, soil, berries, grass, etc. they eat. The second thing it ensures, is that they never grow at their maximum pace.

From studying the eating habits of wolf cubs which are seen to be perpetually hungry, subsisting on raw food consisting mostly of bones and being forced to scavenge a wide variety of foods, we get four vital clues about successful puppy raising.

Four Vital Clues

Number one... The bulk of a puppy's diet should consist of raw meaty bones.

Number two... all or most of the rest of their food should also be raw.

Number three... Puppies should always be kept hungry. They should never be grown at their maximum growth rate. They should be kept slim, lean and hard. Guard against roly poly, fat, young puppies.

Number four... puppies should learn to eat everything.

BACK