Many people ask about taking time to transition to new foods, or if it is ok to feed different meats in one meal or one day.

There are, of course, many different opinions just as there are for people. Here is my opinion:

Healthy dogs can eat anything (well, almost any good food – no chocolate, lots of onions, maybe grapes and raisins, etc) at any time. If they needed transition they would never have survived in the wild. They are scavengers in the wild, even eating very rotten meat. Many of your companion dogs find rotten meat and have no problems.

Please keep track in the journal (you are keeping one, right?) anytime there is soft stools or diarrhea and note what food was fed 12 and 24 hrs earlier. My stools change every meal I eat. The reason they do not on “dog food” nor for people eating only Ensure (“human food”) actually indicates lower health.

In the Early Warning Signs of Internal Imbalance, you will see – “diarrhea at least change of food.” Remember that the back of the master symptom list in your Healthy Dog Journal has a little physical exam you can do weekly or monthly, then also check in the first section of the journal to find even more signs of possible ill health.

Reading the books on fresh food feeding will help you know that there are many ways of feeding animals (Dec 2014 newsletter covered nutrition, too) so you will realize how similar it is to feeding people. We are all different.