hi,
Help please! We need some advice on nutrition for our dog. my 2 year-old standard poodle is a bit of a problem eater. I don't mean he's fussy or anything but we've just had a history of problems with food. When he was v young puppy we discovered he had allergies and feeding him dried food diet only seemed to make him worse - runny nose gunky eyes and overly sleepy and he was suffering a lot from diarrhoea. We resorted to home cooking - plain food, meat pasta or rice with some veg no flavourings. He recovered nicely.

When we tried dried food only again, we had similar problems to before. Then we put him on half and half. Hills science plan with a bit of home cooked. He was fine on that and he settled nicely in terms of his upset tummy. But then we had some behavioural problems.  Because he was a bit hyper...chasing cars with bad recall and barking excessively at other dogs....we were encouraged to change his diet because we were told Hill's had too much protein. We changed him to Burns diet about 7 or 8 weeks ago. We changed gradually over a 2 week period and we did the same routine as before, half dried half home cooking. Problem is he's now quite frequently being sick and having bouts of diarrhoea. Obviously I don't want this to be going on for a long time. He's never continually sick or having such bad diarrhoea that you'd want to rush him to the vet, though we will get him checked over just to make sure there's nothing else wrong - we're taking him Tuesday. But I just wondered if anyone had any suggestions because we're trying to give him good quality foods to make sure he's getting good nutrition but I don't really know where to go from here. The breeder gave him Eukanuba and way back when we first got him home we tried him on Nutrience.

We have a 2 year old Weimaraner dog with the same problem.  We steadily waded through all the dried foods recommeded to us as suitable for dogs with a 'delicate constitution' and finaly came across Burgess Supa Dog Sensitive.  It has no artificial colours or flavours and is gluten free.  Not sure about the protein content as I have just chucked the sack away, but all ours do fine on it and are no more hyper than they were before!  I think it must have been the additives and/or the gluten that affected Casper, but his poo is now nice and firm, which makes it a lot easier to clean up after him too :D

Hi Margaretmck
I think, if I was you, I'd stick to what you know suits him, and go with your home made diet.  It sounds fairly balanced to me - I feed mine a barf diet, but am not an expert in canine nutrition.  I'd just add in a bit of bone - chicken wings for breakfast for example (raw of course).

...and I'm interested in the barf diet. Don't know an awful lot about it but I might look into it a bit more because I think I've ended up not fully trusting dried food. I don't mean in general because I know a lot of dogs who are fine with their dried food diet. But for our chap it just doesn't seem to be right at all.

hi, thanks for your reply...I think I might give that a try. It's good to know that it's not just us who have this problem. The amount of times I've been accused of just spoiling him too much really annoys me (by vets as well I might add). It really is a problem which is very difficult to deal with and obviously you don't want your dog to be feeling unwell a lot. It must affect their quality of life if getting upset tummy's all the time. 

There's a really readable book on natural feeding by Kymythy Schultz that is very helpful.  Can't remember the title, sorry, someone's borrowed mine and hasn't returned it!!

The Kymythy Schultz book is called 'Natural Nutrition for Cats and Dogs' and IMO is a great introduction to the BARF diet as it is well written and simple to understand. There are loads of books on the subject but this one is a very good starting point.