Hungry Eyes
This month has been all about us figuring out Lilly's diet. When we got her she came with half a 20Kg bag of Aldi's dry dog food. From what we know this was what she was given in the morning and left to eat it throughout the day.
I'm not going to say this is a bad thing, as Lilly looked healthy enough on it, but to me it didn't feel like the right thing, so with the advice from my friend, who is a 25 year veteran of working with dogs as a trainer and a groomer, we decided to move her onto a better complete dry food, Burns, and see how things went.
We picked the the Chicken & Brown Rice bag, and with a teeny bit of trepidation she began to nibble away. So far, so good, but the following week we picked the Lamb & Brown Rice bag. This one didn't go down so well, and in the last third of the bag we had to mix it with tuna just to get her to eat it.
I still had the feeling that this wasn't the way to go, and after a long chat to a vet at a trade show who was highly pro-raw, and another chat with my trainer friend, who coincidentally also has a Lurcher and feeds her a raw food diet, I looked into the options.
After a lot of web surfing to find out what to do, and what dogs can eat, we decided that an already mixed complete raw food would be the way to go, and that I had to look for a DEFRA approved company.
In my past working life I used to work for the family business, and we had a warehouse that was next door to Burns Animal Foods wholesaler, so I had a look on t'internet to see if they sold to the public, and, after a quick call with a lovely lady there, one hour later I was handed a box of samples for Lilly to try out. Once defrosted we decided to just go for it, and swap her straight into the raw meat.
O.M.G. What a difference!
Instead of a pooch that we thought was not very food orientated we discovered we had a very greedy carnivore on our hands. She bloody loves it!
We tried all the different versions, and decided the only flavour that would never ever be brought back into our house was the Beef & Tripe. The reason is quite simple - Deadly Dog Farts!! Honestly, I dared not open the front door in case the neighbours could see and smell the green mist emanating from Lilly's bottom.
The best consequence of this episode is that Lilly seemed to scare herself every time she farted, which is incredibly funny to watch, and brought tears to our eyes (though it could have been the tear gas effect, we're still not sure).
The only downside is that because she is enjoying her meal time so much, we are having to ration treats in case she becomes a little chunkster, which means she is working her big brown sad eyes on us, and it is hard to resist. Really hard!