what is the best thing to feed a pregnant bitch? should i give her the same food, would i give suplements, any advice welcome,

sami & dean

You should keep her on the normal amount of food she has until about 6 weeks pregnant then start to increase her food.
I like to feed my pregnant bitch on complete food and Barf diet, and when puppies are nearly due I give her puppy milk to drink and fresh meats, fish etc
good luck with your litter, I am sure someone with give you more indepth advise on here then I have xx

My girls on complete food and Barf at the moment and she's 6 weeks gone.  She's massive, just hoping that she's not having to many as it's her first time.

I put mine on Royal Canin HD42 as soon as they come into season if I intend to have a litter from them.  I have a bitch who may be 4 weeks today - and she has totally gone off her food this week.  They tend to have a dried food in the morning and raw at night - she is better with that, but definately hates her veg!  I'm sure she'll get her appetite back in a few days then at 6 weeks I'll start her on Royal Canin puppy food.

My girl will be having Royal canin puppy food from this weekend also.  At the moment she's eating absolutely everything!

>what is the best thing to feed a pregnant bitch? should i give her the same food, would i give suplements, any advice welcome,<

If your 'hobby' as you put it, is 'breeding dogs' - what did you feed the others?

to be honest, this is my new hobby, thats why im on here getting as much info as i can,

Mine get their normal barf diet and then when about 6 weeks the same complete food that I will feed the pups as well... Saying that I had one bitch that would only eat raw chicken breast throughout most of her pregnancy despite being tempted with loads of food shes normally a pig but it was chicken or nowt, she had 7 healthy pups and then hardly ate for the first week and survived on whole goats milk with a bit of chicken breast if she felt like it...

As long as its a good quality food of some kind she'll do OK..

I'd recommend goats milk too, think fluid is just as important for at least the first week after birth, when they sometimes dont feel like eating that much.

i feel stupid askin but wats a barf diet? maybe i already know just use different terms,

Barf Diet is Bone And Raw Food, such as raw meats, fish, chicken and raw veg too!!  followed buy a nice juicy bone! :)

Barf is a raw food diet, different kinds of meat,heart, tripe, beef, lamb, chicken etc, with raw pulverised veg, eggs, fish, nat yoghurt, and raw meaty bones such as chicken wings, carcasses, breast of lamb, rib bones, with occasional marrow bones chucked in for teeth cleaning and keeping the dog occupied for hours, hee hee. Plus some supplements, such as salmon oil,or cod liver oil,maybe some other supplement containing different minerals etc.
Bones are fine as long as they are raw, once theyve got the idea they love them.
Thats just a basic simple explanation of BARF, there are some good books on it.
Mine get that with a plain terrier meal biscuit, when in whelp they get that (if they will eat it) and then a good quality puppy complete food, such as Royal Canin, Nutro, James Wellbeloved, Vitalin bitch diet.

Some people cant stomach the thought of feeding raw, the tripe is smelly, so a good quality complete works for them...
Its the reason all my litters are weaned onto complete as Ive found that only a few people were willing to feed raw coz they couldnt bear the thought of it....

so basically what ever is in tripe is what you have just described or is that just one of the ingredient, also do we make it or buy it like that? i sound dumb,,,, really im not, lol

tripe is the stomach lining and you can buy it as a raw mince or chunks from various sources, pets at home, berriewoods,landywoods,forthglade, and comes on its own either in frozen freeflow packs or blocks of a 1lb, you can buy raw lamb,chicken, meat, the same way, sometimes you get a meat/tripe mix or chicken/tripe mix, the idea is to feed as varied a diet of this raw food with veggies as possible with muscle meat as a certain percentage and raw bones another percentage, to make a complete blanced diet fed over a period of time including the other items of eggs, fish etc as already mentioned.
AMP also do a mix with veggies already in it, and some of their mixes have bone added to them too.

If you go to www.prizechoice.co.uk that gives a link to the barf club uk which may answer some of your questions, or just google it for loads of info...
Its not as complicated as it sounds, Ive been feeding it for 5 years plus now and all my dogs are doing well on it.

so would you just feed it to preg dogs or all the time?

I feed it all the time....

Yuck, I hate tripe, don't mind much else but tripe ugggghh!!  Sure Carmen would love it at the moment as she's eating me out of house and home!  From a dog that was a slow eater last night she pinched Anton's and he likes his food!

Don't say I said this but mum made me laugh.  I just feed mine a partial BARF diet and when I told mum to feed Carmen the chicken backs etc. she was worried the bones would harm the pups, I thought it was sooo cute, bless her!