Lew Olson - Raw and Natural Nutrition for Dogs: The Definitive Guide to Homemade Meals

Christie Keith is contributing editor for Pet Connection and she writes the online pet care column for the San Francisco Chronicle as well as the Your Whole Pet column twice monthly. She is the past director and editor of AOLs Pet Care Forum, editor of the Veterinary Information Networks pet owner website, and the founding editor of VeterinaryPartner.com. She has written numerous articles on pet health care and has bred, owned, and shown Scottish Deerhounds under the kennel name Caber Feidh.

Im a contributing editor for Universal Press Syndicates Pet Connection and helped cover the 2007 pet food recall for our nationally syndicated column and blog. Thousands of people came to our site during the many months of rolling recalls, desperate for information on how to safely and nutritiously feed their dogs a homemade diet.

Most of these people had been convinced such a thing was all but impossible, that dogs have such mysterious and precise nutritional needs that only scientists are capable of formulating their diets, and only pet food manufacturers are capable of producing them.

But I knew different. I had been feeding my own pets homemade diets for more than twenty-one years at that point. So I was not surprised when many of those people discovered that it was not as difficult as they had been told, nor did it surprise me when they found that making that change triggered many improvements in their dogs health.

Lew Olson is one of the first people I met years ago when the internet and its thousands of email lists, message boards, and forums first made it possible for people all over the country and the world to communicate easily about how we were caring for our dogs. Lew and I struck up an online friendship that later became an offline one, largely because we shared a similar philosophy about homemade dog diets.

That philosophy, which is the foundation of this book, is that feeding a nutritious, wholesome homemade diet to our dogs is neither as difficult as weve been told, nor as foolproof as some dog nutrition gurus would suggest. That is because while it may be true that it is no more difficult to make your dogs food at home than it is to make your own, it is also no easier. Many people do not do a great job of making nutritional choices for themselves, mostly because modern life leaves them short on time and energy, and because we live in a culture of convenience. However, as Lew points out, when humans hit the fast-food lane, we know we are doing it because its easy and dont fool ourselves that its because its better for us. The opposite has become true with our pets; weve come to see packaged convenience foods as the nutritious choice for them, even while we know that a fresh, varied diet is the nutritious choice for us.

In this book youll not only discover why dogs do best on a fresh, varied diet just like we do, but also get easy detailed instructions on how to provide one. Lew gives specific recipes, supplement recommendations, and simple steps you can take to make sure you dont over- or under-supply your dogs nutritional needs.