My dog has colitis and has done for a few years. Certain foods trigger it, i.e. eggs, beef, pork, turkey. She is currently fed on Royal Canin Sensitivity Control SC24 and has a wainwrights tray mixed in with it (lamb or duck flavours only) and has been doing great on it since.

I've been reading up about the Raw Diet and as previously mentioned on another thread i posted I've had a bad experience with it before.

I wondered though if anyone has fed a dog the raw diet with colitis? Is it suitable?

I currently spend £60 on the kibble which last her about 8 weeks and I pay £8.50 for 12 trays which lasts me 24 days. So I roughly spend about £35 a month on her food.

Could I feed her on the Raw Diet for less than this? She weighs around 28kg and gets walked for 1-1.5 hours a day. Also, as she can only really have white fish, poatatoes, rice, chicken, lamb, duck and vegetables, would this be okay?

I don't have a local butchers where I live either. Tesco is the only place I can get my meat and veg from, so again would it be cheaper for me to buy her stuff for a raw diet from Tesco? Or should I stick to her current kibble?

Hi, I'm not sure if i can answer your specific question but my dog has a really senstive stomach, she has only ever been able to eat chicken and rice flavoured burns complete however i am switching her to raw I am starting with all chicken based, chicken mince and chicken drumsticks with veg thrown in, i will then introduce chicken liver. Then i am going to introduce other meats very slowly avoiding beef and pork totally as these are supposed to be bad for hypersenstivity. I have had issues with lamb flavoured complete dry foods but apprantly i should try her on lamb meat raw as it is digested differently and she coudl react differently.

Hope that helps a little.

Thanks, it would be great if you could let me know how your dog gets on with it? I used to feed mine on burns before she had colitis. It's a shame I can't give her any meat, her diet is so restricted.

I feed raw have done since daisy was 10 weeks she came to me with chronic soft stools to the point she had blood pouring out of her bum (literally she was on my lap I ended up with spots of blood on me ) anyway it was never diagnosed as colitis but she was very poorly the vet tried everything so I put her on Raw and haven't turned back I just had to keep her bone heavy for a long time!

She couldn't have any form of grains not that they need it and if she snuck one piece of dry food from my friends house we were back at the vets with blood pouring out her bum

Anyway Just start with one protein and stay bone heavy for a while and slowly cut the bone down and add more meat it's a very long process but done correctly it does work!!

Also wanted to add that just because your dog can't stomach some proteins in processed form doesn't mean they can't in their raw natural form I know a lot of dogs with allergies to chicken or pork that can eat them raw no problem they just stayed bone heavy for a while.

Good luck

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She has been given fresh turkey and beef etc before (we like to give her meat when we can along with her kibble) and she gets a poorly tummy, so I know she can't eat it cooked, I haven't tried it raw though.

For starters, it certainly won't be cheaper to feed her from Tesco, in fact I'd say it'll be almost twice as expensive. The only way you could make tesco work is to say get the reduced meat at the end of the day, but that's very much a gamble as to what will be there.

If you wanted to feed raw 'cheaply' then your best bet is to look at an online supplier if you haven't got an butcher/abattoir near you. However, you'd need to buy in bulk to make your postage and packaging work out for you. So, you'd really in an ideal world need a second freezer dedicated to the dog: you could more than likely pick one up second hand for about half the price of retail if you shopped around online for this. Gumtree/freecycle: websites like these would be your best bet for used freezers if you have a car and can go and collect it.

If she's 28kg then she'd need around 700g of food a day (working by 2.5% of her bodyweight). Lets say you decide (as an example) to go with minces from raw to go (raw to go is complete if you don't feel confident initially with getting the balance right) as the bulk of her meals and then supplement it with various bones during the week for her teeth- say lamb ribs, turkey drumsticks, chicken etc etc.

A packet of mince from raw to go costs around 48-72p and contains 454g. So, she'd need a packet and a half roughly a day (a packet and a half is around 725g give or take a few grams for exactly what you class as a half). So, say you go with the chicken mince (48p a packet), you are looking at around 75p a day if you fed just the chicken mince. However, whilst on a raw diet she will need quite a bit of variety, so whilst a 75p a day mince would be on the cheaper side if you wanted to feed say the rabbit one you're looking at £1.08 a day.

On top of the minces (if you did decide to go down the mince rule) you'd need to top it up with bones such as chicken drumsticks, turkey drumsticks, lamb ribs, necks etc etc which could be bought online. Raw to go has a good selection of bones, as does the dog food company, I believe natural instinct does turkey carcasses too and of course you could get her bones from Tesco as well. I'd imagine this will be an extra ten pounds to twenty pounds a month-ish.

Say you didn't fancy raw to gos complete meals, you could possibly look at something like DAF's minces instead which come in slightly cheaper. Going for the minced chicken again you're looking at 41p per lb if you go for 1-5 boxes or 40p per lb if you went for more than 6 boxes (so 60p a day ish with the DAF minces).

However, the issue here is that the meals aren't complete, so you'd need to get hold of DAF to find out how much bone is in their minces and then substitute more bone (say in the form of a chicken wing) if their mince isn't very boney and then of course there's offal on top of it (if you're looking at a pray style diet then you want 10% of her food to be offal- 5% liver, 5% another type of offal like kidney. So, you're looking at 490g of offal a week- now, you can get offal quite cheaply at tesco, however you can also order it online. 8kg of liver from DAF is £9.36 which if you went halves with something like kidney which is £6.66 per 8kg you are looking at an 8kg box of both lasting you around 8 months (looking at feeding 1kg each a month). Not a clue about BARF I'm afraid- hopefully someone like Sleeping Lion will come along and help). Also, you will need to keep up the variety- so prices will vary between minces.

There are of course other suppliers: the dog food company, darlings (BARF) and Natural instinct (BARF) to name just a few. It'd be worth shopping around to see what deals you could get.

Now, if you don't fancy feeding her the minces you are then looking at chunks of meat. So, chunks of chicken, duck etc etc at 700g a day- with a picture of 80% meat, 10%-15% bone, 10% offal over the face of a week (every meal does not have to be balanced but you do need to get the rough balance over a period of time). Now you could buy that from tesco but I'd imagine it'd be extremely expensive.

As for the suitability, you will have to introduce raw carefully and slowly. Going slowly is the key: do not rush it or you will have a dog with a poorly tummy. Start with chicken (just chicken- no offal) and see how she gets along with it, if it's fine after a week or two then ever so slowly add in a second protein source. Transition it carefully and slowly- so say you wanted to bring in lamb as a second source I'd feed her 95% chicken the first day and say 5% lamb that day. See how she is, if she's fine, slowly up the amount she's ok with day by day.

When I first introduced Pixel to offal I would freeze it in tiny 5g strips and he'd have one of those a day. If he was fine with the offal then I'd slowly up the portion sizes until he's now on his weekly allowance four times a week.

Overall, unless you can find a good supplier that's willing to go cheaper than the online prices I'd guess you'd be looking at about the thirty five to forty five pounds a month mark with bones included. As for suitability, I can't say as my pup is fine in general, however I can say that you may find she is completely fine with say raw beef/turkey/eggs if they're introduced slowly and carefully.

Best of luck- I hope this helps somewhat with the practicalities of pricing and such!

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Thanks for that, so I would be looking at a similar price or possibly more money, if i read all that correct? I'm struggling to afford the £35 a month at the moment unfortinately, so I couldn't stretch to anymore than that

Unless you could find a cheaper supplier- I'm afraid you would be looking at about the same price/more expensive. DAF is the cheapest supplier that I know of online, and say if you fed her solely on the chicken mince you'd be looking at around twenty pounds- but I really do feel strongly that a raw fed dog needs variety, and unfortunately that will up the cost when you start factoring that and bones in as well.

It might be worth perhaps making up a supposed meal plan for a month up, seeing how much mince/bones that'd use and pricing it up but I doubt it's going to be much cheaper than the thirty five mark.

I know Sleeping Lion feeds her big dogs for next to nothing on raw but I believe she gets hers from a local abattoir and has locally sourced tripe.

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Unless I am very much mistaken, Raw to Go is just a supplier of DAF minces in Wales who are willing to post nationally (unlike other suppliers across the country).

Personally, and after many conversations with the makers of DAF minces I am not convinced that the minces really are complete or are following the 80/10/5/5 ratio. It very much depends on the flavour. Some contain way too much bone, others not enough, some contain no offal. I guess as long as you feed a variety of flavours than it should even itself out but I feed raw because I want to know what is in my cats' food!

It's unfortinate I don't have a local butchers and I also can't drive so I can't even travel to find one. I'd like to give her variety within her diet as I try to now as I know she gets bored. I mean whether she could have raw beef, turkey and pork without it upsetting her stomach I'm not sure. Do people find it really time consuming as well? It seems like a lot of preperation and planning and being a uni student and doing a part time job, i don't have too much time on my hands either. Some of the benefits of the diet interested me though - hence this thread.