What is the best food for breeding dogs? Today we’ll look at a complete but easy natural diet for dogs and dog health supplements for breeding dogs.
Scientific studies have proven what all seasoned dog breeders know: nutrition can make or break the health and fertility of your stud dogs. It can even restore fertility in some dogs.
Best Food for Breeding Dogs
I’ve already recently shared what I don’t like about commercial foods for dogs and about what’s important to include with our dog’s food. And I’ve also talked about what’s important to make sure we’re not feeding our dogs because they’re toxic and can harm their reproductive performance and health.
I will show you a diet that is is high in the very minerals, fats, and vitamins that breeding dogs need.
This diet has been keeping my dogs healthy for decades. And the best food for breeding dogs is also what I tell my owners to feed their pet dogs. Most vets are going to say that you have to feed commercial dog food. I’ve got four children and wonder why the doctor never said “You have to feed commercial, processed food to your child to make sure it grows up healthy”? That doesn’t happen. What do they say instead? They say feed a variety of whole foods, don’t they? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What whole foods can we feed our dogs for a healthy life and good reproductive performance?
Natural Diet for Dogs
The basis, the foundation of the diet is based on trying to feed as natural a diet for dogs as we possibly can.
We know that only 12,000 years ago, dogs were wolves and were gradually domesticated into all the different breeds we see today. That’s a blink in the eye in evolutionary terms.
The premise of the natural dog diet is to feed them what millions of years of evolution have prepared them to eat and thrive on – natural food.
What is a natural diet for dogs?
It’s the whole animal: It includes the fur, the bones, the ears, the cartilages, the hooves, the guts, and all the organs.
Another thing to understand is that when a dog eats a whole animal, the vegetables it’s getting is actually in the form of digested food in the animal’s gut. Basically poop, right?
What can we do to try to simulate as natural a diet as we can, which does include vegetables of course, and bones?
The first thing I based my diet on to make it real simple, is chicken drumsticks. So half the diet should be chicken drumsticks and have them whole with the bone in it. We’re talking about food grade, human quality, fresh chicken drumsticks; very unlikely to give your dog any problems with bacterial contamination. I like drumsticks more than other meaty bones because it has a nice balance of bone, to meat, to fat and will provide your dog with a lot of its vitamin and mineral and fat requirements.
And never feed raw bones on their own because they need that meat and that fat present to lubricate the bone through the gut. If you just feed bones, then you can end up with impaction, made up of bones that all collect up in the gut because there’s nothing to slide them through. So don’t just feed bones. And make sure all the bones you ever feed are always raw and naturally shaped, not artificially shaped like lamb chop bones, for example, got it?
So half the diet is chicken. The other half of the diet is no chicken whatsoever.
A problem that we see in dogs is itchy skin. 80% of the time itchy skin is caused by food allergy. And food allergy often arises because they have, for example, commercial food or home-cooked food that rely on just one kind of meat. Relying on one kind of meat protein is a recipe for allergies developing. This is why we have to be very careful not to give any chicken whatsoever for the other roughly half of the diet.
What I recommend as the best food for breeding dogs
Well, we can start with one meal a week of whole sardines.
So I buy the frozen sardines and I defrost them for my dogs and each 10-kilo, 20-pound dog gets about three or four sardines. They’re thawed out, but they’re still raw and most dogs don’t particularly like them. If they don’t eat them, that’s fine. I just dish them up to them the next day. And this gives them a bit of a fast, which is also very good for their guts.
Sardines provide some very essential nutrients that you won’t get anywhere else in the diet. They are the way to get B12 and vitamin D. And it is actually the only meat which has a lot of vitamin D in it. It’s also an excellent source of folate which is very important for breeding dogs, and selenium. So, if you don’t feed sardines once a week, you might be missing out on those things.
Lamb Liver
The other thing that I feed once a fortnight is lamb liver or lamb’s fry, you might know it as. Now you can use beef liver, but I’d rather give lamb because, at least in Australia, lamb tends to be straight off the paddock, straight through the abattoir, and straight on to the butcher shop. Whereas beef is very often finished off in feedlots where they might be given antibiotics and grain. So lamb is the cleanest liver and liver is a very nutritious food.
So 140 grams once a fortnight, and don’t overfeed liver. Because if you do, you’re going to be overdosing with vitamin A and in higher doses, like super high doses, vitamin A’s quite toxic. How I think about it is the liver is only a small part of an animal. So only feed it as a small part of the diet, right. Does that make sense? Cool.
Red Meat and Vegetables
For the rest of the time, I like to give red meat and mix it up. So sometimes beef, sometimes deer, or in Australia we use kangaroo. They’re very similar to venison, very lean. You can use other red meats, horse meat, goat meat, beef, whatever.
It’s important they get the vegetables as well. Studies show that they really do make a difference to dog health! So we add in green and orange vegetables.
For orange vegetables you can sometimes use pumpkin, then next time use carrot or sweet potato. Same with the green vegetables: sometimes it can be spinach or kale, next time cabbage, next time silver beet. Just mix it up and use different ones each time so you get a nice balance of nutrients going into your dogs. Be careful though not to double up on the high Vitamin A containing green and orange vegetables (download the FREE Best Food for Breeding Dogs Guide for more information).
Now, the way I feed that is I will actually steam the vegetables and then mix it in when cool into raw meat. Or you can buy the “BARF” mix of meat and vegetables made-up already. In these the vegetables are raw. It’s OK now and then but I prefer not to feed raw vegetables because they have anti-nutrients in them that interfere with nutrient absorption from the gut.
Remember the vegetables that a dog will eat in the wild are already digested. They’ve been fermented in the gut of an animal, right? So the anti-nutrients would have been broken down by digestion. To try to simulate that, I like to slightly steam the vegetables first, or you can make up a stew, or you can buy stuff already made up.
DIY Dog Health Supplement
When you realize the best food for breeding dogs is natural and commit to follow this natural diet for dogs you will still need to supplement a few key nutrients. Luckily it’s easy to make natural stud dog health supplements to complete a natural diet for your breeding dogs with very simple ingredients!
The things that are low in this natural diet for dogs are vitamin D, vitamin E, and folate (B9). So how do I recommend you make that up? I recommended you do it with this simple mixture:
For the vitamin E, the richest source is sunflower oil, which is very easy to come by, inexpensive, and very, very rich in vitamin E.
Use mainly sunflower oil, and then – for the other important nutrients – I’ve added a little wee touch of cod liver oil, which we need to boost the vitamin D up a little bit. As you recall, the sardines are a good source of that but dogs don’t like eating loads of them. So to balance it out, add a bit more vitamin D through cod liver oil, but just a smidgen, because we don’t want to overdo vitamin D. Like all nutrients Vitamin D can be really toxic in high doses. You need the right amount. Too little and it causes deficiency issues, too much and it causes toxicities.
The other magic ingredient that we’ve got in here is actually nutritional yeast. When you make this up yourself, you’re going to have to shake it up before use because the nutritional yeast will sink to the bottom.
Now, why do we need the nutritional yeast in there? We need it to boost the folate.
Folate is really important for reproduction and nutritional use is the easiest way to get it. Don’t just use any old yeast. It has to be nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast has had folate added to it. That’s why it’s called nutritional yeast. I give you the doses of this and how to make this up, what proportions, in the FREE Best Food For Breeding Dogs & Dog Health Supplement Guide you can download by clicking here.
I know the natural diet for dogs that I’ve given you is the best food for breeding dogs to keep them healthy and in peak fertility for you.
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