You can purchase foods for your dog’s raw diet anywhere, so if you do happen to forget to lay something out in advance, a quick trip to the store can take care of the problem.
The drawback of picking things up from the grocery store is the cost. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk.
Here is the meal my dogs ate this morning:
Sometimes, like this meal, I’ll pick up something from the local grocery store to offer something different than what I have in the deep freeze. I purchase beef liver in bulk, so my dogs haven’t had chicken liver in awhile.
I try to vary the things I feed my dogs, although I find it easy to get stuck in ruts of feeding the same things over & over.
I don’t know what (if anything) chicken gizzards offer for nutritional value, but it’s something different (and the package also contained chicken hearts). Liver, of any sort, is very important and needs to be fed the most frequently of any organ meat. Heart is actually a muscle meat, although it also contains taurine (something vitally important in a cat’s diet).
Between my two dogs in this one meal, they ate the whole 3 lb roll of hamburger and a 1/3 of each of the packages of liver and gizzards/hearts. Because I wasn’t feeding any bone in this meal, I didn’t want to feed too much organ meat as it could cause a little too loose of stool. I repackaged and froze the other 2/3’s of the hearts/gizzards and livers.
My dogs detest the texture of most organ meats, so I chop them up and mix them in with other food.
I could try holding out, to see if I could force my dogs to eat the liver without cutting it up, but it isn’t a huge deal to chop it up and mix it in with something else. All of my dogs have been the same way about the texture of organ meats.
If you’re new to raw, you might find that your dogs have preferences for various things. If your dog balks at eating certain things, try feeding them in different ways before completely giving up on the item. For instance, try room temp or nearly frozen.
Keep in mind that the meal pictured above does not contain any bone. It’s fine as a meal (not every meal has to be balanced), however bone is critically important in a raw diet. I could not feed only this to my dogs.
The dogs’ evening meal was one large (tom) turkey neck each.
Update of my broken leg: I’m out of my boot and healing well! For the most part, I walk with only a minor limp and it’s getting better every day. Doc says it won’t be “completely” healed for another few weeks and I’ll have to deal with swelling for quite awhile. All in all, I was very lucky to have avoided surgery.