The best diet to feed your dog has been a heated debate for many years. There are many different
diets available and it really depends on what suits your lifestyle. For example feeding primarily a dry kibble diet is easy and readily available. Whereas as feeding a natural or Barf diet is more time consuming as there is some time needed to prepare the food as well as risks to human health associated with keeping raw meat. There are a lot of different opinions out there. We feed our dogs a combination of high quality dry food (Our favorite is a combination of  Nature’s Variety Rabbit Kibble and Wellness 95% in Lamb and Salmon canned food ) in the morning and a high quality Raw food from Darwin’s Pet Product in the evening. We also feed them chicken wing/necks and raw meaty bones once to twice a week. We have never had any problems with our dogs and are very happy with this diet.

The most important thing you need to know when it comes to feeding you Doodle is: no grain or as little grain as possible. Doodles have a tendency of getting ear infections (yeast or bacteria) and if you want your doodle to have healthy ears the easiest thing to do is to stay off the grains in their food.

My advice to you is to :

Try to feed a good quality food and try to feed your dog a diet that is consistent. i.e. don’t feed dry food one night, table scraps another, a can of supermarket dog food the next. After speaking to friends in the veterinary field they suggested that dogs that seemed to be fed a consistently high quality diet had the least health problems. You will probably find that if you change your dogs diet too frequently they
will suffer from loose stools or diarrhea.

Make an informed choice. Educate yourself before making your decision. There is an immense amount of information available on the internet. I have included a couple of the best/most popular sites below. It’s easier to make a decision on what is best for you if you do your research.
http://www.barfworld.com/ for information on the Barf diet. A general internet search will give
you many many other sites.

http://www.iei.net/~ebreeden/kibble.html for information of what’s in dry dog food. This may help you to decide on which brand of dry dog food is best for you. Remember you usually get what you pay for.

NEVER EVER feed COOKED bones. Dogs digestive systems have been designed to breakdown raw bones but cooked bones don’t digest properly. We like to give our dogs a large split or whole marrow bone once a week. I start giving these when the puppy starts destructive chewing. We have found that this is the most effective way to help reduce the amount of destructive chewing they do during their ‘adolescent’ years. It is so much nicer to chew on a tasty big bone than on shoes, pot plants rugs (much nicer for you too). Some people don’t recommend feeding these large hard bones as they can wear down the dogs teeth.

Don’t give your dogs chocolate it is toxic to them.

Don’t give your dog onions and be very careful of corncobs. Dogs seem to love corn but the
cob isn’t digestible and can cause a blockage.

Always have a good sized supply of fresh water. Try to change your dogs water at least once a day. And remember to wash that bowl with soap and water or to run it through the dishwasher at least every other day!

Remember puppies are like toddlers they will put anything in their mouth. So put away plastic bags chemicals, rat and snail bait etc. Make sure your rubbish bin in not accessible.