How I Feed My Dogs — A Learning Journey Grounded in Science

A personal account — told by a breeder and enthusiast of Belgian Ring and French Ring.

I breed and train Malinois. Paco, 34 kg, and Mala, 28 kg: both train every day. We practise utility and protection disciplines: protection exercises, searching, obedience, heelwork, and — as an enthusiast of Belgian Ring and French Ring — all of the tests these demanding dog sports involve. On top of that there are two six-month-old puppies, also active every day.

For me, nutrition is neither a fashion nor a lifestyle philosophy. It is a question of performance, recovery and responsibility towards these dogs. It is also a subject I researched for a long time, read a great deal about and made mistakes with, before arriving at a solution that I am now able to explain and justify.

In this article I want to be honest, not promotional. I will make claims that are supported by the scientific literature, and I will clearly indicate where the evidence ends and where my own personal conclusions begin.

WHAT I FEED MY DOGS — AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS

I feed a commercial raw food. Specifically, VOM, a Norwegian product delivered frozen. It is made of raw meat from Norwegian farms — where legislation prohibits the routine use of antibiotics in feed intended for animals — combined with offal, salmon oil, and carefully balanced vitamins and minerals.

I deliberately stress the word "commercial", because understanding what it means is essential. A commercial raw food is not the same as what many people mean by BARF. Traditional BARF consists of buying meat, bones, offal and raw vegetables separately, formulating the ration yourself and taking on full responsibility for its nutritional balance. It is a demanding method and, if carried out incorrectly, it can cause genuine deficiencies: calcium–phosphorus imbalances, shortfalls in trace elements or in vitamin D.

VOM, by contrast, is already fully formulated. The nutritional profile is balanced, the composition is defined by the manufacturer and verified through laboratory analysis. In this way the main scientific criticism levelled at traditional BARF is eliminated: the risk of poorly formulated homemade rations.

The result is, in my view, the best of both worlds: minimally processed raw meat, with high biological quality and high bioavailability, combined with the reliability of a complete food.

For the sake of fairness I should add one more clarification: my food contains slaughter by-products, for example bovine rumen. From an economic point of view, rumen is certainly a low-value part of the carcass. From a biological point of view, however, it represents a food of great value for the dog, rich in enzymes and micronutrients — quite different from plant fillers treated at high temperatures and used solely to artificially inflate the protein