Friday, June 13, 2008

A Staffordshire Bull Terrier smorgasbord

Since Bean - my 2yo Staffordshire Bull Terrier - came to live with me early last year, he's been fed a raw diet. That means no commercial pet food: no dry food, no canned food. He gets the occasional table scrap, but generally his diet is exactly what it should be for the wolf descendant carnivore that he is: raw, unprocessed meat, along with bone and offal. It makes for a highly varied and interesting diet, and he has the whitest teeth and freshest breath a dog can have!

Here he is with half a fat chicken - his 2nd birthday present. This took approximately 10 minutes to eat.

This is a hunk of lamb... not sure what part. Most of the lamb he's fed is lamb neck.

This is a rabbit's hind leg, complete with fur and skin. He'd never eaten a 'furry meal' before, and I thought he might balk at eating it... but he ate the lot and looked for more.


Two lamb hearts. Three of these make a full meal for him. At 80 cents each, it's an expensive meal compared to chicken or fish. Generally, I spend - in total - between $2.00 and $7.50 on his meals each week. I spend more on squeaky toys than I do on food for him!

A salmon head, bought from a local fresh fish shop for 50 cents. It's a big meal, with a lot of meat, a couple of fins, eyes, teeth etc. A fish head takes him half an hour to eat and leaves him with fish breath for another half hour.

This was taken late last December. I was able to source Christmas turkey frames from a local butcher who would have otherwise thrown them out. The frame pictured above was only 3/4 there I think, but still a huge meal for him. It took him more than half an hour to eat, and he fasted the following day because his little stomach was so bloated.

Kangaroo tail pieces! These are great - really meaty. Kangaroo is one of his favourite meats, along with rabbit.

Yes, this is Bean eating a banana peel. I dropped it on the way to the compost bin and he (as usual) decided that if it was good enough for me, it must be good enough for him. Two seconds after this photo was taken, he spat it all out and shredded it for fun instead. He loves apple cores though.

Bean loves these! Pig trotters take Bean a solid hour to gnaw through, and they're only 50 cents from a local butcher. There's not a lot of meat on these - and he does have gas issues after eating pork - so he only gets one every week and a half or so.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a happy little carnivore! So great to see Bean being fed the way a domestic wolf should be :) .
~ Diane.