Today is Day 8 and by 9pm tonight (the time I normally weigh them) all the puppies should have doubled their birth weight.

The movie clip above shows Flossy enjoying raw chicken wings and "lights" for breakfast. This is PART of the BARF diet.

All the dogs here are fed a BARF diet. BARF stands for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food which is also sometimes referred to as the Bones And Raw Food diet. Google "Ian Billinghurst" for a list of books to read on the subject or refer to the Essential Reading page on my main website: http://www.barleors-labradoodles.co.uk

Why do I feed a BARF diet? Well, raw food is easier for dogs to digest than processed dried kibble. By 10am this morning Flossy will have converted her breakfast into a thick soupy substance called "chime". This will pass from the stomach into the intestines and be filtered into her blood stream and milk supply. So in a normal situation, her stomach would be rested from 10am until 6pm (ish) which is when she would get her next feed.

Had I fed Flossy a commercial Dry Food diet, her breakfast would not have been converted into chime until about 6pm this afternoon. Her stomach would have been working flat out to try to digest this unnaturally processed material and would therefore never get a break because she would need feeding again in the evening.

Flossy will of course, be getting another meal at about 11am, then a top up at about 3-4pm followed by dinner between 7 and 9pm - her nutritional requirements are phenomenal now and many smaller meals are easier on her digestive tract than two giant ones.