Please remember that keeping your furry friend healthy and happy is much more than just diet alone. A nutritious diet combined with a reasonable amount of exercise, mental stimulation and proper veterinary care is the best way for a long healthy life for all of us!

Feeding a commercial kibble or canned food diet is pretty simple isn't it? Nothing could be simpler than just measuring a cup or two of kibble or opening a can and no question, in general, feeding any home based diet takes more work. However, like most things, once you are a organized a little bit and have some knowledge about what you are doing it's not all that complicated to feed a home prepared diet. After all, that's what most of us do for ourselves everyday isn't it?

Aside from a few things, such as a bit of freezer space to store ingredients, a kitchen scale to weight amounts of food and perhaps a mixing bowl or two, what you need most is some knowledge. Our hope is that we can help put you on the right track to gaining such knowledge.

• Talk to people that are already feeding a home prepared diet for their pets.
• Check out our Reading List for some suggestions on books and articles written by vets, animal nutritionists and other knowledgeable folk about feeding a raw food diet and other thoughts on the nutritional needs of our pets.
• Check out our Links List for some more interesting reading
• Sign-up on one of the Internet chat groups. Both Google and Yahoo host a huge number of group lists. Everything from breed specific group lists to general group lists that are about feeding raw foods to our pets. Try searching on key words like "BARF" or "ARF" or "Raw Food" or "Raw Fed" or your dogs breed or a combination of those words.
• Have a look at the page on Risks for an overview of some of the pluses and minuses associated with the different pet food diets.

While it is important that the raw diet you feed provides the necessary nutrients in the right proportions to keep your dog or cat healthy ... relax ... don’t torture yourself trying to get each meal completely balanced. We humans don’t prepare every meal we eat using exact percentages of nutritional components and exact portions of foods. The goal is to make the overall diet complete and balanced over time, not each and every meal. Feeding a 100% completely balanced meal is part of the marketing message that we are bombarded with all the time. If you saw a commercial on TV advertising a pill that if taken three times a day would meet all your nutritional needs, would you buy it? Even if the pills came in Beef, Chicken and Lamb flavours would you buy it? Well, there probably would be some buyers for such a product, but could anyone honestly say they would enjoy eating that way? Same thing for our companions, a wide variety of nutritious foods and snacks goes a long way to providing both a healthy and interesting diet.

How you switch your pet from eating their current diet to eating a raw diet is really up to what you feel is best for each individual. Many have switched their pets diet without any real transition. Going Cold Turkey as it were. One day their dog or cat was eating a commercially prepared kibble or canned food and the next they are fed a home prepared raw diet without any problems. Others have felt more comfortable making the change more gradually. Feeding small quantities of raw food gradually over a week or so. Increasing the amount of raw and decrease the amount of the old diet until their pet was eating a completely raw diet. There are also pet owners that have fasted their dog or cat for a day and then started them on the raw diet. Recently we have heard about feeding live culture yoghurt and / or dried papaya to help boost the healthy bacteria and digestive enzymes in the gut.

Your pet is a unique individual and factors such as previous problems changing diets or with the introduction of new foods or any recent health issues that might have compromised the digestive system, such as receiving a course of antibiotics for an infection, should be taken into consideration when changing any diet.

If you find you are feeling confused or overwhelmed with information and options regarding the raw diet then feel free to contact us for some suggestions on where to begin your learning journey.

Our goal at Aidan's Naturals is to help support you, if you choose to prepare a raw food diet for the pet you love, by being your source for many of the main ingredients. We are starting small, but like the variety in the diet, are hoping to grow and be able to offer you a wide selection of conveniently packaged ingredients. Check out our Food Products page for a idea of the sorts of things we currently offer.