Tell me about the BARF diet you feed your own dogs.

BARF stands for "Biologically Appropriate Raw Food" or "Bones and Raw Food". We chose to start feeding Milo and Addie this diet consisting of raw chicken necks and backs, muscle meat, pulped raw vegetables, and occasional supplements after reading Kymythy Schultze’s Book, Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats: The Ultimate Diet. The idea behind the diet is that you are recreating the small prey animal your pet would eat daily if it were a wild animal like a coyote, wolf, or wildcat. We feed Milo and Addie mostly whole chicken pieces mixed with the vegetable pulp, some flax seed oil, and a little alfalfa and kelp powder for extra vitamins and minerals. The vegetables must be ground up into a fine pulp because dogs and cats cannot absorb the nutrients and utilize the enzymes otherwise. And it’s actually healthy to feed RAW chicken bones whole as long as the animal crunches them into small chunks before swallowing. Our dogs are so healthy and their poops are so small and odorless, we would never feed any other way! There are also many pre-made raw diets that can be purchased frozen and ready to feed, once thawed. They are much easier and more convenient! At the Divine Canine, we carry Nature’s Variety Prairie raw diets.