I have been singing the praises of raw meats and fresh vegetables and fruits blanched and blended as a healthy homemade recipe for homemade dog food. And I stay with that. But what about dogs that have dental or digestive problems? Since you knew I would, I have an answer for that too.

Rice is good, but barley is better

Lean white meat chicken breast, boiled until tender (but not overcooked) and cooked barley is the perfect food for a dog with a sensitive digestive system or severe dental issues. Simply shred it so less chewing and digestion is needed. Some sources will recommend rice over cooked barley, but barley has many more nutrients than plain white rice. That is, after all, the point of this. Homemade, natural and healthy food for dogs. Fewer nutrients means less healthy. Why give your dog fillers when you can give him something nutritious and delicious?

You say natural, I say raw

It couldn’t be more natural than modeling your dog’s food after what he ate before domestication. Packs of wild dogs would attack live prey and eat it; not only benefiting from raw meats, but they inadvertently received nutrition from predigested vegetables and fruits that their prey had eaten. I have yet to read in any history book about a pack of dogs sitting around a campfire roasting their rabbit to perfection. The lack of opposable digits probably largely prohibited them from striking a match. Although humans can have health problems from eating raw meats, dogs’ digestive systems are equipped to handle most of the bacterial problems that raw meat can be responsible for.

Why do I have to grind the vegetables?

While raw meat doesn’t present a problem for most dogs’ digestive systems, vegetables are a different story. When the wild dogs got their vegetables, they had already been digested, at least partially, by their prey. Dogs’ systems have some problems with raw, hard vegetables. Blanching them takes away some of the gas they cause in a dog (of course, who needs that!) and grinding them simulates the partial digestion that would have been accomplished by their prey’s digestive system.

what to avoid

Now I know what you’re thinking. If certain vegetables and fruits are bad for dogs, how come they can eat animals that don’t discriminate in their choice of fruits and vegetables? This is something that has been altered by our domestication of dogs. Wild dogs possessed a sense that allowed them (most of the time) to stay away from things that were bad for them. They could still eat the fresh (or even ‘spoiled’) raw meat, but could ignore the internal organs that contain digested food; to the delight of the scavengers.

Dogs today will eat almost anything you put in front of them. I refer to one of my dogs as ‘Hoover’; he will pick up anything in his way and make it disappear. Unfortunately, this is something the dogs would have been better at if they hadn’t given up; their ability to discern between eating well and eating badly.