Further reasons for raw

Sorry for the lapse here... I've been out of town and tied up in the preparations for going and the return to civilization upon coming home. Finally getting to the nitty gritty of what we actually do/did is coming up... in the meantime, I appear to have left off with our other reason for the switch to raw:

Luna
When we found Luna she was 4months old, or so. Her skin was in such bad shape that I thought she had mange; rather, she was just allergic to everything. Fleas, pollens, you-name-it. And we could never get a solid stool. She had worms, was skinny, had ear infections, and her flea bites ALWAYS turned into pustules and staph infections, so she was constantly on antibiotics. She has a Shar Pei horse coat, and topical flea treatments didn't work on her. Her nails were brittle. She was a hot mess.

Hard to see how patchy she is, but you can see how red and just "off" she looks.

But because we had no idea how big she would get, and I was new to raw, we decided to put her on kibble until she was done growing vertically. I might do things differently in future now that I know more, but I wanted to err on the side of caution.

With growing puppies, the conventional wisdom has always been to make sure that the calcium content of the food is appropriate so that they don't grow too quickly for their bodies to keep up with their bones. We tried premium foods with grains and could never get a solid stool. Upon removing grains, the change was immediate. Solid stool, weight gain. We were good to go. Her skin certainly improved, especially after adding coconut oil and salmon oils to her foods, but she, too, had a UTI and crystals, and her allergies just never quite settled down. She still got staph infections; Benadryl stopped working for her and we switched to Claritin.

When she was nearly a year old, we made the switch. And we haven't looked back. We have only had to treat for fleas a few times in the last few years; when she does get a flea bite, it's a bump, but it's not the end of the world. No drugs required.

People who normally are plagued by the Shar Pei coat comment on how she is the only Pei or Pei/mix that doesn't make them itch. She still makes me itch on occasion, but it's nothing like it was. She's no longer patchy. She remains trim, but healthy and muscular. She generally has solid stool. Her nails are far less brittle (she broke 3 or 4 over the course of about a year, all of which required vet treatment). She is happy, beautiful, and energetic.

When she went for her check-up earlier this year, I made sure I didn't need to put weight on her or anything. No, he told me she was perfect condition, don't change a thing. He said we know what we're doing, so keep doing it. :)

She still struggles with seasonal allergies, but they aren't nearly as problematic as they were.

River
A word on River. We'd initially hoped the change to raw would help with her anal glands, which were needing to be expressed more frequently than I'd have liked. Raw alone didn't help, but other dietary measures did.

That said, raw has decreased her shedding by quite a lot. And because she is now 8 or 9 years old, I went ahead and asked the vet to run blood work for her. And it looked great. :)