Decisions, Decisions, Decisions ...

I've been wrestling with the impossible for the last few weeks - trying to figure out a way to make a raw diet that is the equivalent of the kibble diets to which the vets at Auburn are most accustomed. It has been cross my eyes and rolling them around backwards in my head and sending steam out of my ears and everything else. It has truly seemed impossible. Yesterday, a friend of mine suggesting spending the money to have a telephone consultation with Monica Segal. THANK YOU, MICHELE!

It was perhaps the smartest thing I have done since taking Gata down to the vets at Auburn. I just bought the basic 1 hr telephone consultation, but it was such a relief to have someone to talk to about the entire situation, not just one aspect of it or another. Her perspective was more or less the same as mine - let's figure out a way to help the vets evaluate what is going on with Gata - regardless of what the outcome is in a couple of months.

Aside from the difficulty of trying to formulate a raw diet that is the equivalent of the high performance kibbles that they are accustomed to using, I have been less than certain that if the change in her diet doesn't get rid of her collapses that we would ever be able to move on from the potential complications of a raw diet. Monica felt the same way, although not as much about creating an equivalent diet.

She strongly encouraged me to at least try to get Gata onto one of the raw diets that they routinely use. If I can't get her transitioned over without issue, then we will try to create a raw diet that is more or less equivalent to those diets.

Then the next question is, what about Tor? Since he looks absolutely fabulous with the addition of some carbohydrates and fat to his diet, I am going to leave him on raw. We'll see how both dogs do and they will, to a certain extent, serve as a basis of comparison. I don't really like experimenting on my dogs, but I think that this one is for the best.

So, what am I going to feed Gata? Royal Canin 4800 - 32% Protein, 30% Fat. The list of ingredients kind of makes me cringe, but that is almost certainly based on what I have been told to think by the media and lots of other folks, not any scientific studies about the nutritional value of different ingredients to dogs. Potatoes somehow seem healthier than corn, but I'm not sure that is true for dogs ...

I also ordered her 2 books on nutrition. So, I guess I'll be learning about nutrition all over again. All I can say for sure right now is that I no longer believe in balance over time, unless I define "over time" as being determined by the individual dog's energy and metabolic needs. And, I don't think very many of us can determine what that is. So, even if we go back to raw in the future (assuming that a change to a complete, balanced kibble fixes Gata) my approach to balance will definitely be very different. It will almost certainly be something very close to daily balance.

Stay tuned ...