----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Hoggan" <[log in to unmask]>

> 1. My wife's cousin had a dog that was dying. She switched it to raw meat
> only and it perked up and lived many more years. 


Ron, I believe it.  I raised my standard poodle on a raw food diet, including raw bones for most of her life.  I tried to approximate, as best I could, a wolf diet.  The standard poodle DNA is very close to that of the wolf.  And I thought that her optimum health depended on her eating as close to a wolf diet as possible.

It absolutely blew me away the first time I gave her a deer leg.  It was an entire adult deer leg, including the hoof, that had much of the meat removed by the hunter.  It was winter in Michigan, so I spread out a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor and laid the deer leg down in front of her.  She looked at the leg, looked up at me and I said, "break."  She jumped on that leg and ate the entire thing in under two hours... I wish I could remember the exact time because I did time it.  I think it was an hour and 20 minutes.  I had never given her any bones before and I was very, very nervous so I sat in a chair and watched her eat.

What stunned me most about that experience were the following things:

o  I had been feeding her wet and dry dog food for the first couple years of her life.  She had never had any raw meat prior to the deer leg.

o  She knew exactly what to do with that leg, including how to hold each bone in her paws while she turned her head sideways and cracked the bone to get at the marrow.

o  the next day when she had a bowel movement, almost nothing came out.  She had eaten an entire deer leg (less much of the muscle meat), and almost nothing was left after digestion, other than a very small amount of white, chalky material.  She and I both stood in the back yard and looked at it!   :)     I remember thinking that this is how animals - including humans - must have evolved to eat.

o  she did not need to go to the veterinarian to have her teeth cleaned, the bones in her species appropriate diet took care of that.

My dog lived to be 14 years old, which is a good long life for a standard poodle.  She had a beautiful healthy coat of pure black hair until the day she died.  In other words, she never turned gray.
  

Probably some lessons to be learned here,
Kath