I have never taken care dogs before or had dogs in general. I did foster a puppy 2 months ago and was given kibble to feed the puppy. Plus even as someone who never had Dogs, I still knew "dog food" existed in the form of those small little bites packaged together in a plastic bag that is bought at stores like Walmart, PetSmart, etc. So to my limited knowledge, I thought this was the only thing I ever needed to use to feed Dogs.

Anyways, I adopted my Mini Poodle 3 weeks ago and he was 13 lbs when the shelter weighed him. I bought Hill's Science Diet Kibble for him because that's all I knew, since the lady that let me foster the 8 Week Old Puppy gave me a weeks worth of kibble by that brand to feed her. On the first day, my dog didn't eat because he was nervous, but the next few days he was eating as he started decompressing from being in a new environment. I noticed that it was not possible to get him to eat on a specific schedule, because he simply just wouldn't eat the kibble when offered to him. I could give it to him at 2pm, leave it inside his crate, and he'll eat it while I'm sleeping 10 hours later. This week, I had given him a bowl of kibble, and he literally didn't touch it for 2 whole days. The times he ate his kibble he would only eat like 50% of it, and I poured about 3/4ths of a cup in his bowl and put it in his crate. He actually lost weight, about 0.4 lbs in 2 weeks. He would eat other things like treats, or chew on a bully stick, but just would refuse to eat the kibble.

Yesterday, I went to a local store that sold raw, organic products for dogs. It was the same store that sold the organic raw dog treats that a friend of mine gifted me. Since my dog loved them, I figured why not go check them out and see what they could offer instead of buying from PetSmart or Amazon? The lady that owns the store immediately asked me what I was feeding my dog, because she noticed he had yeast on his paws and asked if he licks his paws. I told her he does because I've seen him doing it. She then told me about how all kibble companies are filled with 50 ingredients, and honestly it didn't take much to convince me, because I am already aware of how garbage the food quality in America is, it just didn't occur to me that they would target Dogs, Cats, and other pets too. But am I surprised? No, America wants to make tons of money by getting us sick, filled with diabetes, obesity, to get us into the medical doctors office and only for them to prescribe us with bullshit drugs that can greatly give you side effects causing who knows what issues down the road.

It's also sickening that they target pets, but then again, these companies are all doing it purposely to make tons of money and stay rich by getting our pets sick so we have to take them to the Vet and then be told we need to put them down or spend thousands of dollars on medical procedures, which if you have Pet Insurance, is not even guaranteed they'll cover all of it, or any of it at all since their main method of making money is by paying as close to little as possible. On top of that, my Vet immediately wanted me to get my Dog X-rays and blood work done which costs like $1500 total. So it made me feel like my Vet just wanted to make money off me.

Anyways, the lady that owns the raw dog food store was nice enough to give me lots of samples, she gave me about 1lb of raw organic beef (split into 8 small packages). When I got home, I thawed out one of the packaged samples, which I thought was only 1 oz, and I just opened it and let my Poodle sniff it to see if he was interested in it. I put it in a bowl and he ate it instantly. So I gave him 3 more of the samples, which was a total of 4 oz, or so I thought. It turns out the samples were actually 2 oz, so I fed him 8oz or half a lb of raw organic beef. But he ate the whole entire thing in less than a minute. I guess he really was hungry and loved the raw beef. I immediately called the store and told them what happened, and drove back and bought 18 lbs of Raw Organic Beef and put it in my freezer. It was about $106 after tax. I was told to feed him 4oz a day, 2 oz for breakfast, 2 for dinner. With 288 oz (16 lbs) divided by 4 oz, that's 72 days worth of food which is literally almost 2.5 months. Compared to Kibble, I could spend $60-$70 on a bag of 15.5lbs worth of kibble that will last 2 months, but I would MUCH rather spend an extra $40-$50 to benefit my Dog's health for the long term.

Now that I actually have real food, it will be so much easier to feed my Dog on a constant schedule. He was a stray dog before and from his reactions it looks like he may have been abused, and abandoned, and from what the lady at the shelter told me he also rarely ate food too (which they feed kibble). So he may never had a proper, safe access, to good, legit food, and felt like he was forced to eat the kibble. But now that he has access to natural, unprocessed garbage, it will be a lot easier to help him feel safer and more comfortable at home.