Viva Pets, the pet food store that cares.

We here at Viva Pets take the responsibility of choosing a healthy diet for your dog or cat seriously. And if you're reading this, you're likely of the same mindset! Our pets cannot read the labels and make informed decisions for themselves, so it's up to us to make the best choices we can on their behalf. So how do you identify a good frozen raw food? Ingredients are a great place to start. Whether you're feeding a frozen/freeze-dried raw diet, a dry kibble, or anything in between, a high meat content is extremely important. A well-balanced raw food should have about 5% liver and another 5-10% other organs (think heart, kidneys, lung, spleen, and pancreas). Ground bone content should be around 10% of the meal, or supplemented with eggshell, calcium carbonate, or citrate if using a bone-free diet. A well-balanced raw diet should have about 10-15% fruits and vegetables for dogs, but only about 2-3% for cats. Some of the best you will see might include blueberries, cranberries, apples, broccoli, kale, leafy greens, and kelp. These inclusions will add a variety of fibre to the diet (which helps to move food through the GI tract, in addition to acting as prebiotics that feed the probiotics in their gut). Fruits and vegetables will also offer important vitamins and minerals that will round out the nutrient profile of the main meat protein. Lastly, to really be considered a balanced diet, try to include a steady supply of omega fatty acids from either fish diets or toppers (think salmon, sardines, or mackerel), or add fish oil added to the meal (salmon, pollock or algae oil).

My super-dog husky/malamute cross Kai may be over 12 years old, but she still insists on outrunning my other dog, who’s many years younger than she is. She’s also extremely smart with fantastic eyesight and hearing, with no plans to slow down anytime soon. These properties can all wane with age, so as a pet food industry insider, these are the supplements I add to her raw food meals to help keep her going. (Check out our June post to find out what I feed her.) For her joints, she gets Tri-Acta glucosamine, chondroitin and MSM (just like humans take), Thrive Green Lipped Mussel (also packed with taurine for heart health), North Hound Life turmeric and black pepper (powerful anti-inflammatories), and Nature's Logic powdered bone broth (full of collagen). As a pro tip: I actually portion these powders all into one tub and scoop them onto one meal a day to save myself the time of opening and measuring several different products while my dog is drooling beside me, impatiently awaiting her dinner. Age comes with increased cancer risk, so I use supplements to support right down to her cellular health. To fight oxidative stress, I load up her antioxidant levels with Adored Beast's Vital Defense (a blend of spirulina, chaga mushroom and phytoplankton) and Myco-Biome turkey tail mushroom extract. Chaga mushroom is second only to cocoa as an antioxidant powerhouse, and turkey tail mushroom is not far behind. Spirulina and phytoplankton are also packed with nutrition, are highly digestible, and you only need a pinch to get their benefits. She gets a mix of organic sprouted seeds in her Carna4 Flora4, and her Back2Raw meals include the cancer-fighting champion that is organic broccoli, plus organic blueberries and cranberries for more antioxidant sources and urinary tract support. Dogs do best with a weekly rotation of at least three proteins plus some fish, so I make sure to include salmon and mackerel in her regular meals. Animals can synthesize many nutrients themselves, but essential fatty acids must be added to their diet. For both her brains and her beauty, she regularly wolfs down sardines (either frozen from Big Country Raw or dried from Wild Vibes and Granville Island Pet Treatery) for their incredible omega fatty acid profile. If the thought of supplementing seems daunting, you aren’t sure where to start, or simply need to keep a tight balance of nutrition and financial economy, it’s easy to start simple. Carna4’s Flora4 or Thrive’s Fortify are both great options to start with. Flora4 offers a host of nutrients, enzymes, probiotics, and fibre with their ground sprouted seeds, which is the highlight of their dog and cat dry food lines. Fortify boasts naturally sourced vitamins and minerals, plus apple pectin and digestive enzymes that specifically help to digest proteins, fats and carbohydrates. If you have any other questions or want some recommendations specific to your pet, come by and talk to us! Here at Viva Pets, not only have we studied these supplements, but we also use them with intentionality in our own homes. Much love, Jordan, Kai and Xaler Jordan has over six years of experience in the pet nutrition retail industry, and over ten years of experience raw feeding his rescue dogs. His dogs Kai and Xaler are never happier than when they’re running in deep snow or splashing in the North Saskatchewan.

Our canine best friends, while not strict carnivores like their feline rivals, still thrive on a meat-based diet. Raw food mimics the natural prey diet – anything a dog would have eaten in the wild. This approach to a dog’s diet is typically unproblematic to their digestive systems and leads to healthy benefits such as shinier coats, fresher breath and less poop. A healthy raw food diet is made up of ground raw meat, organ meats, bone, and in some instances veggies or tripe. Rotating your dog’s proteins not only adds variety to their diet, but ensures they are getting all the necessary nutrients needed, as every protein has a different set of macro and micro-nutrients that some proteins may not offer. You wouldn’t eat the same thing everyday and chances are your dog doesn’t want to either. If you’ve decided that a raw diet is good for your dog, we recommend watching your dog’s body weight and adjusting accordingly. Depending on what life stage your dog is in, or even what season you’re feeding in, you may need to adjust how much you’re feeding. The amount of food is based on various factors including how active your dog is. A wide variety of factors can affect how much raw food to feed a dog, everything from their breed to the weather outside. Your dog’s breed, size, and activity level are the main factors to consider when figuring how much to feed. A more active dog will require more food, than the dog who is content to lay on the couch all day. Similarly to breed, feeding may need to be adjusted based on your dog’s size, as smaller dogs actually need more calories per pound due to their fast metabolism. We recommend feeding adult dogs two meals a day, and puppies 3-4 meals in the day. We can’t stress enough that paying attention to your dog’s weight will be a key factor in ensuring your pet is getting enough, or too much food. A couple of ways to check their weight would be to weigh them once or twice a week and recording their weight, or physically checking with your hands. You’ll want to feel for hips and ribs to track if they are gaining or losing weight.