Natural Diet
Silklake adult Beagles and puppies are reared and fed on a natural BARF diet keeping them all extremely healthy.
The barf diet is based on raw meat and raw meaty bones along with a few mashed vegetables and added vital herbal vitamins.
Nature designed the dog to eat raw meat and bones, and their digestive tracts are built to handle just that. Dogs in the wild are still eating raw meat and bones and thriving, just as nature intended. Dogs were not designed to thrive on a cooked and processed diet consisting of predominantly grains, potatoes and rendered scrap meat products and by-products, deemed unfit for human consumption.
The benefits of feeding a raw natural diet helps support and maintain a strong immune system, something your dog will need for the whole of their life. Puppy growth is even and steady, providing vitamins and minerals in their natural state.
Dogs love eating a raw food diet, giving your dog a RAW meaty bone can provide hours of exercise and stress relief for them.
We feed our dogs on a variety of raw meat, meaty bones and mashed fruits and vegetables. The proteins we use are raw tripe, chicken hearts, chicken or duck necks, beef and organ meats. We also add in pulped vegetables to the diet, plus the dark green vegetables and fruit, free range fresh egg yolks are added to meals two or three times a week.
We purchase herbal wellbeing vitamins that provide all the necessary minerals and calcium from
thedogherbalist.co.uk for vital health to complete a balanced diet
.
At Silklake we strongly believe in a Raw Natural Diet for True Health of the Dog.
We offer help and advice on the correct diet for the In-Whelp Pregnant Bitch, naturally rearing healthy puppies, adult dog diet and the older dog diet.
Dogs fed naturally as nature intended with the addition of vital herbal minerals and vitamins will keep your dog in excellent health and ailment free throughout their life.
Silkake has practiced the Natural Diet for the dog for more than 30 years.
Dogs in the wild would naturally kill their own prey, this is the reason why raw meat and raw bones is a natural diet for the domestic dog as like their ancestors. Domestic dogs and wolves have exactly the same strong digestive tract, the prey, (example the rabbit) the dog will eat the cereal( content of the stomach, the prey would of raided the farmers crops thus why the cereal is a natural part of the dog's diet, the fur would be the roughage, we replace this with bran it helps the anal glands to empty naturally.
Commercialised unnatural dog foods can cause health problems in dogs especially as the dog ages.
Feeding your dog raw foods the natural way as nature intended combats these problems
Dogs were in existence long before the creation of dried dog food. So how could they have possibly survived. In the wild a dog will catch it's food and devour nearly all of it, the flesh (good source of protein), fat (a good source of energy), bone (good source of calcium), muscle and organ meats, and the stomach with its contents (a good source of enzymes, minerals and pre-digested plant material consisting of herbs and grasses).
Dogs, both domesticated and wild, are members of the carnivore family. Anatomically, they are built for it. No one describes this more eloquently than Juliette de Bairacli Levy in her book.
The Complete Herbal Book for the Dog A Handbook of Natural Care and Rearing:
( I highly recommend this book to everyone )
The dog is a meat eater, from the teeth fashioned for tearing and crushing, the powerful jawbones and muscles, the small, very muscular stomach, the short intestines and above all the very powerful digestive juices peculiar to the carnivorous animals - digestive juices that can dissolve even lumps of bone. In health the dog's juices, both of mouth and stomach, are strongly antiseptic, and thus high meat and even flesh from diseased animals food which would kill a human being in a day, can be eaten without any harmful effects.
Ms. Levy's philosophy of raising dogs is called Natural Rearing and it means just what it says raising the dog in such a way as to reproduce the way they would exist in their natural state.
Natural rearing diets, such as Raw Food, also known as, Bones And Raw Food), are based on fresh foods such as raw meats, raw bones, raw vegetables and herbs. Because dogs in the wild would not eat every day, one day of fasting (only for adult dogs) per week is also recommended. This allows the animal to cleanse its body of toxins.
Cooking breaks down many of the proteins and amino acids in raw meat, thus destroying much of it's nutritional value. The dog being not only a hunter, but a scavenger as well, will be able to exist on a diet of cooked food, but it will not be in optimal health. I guess a similar comparison would be to place a human being on a strict diet of only MacDonalds hamburgers and fries for the rest of his/her life!
Raising your dog on poor diets will eventually have its effect - disease, immune deficiencies, short life span, the list is endless. Thanks to the works of Juliette de Bairacli Levy, Dr. Ian Billinghurst, Wendy Volhard and Dr. Kerry Brown, Dr. Tom Lonsdale and Kymythy Schultz a step in the right direction (back to nature) has been taken. Their books have been an invaluable source of information for all dog owners.
REFERENCES:
The Complete Herbal Book for the Dog, Juliette de Bairacli Levy
Give Your Dog A Bone, Dr. Ian Billinghurst
The Holistic Guide For A Healthy Dog, Wendy Volhard & Kerry Brown, DVM
I am sure you are thinking, "...what is Green Tripe?". The answer to that is simple, because it is the best, most natural food you could feed your dog. It has been a well known secret of top breeders/kennels of performance dogs for years. The following excerpt from Juliette de Bairacli Levy's book, The Complete Herbal Book for the Dog, says it best.
"I would suggest breeders make good use of such flesh foods as the following paunches of all animals (the raw, uncleaned paunches of healthy grass-fed animals can be fed with much benefit to all breeds of dogs). I learned this from a gypsy in the Forest of Dean: this man had bred many famous greyhounds, and he told me that such fare was the finest of natural food tonics.
Tripe is the stomach of animals. These animals i.e. cattle, buffalo, sheep, deer, goats, antelope, etc.) are classified as being four-footed, hooved, cud chewing mammals. The food the animal eats i.e. grass and hay is swallowed unchewed and passes into the rumen and reticulum where it is then regurgitated, chewed and mixed with saliva. It is again swallowed and then passed through the reticulum and omasum into the abomasum, where it is then further broken down by the gastric juices, amino acids and other digestive enzymes.
So how can something so disgusting, be so good. These same gastric juices and enzymes not only aid the animal in digestion, but also aid the dog in digesting and efficiently utilizing his food. The amino acids are necessary for muscular development and, the other gastric juices, I believe, are the best cleaner ever for their teeth.
