What do I feed my Puppy?

Earlier this month our family decided the time was right to get a new puppy to be a friend for the children and a playmate for the dogs that stay with us. We chose Millie from the SPCA, breed unknown..the card says Collie X but who knows. I see you can now do DNA testing on dogs to determine their exact breed. Perhaps we’ll have a think about that.
The first stop was to get some food for her. I remember a little girl asking me once when I was at a Veterinary Clinic..”What’s the best thing to feed a cat?...I suspect she wanted me to say a particular brand of cat food. I replied “The best thing to feed a cat is a bird, or a mouse or a rat, as that is what they’d eat if they were in the wild. If they were supposed to eat out of a can, they’d be born with a can opener around their neck.” There was stunned silence from the little city kid..obviously this was a completely foreign concept to her. I don’t know if she got a second opinion from someone else to do her school project , perhaps my answer wouldn’t have given her a great mark, but it’s still the truth.
So what should you feed a puppy . If Millie was in the wild her mum would eat and regurgitate the food so the puppies could eat a mince like consistency. So Mum would scavenge and forage on whatever was available in the environment at the time. If she came across a dead carcass or killed something the first thing she’d eat would be the stomach contents, and so get a good variety of pre-digested veges. She’d have a munch on a bit of the liver and get some A and D vitamins, she’d crunch on some of the leg bones and get some calcium and give her teeth a good clean in the process, she’d eat a bit of eyes, a bit of kidney, a bit of brain and get a good array of Vitamins, Minerals and essential fatty acids. This raw mince up food would be what the puppy ate and then as it got older it would head out and eat the same things Mum was eating.
So as her new Mum I needed to find something similar. I headed along to Pet Essentials and bought her a bag of the bickies she was eating at the SPCA so I could gradually introduce the new diet. I also got some puppy mince which has lamb, chicken, tripe and heart and chicken necks to introduce her to the joys of chewing on raw bones. She took to her new diet ravenously and since then has eaten, in addition, green tripe, whole chicken carcasses( from the Aussie butcher), chicken wings, chicken drumsticks, fish and salmon heads,( from Sanfords) big lumps of kidney, heart, a little liver, beef and lamb brisket, whole eggs, Tukkathyme, blended veges and left over veges and fruit. She has had a sprinkle of spirulina and occasional LSA mix also. There are a few different people recommending raw food diets and they vary slightly as the amounts of bones and whether to feed grains or not. Certainly any version with fresh raw ingredients, that actually have some life in them, and are free of colourings, flavours,preservatives,tons of bad fats and salt, will significantly increase your pet’s health and lead to a longer and happier life.
Millie certainly agrees with me.