Hi Laura,
These are some tips that were sent to me by the company when I first transitioned my dogs to Darwin’s, a commercial raw. They’re ideas specific to their product, but you might find some of them useful.
You can try these tips if you haven’t already (singly or in combo):
1. Adding cheese or canned food is usually a good trick to start with. Also adding spices can increase interest.
2. You can feed Darwins very warm. You can either float it in its bag in hot water or, at least to start, cook it a little on the stove or in the oven. This will release some of the fat molecules in the meat and hopefully overcome some of the veggie smell. Also put just a small amount in the bowl. No sense wasting food and also a small amount might be less intimidating. Add more if your dog eats the first offering.
3. Mix either straight ground meat or some healthy table scraps into the Darwins. Some people find that mixing ground meat into the Darwin’s at a ratio of about 30-50 percent warm Darwins with 70-50 percent fresh ground meat for a few days will convince their dog to start eating Darwin’s.
4. At first only feed the meat variety that your dog is used to eating. Also, it seems that many dogs take to the turkey and chicken faster than to the beef. It might be the smell of the meat itself or it might be that the beef contains bone meal instead of ground pieces of bone and some dogs don’t like the smell of bone meal. Also, I think the red meat variety smells more of organ meat than do the chicken or turkey. Unfortunately the veggie smell is the first noticed smell and it is the same in all Darwin’s varieties; so dogs who didn’t like their first meat variety might think that all the Darwin’s is the same since it all smells the same. That’s when using trick 3 is helpful to get them started by cutting the percentage of vegetables and, thus, reducing the smell.
5. Warmed chicken or beef broth poured over the food to make a soup or stew sometimes works, if your dog will eat a very wet food. Some do not like soup.
6. Make sure your dog is good and hungry and don’t feed anything else if the Darwin’s is refused. Just try again next meal. . Easier to get a child to eat broccoli if he or she hasn’t had access to McDonalds for the past few meals.
7. Cook the food like a meat loaf (325 for 30 – 40 minutes or so) and start there. You can mix in raw Darwin’s with the crumbled cooked loaf slowly until you are transitioned. Or mix the crumbled loaf into the food that your dog is used to eating and then transition to raw once you have convinced him/her to eat it cooked.
8. Adding Green Tripe to our meals is an excellent idea for notoriously picky eaters. It is highly palatable, and considered a “superfood” for dogs. We do offer Green Tripe in 1lb packages, and can be added to your standard order any time.
