Hello all!

I feed both my dogs a raw meat diet of mostly whole chickens (organic or almost organic). Fish makes them stink reaaaaal bad. I give beef occasionally. Their @#$%& does not smell and they have no gas (all good signs for me) However...

My one dog has a lot of drainage in her eyes. It really acts up when I give them fish, but it is still around with just chicken and other raw meats. My dogs eyes are cloudy and yellowish...not bright and white as I'd hoped they'd be. I do include a reasonable amount of organ meat.

I read Ann Phyo's book and she has a part at the end where she says she feeds her dogs a raw vegan diet and that her dog does beautifully well. I think I am going to try it for a month and see the difference.

What I am interested in knowing is if there are others who had personal experience feeding their dogs a raw vegan diet. Had you fed raw meat previously? What was the difference? I already know all of the arguments for feeding prey-model or BARF diets. While I do not want to stifle anyone's opinions I would like to keep this thread focused on benefits of raw vegan diets for dogs. I would like to hear CONS of the vegan diet for dogs ONLY if someone has had personal experience with it (as in they tried it and it didn't work for them). I only say this, because I am trying to get a balanced view of BOTH the pro-meat and pro-vegan diets for pets. I would be confused if my quest to hear the vegan-dog perspective got sidetracked by arguments from the pro-meat side (unless the pro-meat argument came from someone who actually tried the vegan diet themselves). Does that make any sense? Hope that doesn't offend anyone. I look forward to your comments!

Musicbebe

hi there musicbebe! how is it going with the diet switch for the dogs? i don't have dogs myself but i work with dogs and cats daily, and based on my experience i believe that dogs would do really well on a raw vegan diet. cats are true carnivores, they need a meat based diet. dogs, however, are omnivorous. it seems like a diet that has everything a dog needs for health, regardless of where it comes from (animal products vs. fresh veggies and nuts), would be great. i'm not sure that a dog would get everything he/she needs from a meat only diet. good luck, and i'm interested to hear how the progress is going!

Hi musicbebe

This is a UK shop that sells commercial (vegetarian) dog food

[www.veggiepets.com]

They have some tips and stuff on there

Also, check out the pets threads on veganforum.com:

[www.veganforum.com]

Thanks radomeag and rawnoggin for your replies. The dogs seemed to do well on the raw vegan diet. They had no gas and their @#$%& didn't stink, just like on the raw meat diet. I wasn't able to continue it long enough though to see other benefits, such as if the eye sludge would stop or their breath got better. I got hit with SEVERE morning sickness and the thought of making that raw food vegan for them or even going back to handling meat was repulsive for me. I lost some weight myself. I am still in the process of trying to get myself to eat food and raw food especially. Unfortunately my poor puppies are eating kibble right now (one of the best I could find at least--Merrick). They have awful gas and their @#$%& smell worse than on the other diets. So both a meat based diet and raw vegan diet sound better to me as of now. One more thing I noticed on the raw vegan diet was that their @#$%& seemed softer than on the raw meat diet. It was also about the same volume as the @#$%& on the raw meat diet. However the @#$%& on the raw meat diet turned white (I think because it was just bone material left, though that did indicate to me that they were assimilating and using almost all of the actual meat). The @#$%& was the normal dark color on raw-vegan, but smaller like when on the raw meat. The @#$%& on the kibble is very volumous and smells worse (though not as bad as a poor quality kibble diet would make). I will keep you all updated whenever I am well enough to return to making them the raw vegan diet.