February Raw Diet Update

Today we are going to a farmer's market in order to stock up on some more varied meats. Hopeful buys will include rabbit, goat, chicken parts, liver, heart and other organs, some variety of fish, maybe quail/pheasant, duck.... If the farmer's market has it for <= $2/pound, then it will be considered.

Luna's health continues to be fine with the raw diet. We have had a couple of choking scares recently. On raw feeding FAQs, there's usually a question asking about won't-the-dog-choke-on-bones. Well, Luna has the opposite problem. She does not try to swallow bones unless they are quite small. If she's going to choke on something, she chokes on pieces of meat that are small enough to fit in her mouth, but a bit too big to squeeze down her throat. From now on, for meat-only meals, we are going to cut the meat into non-choking sizes. Raw feeding die-hards would probably not look favorably upon this, because ripping meat off bones is considered a good exercise. However, if there's no bone in the first place, there will be not as great of a work out anyways, so we don't feel bad about doing this with boneless pieces. We certainly don't want Luna to choke!

Luna went through a phase where she didn't really eat the bones. She would eat all the meat off the bones, then would gnaw on the bone throughout the day. We think it was because she was teething, seeing as we found a fallen out molar and canine in the past month. As she now has more big girl teeth, she has gone back to crunching up bones in a delicious manner (for her anyways). During the teething (?) phase, she learned to pin the bone down with her paw and rip the meat off. So now instead of just wiping her mouth afterwards, I have to wipe her paws as well.

I don't know if it's just that we got lucky, or because she's a puppy, or because of her diet, but Luna has very soft fur. We notice it even more when we go to dog parks and pet other bichon/poodle type dogs; they never have fur as soft as Luna's. We went to a bichon playgroup a couple weeks ago, figuring we'd pet at least one dog whose fur was as soft as her's. Out of the approximately 13 dogs that were there, only the 4 month old puppy came close to being at Luna's quality. Hey, I'm just reporting the facts ;)

Here's video of Luna at the bichon playgroup. Ewokgirl should appreciate the music:


Here's video of Luna's most recent dog park visit: