Beef Heart

This time I decided to try out beef heart. The heart is considered muscle meat, not organ meat, so she will be getting that as her base meat and gizzards on organ meat day. Because beef heart is quite fatty I reduced her portion size.
She gets
2 Tbl beef heart
2 Tbl oatmeal
2 Tbl steamed green beans
1 Tbl pumpkin
1 Tbl yogurt
supplement

Didn't switch up too much this time around. I will warn you though, beef hearts SMELL. Holy wow, do they smell. They smell really really bad and I had to verify with a few people that this is normal and they hadn't gone rotten. It was very easy to slice though.

I had a good question come through. Someone asked why raw food is so controversial. I will attempt to explain.
Dog food has not always been the neat bags of colorful little shapes that we have today. Before the 1900s most Americans fed thier pets table scraps and other leftovers. Now, most people feed thier dogs prepackaged dry dog food. These extruded pellets have a long shelf life, are easy to store, and are provide uniform levels of ingredients. They are also, generally, very affordable.
Raw diets are less uniform, spoil quickly, and can cause several types of food borne illnesses in humans. Feeding a balanced raw diet also requires some education in dogs' nutritional needs. The USFDA does not reccomend such a diet.

Why would I choose to feed my dog such a diet?
Since Jade does not have a voice, I must speak for her. Commercial diets are commonly loaded with fillers that are undigestible for a dog. Most dogs cannot digest grains very well, corn being especially difficult to digest, yet very commonly used as a main ingredient in dog food manufacturing. In addition to fillers they contain preservatives, artificial dyes and flavors. I know some of you are probably saying, "but wait, some of my favorite foods contain all of those things!" And it is true. My problem lies with the regulation of the dog food industry. There are few well defined regulations or standards. A few years ago hundreds of different brands of dog food were allowed to be contaminated with melamine. Most dog foods contain meat by-products that are not allowed to be sold for human consumption because they contiain bovine spinal tissue, or come from animals that died of disease, or are contaminated with feces. I cannot in good conscious feed such things to my dog when I can, for the same price and at very little inconvenience to me, feed her human grade food.
This being said, they certianly do sell high quality dry dog chow with no fillers using human grade food but it is very expensive and hard to come by here in the boondocks.

Some people advocate raw diet because it is more natural for a dog. I agree with this to an extent. To keep a dog in a pack of humans is unnatural, to allow said dog to sleep under the covers is unnatural, to train them to 'sit pretty' and 'high five' is unnatural, to feed them at the same time every day and the same amount is... unnatural. However, physiologically speaking, a dog is naturally well equipt to process raw foods.
Typically, meat processed in large packing plants and shipped over long distances is more likely to contain higher levels of bacteria. I buy my meat locally, follow proper handling procedures, and keep it frozen or refrigerated until it is used. I will not feed Jade raw ground beef because it had an increased incidence of carrying dangerous levels of bacteria due to an increased surface area. I try to avoid poultry due to its greater potential to carry bacteria... now, if I had local, farm raised chicken, I would feed her that.
These are a few of the things I considered before switching Jade over to a raw diet.