> Do you supplement your dog food and do you feed natural raw diet? I was told > from Pat Hastings's Trick of the Trade seminar to never supplement dog food > because it throws off the nutritional balance and can do more harm than > good. She suggested for a stressed dog before a show giving an increase of > vitamin c and then go back to normal amount later. I have the suggested > dosage somewhere in my reference pile. Please comment.
I attended Pat's seminar as well and I do go along with much of what she says but I thought I would mention some common sense things missing in her thoughts. 1. Every single dog has different nutritional needs. So no way you are going to find a food that is nutritionally balanced for all dogs. 2. Every single dog's nutritional needs change--probably from day to day--as their bodies try to meet the demands of everyday life. So if you somehow managed to find a food that is perfectly nutritionally balanced for your dog today, next week when it is at several shows, or running agility trials, or has been exposed to a virus--those needs will have changed. It is highly doubtful many of our dogs are getting ALL their true nutritional needs met on a daily basis. It is highly doubtful many of us humans are either. Our bodies compensate in so many ways. Supplementing on a moderate basis is not likely to throw this balance off any more than a slightly wrong diet (and there is no way to know if we are feeding a slightly wrong diet!). So her statements are extremely generalized and probably do not hold a whole lot of weight except in extreme circumstances. We have no idea if the diet we are feeding is doing more harm than good at any moment in time! Having said that I do firmly believe that because Cavaliers are small--under 20 lbs. in most cases--their diet needs to be more precise than our own. Due to their small size and accelerated life stages, a nutritional deficiency is almost certain to show up more quickly than in a human--probably a LOT more quickly. That is why I worry about home-made raw diets for the time being for small dogs. I prefer to stick with a commercially prepared raw diet that is nutritionally formulated to meet AAFCO guidelines--until they have done a LOT more studies on raw food. Supplementing in very moderate amounts probably isn't going to do any harm and probably not much extra good either when feeding a somewhat nutritionally balance diet. Some days it may help and other days it will be excessive--so it will all balance out. Laura Lang ========================================================= "Magic Commands": to stop receiving mail for awhile, click here and send the email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=SET%20CKCS-L%20NOMAIL to start it up gain click here: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=SET%20CKCS-L%20MAIL E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] for assistance. Search the Archives... http://apple.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ckcs-l.html All e-mail sent through CKCS-L is Copyright 2002 by its original author.
