Is it better to feed kibble or raw dog food?

The Best Choice for Your Dog: Kibble vs. Raw Dog Food

There’s a great deal of discourse when it comes to which is the best diet for your canine companion in Ottawa. The debate between raw pet food and kibble feeding for dogs heats up in certain pet owner circles. It seems like there’s never a resolution, due to the proliferation of new information and animal natural pet diets in the form of lower carb or grain-free. Just like humans, your dog’s longevity and health begin with a proper diet. Lynn Menard is an Advanced Pet Food Nutritionist and the owner of Everything Raw Doggie Café. Lynn knows that your pet’s diet is an ongoing debate, and she will outline the pros and cons of switching to raw dog food that you should be cognizant of, such as nutritional value, cost, convenience and safety. 

Kibble: The Convenient Choice 

Kibble is cheap, convenient, and lasts forever, as you already know. The ‘buffet style’ meal plan is easy to manage and it saves money (kibble diets are often inexpensive), not to mention it’s easy to store with no refrigeration required. However, at best, kibble diets consist of 40% to 50% fillers such as corns, cereals, grains, copious amounts of soya, not to mention artificial preservatives, colouring and flavouring – ingredients that could be detrimental to your dog’s health. These ingredients have been known to cause allergies, skin conditions, and other health problems. 

The Raw Dog Food Diet: A Species-Appropriate Option 

But, Lynn stresses that raw dog food would be more in line with what your dog would naturally have eaten in the wild. This is truly a species-appropriate diet; a diet that would provide many more of the nutrients that dogs need as they evolved and require for their health and vitality. While this type of diet would still include bone, which is probably useful, it wouldn’t include things that don’t have a lot of the kinds of nutrients that dogs need and wouldn’t include many of the kinds of fillers that we find in kibble. 

Moving to a raw dog food diet, however, requires some consideration. Raw dog food in Ottawa comes frozen and should be thawed before serving to your dog. You may also find that raw dog food can be as competitively priced with kibble but needs to be properly stored. The shelf life will also be shorter – 3 to 5 days once thawed and refrigerated; it may last several months, or even years, if kept in the freezer depending on the packaging. 

Balancing Nutrition, Convenience, and Health 

When you are making the decision to feed your pet with kibble or raw food on a daily basis, it all comes down to certain tradeoffs of nutrition, convenience and health in terms of which food you should get. Lynn advises that while kibble may be more convenient, and sometimes less-costly, raw dog food offers much better nutritional value that is much more similar to how your pet’s ancestors ate. 

To inquire about transitioning your dog onto a raw diet or to find out about the variety of foods we offer, get in touch with the pet nutrition experts at Everything Raw. You’ll never look back once you start feeding your pet the natural way, raw