Green Tripe is something we highly recommend here at K9 Natural because not only do dogs LOVE it but it is incredibly nutritious as well. We consider it to be natures ‘super-food’ for dogs because it is packed full of protein and probiotics.

What exactly is Green Tripe?

Tripe is the stomach of ruminating (grazing) animals. These animals are classified as being four-footed, hooved and cud chewing mammals with a stomach that consists of four chambers. Our source of Green Tripe comes from New Zealand grass fed Lamb.

How can something that smells so disgusting be so good?

Green Tripe contains gastric juices and enzymes which aid the dog in digesting and efficiently utilizing their food. Raw Green Tripe is full of lacto bacillus acidophilus along with amino acids, both of which are necessary for good health & include muscular development, plus gastric juices which are great teeth cleaners. It also means it can be easily digested and perfect for dogs who suffer from a sensitive digestive system and or skin allergies.

Why feed K9 Natural Green Tripe?

We have many customers that find green tripe has helped clear up their dog’s skin allergies and they are very happy with the results. Green Tripe is also an excellent transitional tool to help transition a dog from a highly processed kibble diet to a raw diet since it contains lots of digestive enzymes and makes the transition nice and easy.

We offer green tripe in both frozen and freeze dried free flow forms. This takes away the ‘yuck’ factor as you can feed without handling the tripe (unfortunately we can’t take away the smell).
The freeze dried is an even more convenient way to feed as there is no need for freezer space and no need to defrost, you can also feed it as treats.

Here are some comments our customers have made about our Green Tripe:
‘Tripe is the stuff doggie dreams are made of’
‘You’ve turned my dog into a tripe junkie ? LOL’
‘Bought a bag on the weekend and she’s right over the moon. She loves this smelly stuff….so much so that I caught her trying to break into the bag….and she has never, ever done that before!’
‘It stinks but it works, Watson was itching nonstop and shaking the house like an earthquake until I dished this up’

Check out this article by Dogs Naturally for more information on Green Tripe

http://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/the-stink-on-tripe/

The answer is simple; at K9 Natural we do not believe we know the best raw diet for our dogs and cats. We do not try to second guess nature; we do not believe we are good enough to produce the perfect food for dogs and cats. We do not believe science is good enough to produce the perfect food for dogs and cats. So that leaves us with the one thing we do know.

Nature can and does provide the perfect food for all its animals (whether they can catch it is not up for discussion here). That food is raw, uncooked, unaltered, warm (body temperature) full of blood, full of EFAs, full of vitamins, full of calcium, and all the nutrients they need. People do dispute this, some Vets dispute this, some scientists dispute this, and some people dispute this. My question to those that do is how can you? The biggest hurdle we face as humans is ourselves, we believe we always know best and we have the answers, yet we still cannot predict earthquakes, or stop the weather, or the tide or most things that are ruled by nature. Yet we firmly believe we can feed cats and dogs better than nature and ourselves for that matter?

I once met an Indian chief who used the wolf as their symbol of hope and their society’s teacher. They watch nature, they lived by nature’s laws and they were a better race because of it. He summed up humans and how we behave towards wolves in this case but towards one another in my view by saying this “as humans what we fear we destroy, and what we cannot conquer we also destroy.” How true are those words? So how does that relate to raw dog and cat food? It sums up the whole ethos behind our company, as we believe that getting a raw dog and cat food right means observing nature, following its methods and not fearing but trusting our own instincts. No one I speak to every disagrees with the simple logic that cats eat birds and dogs will eat rabbits given the chance, so why is it so difficult to convince those people with what we call intelligence that a raw cat and dog food, is a food fit for cats and dogs? It is simple if I want to sell you something I have 2 very distinct ways of doing it. The first is the way we choose at K9; therefore I tell you to trust your instincts and what you already know; you know a dog and cat doesn’t cook its food, so RAW it is. You know they don’t graze in paddocks of wheat, you know they need moisture in their food.
You know if a cat or dog is losing weight to feed it more, or if it’s gaining weight to feed it less. Yet we still question how much to feed and what to feed them, why? Because the second way to sell you anything is on fear; you are told that you do not know what to feed a cat or dog, you are told how much to feed them because you are told you don’t know. You are told they must have a complete and balanced diet? What is one of those, do you eat one every day? You are told Dogs are domesticated so they eat differently than they did in the wild? Why then have we only started to do feed cat and dog kibble, biscuits since 1950, when they were domesticated 15,000 years ago? You are told you know very little about them and that your dog is an omnivore. Yet nature (thousands of years ago) and science (fairly recently in the last century) classified it as a carnivore. You are told your cat is an obligate carnivore, yet unless it eats biscuits it will not thrive.

Notice the common theme here, you are being told you are inadequate of caring for your cat or dog. Do the same people tell you that you are inadequate of looking after yourself? Well unfortunately that is now becoming the norm too. So at K9 Natural we will only tell you what we know and that is very little compared to nature. I will go into great depth regarding the food and how we make it in the next issue of my blog. If you do nothing else after reading this second chapter remember this, trust your instincts, you do not have to feed my raw diet to your cats and dogs you are quite capable of making your own raw food for them and we encourage that.
What we do make for you is a food you can hopefully feed with confidence knowing we have told you everything we know and it is a little more convenient and sourced from animals deemed fit for human consumption, in New Zealand which has the strictest farming practices and food safety controls in the world and one of the most cleanest, free range farms and farming practices on the planet.

As we are all aware, dogs in common with us humans are increasing in terms of those being classed as overweight or obese. K9 Natural in conjunction with regular exercise is a great combination to help a dog lose excessive body fat and get in shape. Here’s why!

Raw fats
A lot of people mistakenly believe that raw fats are bad in terms of helping a dog lose weight, however when fed in the correct quantities can actually increase the fat loss process.
Raw fats contain an enzyme called lipase, this enzyme basically helps break down fats for digestion and this makes the raw fat much more accessible as a fuel source as opposed to cooked fat. Unfortunately in this case lipase has been significantly downgraded through cooking which in turn limits the ability of the fat to be used as energy and increasing the potential for immediate conversion to body fat.

Raw Protein
The raw single protein sources found in K9 Natural not only provide a dog with a range of amino acids to help build and repair muscle tissue along with a host of other functions. But also helps (along with the fats) in slowly down the rate at which carbohydrates enter the dog’s blood stream, reducing the amount of insulin released by the dog’s pancreas (a high insulin release in directly linked with an increased potential to store body fat).

Slow Released Carbohydrate Sources
K9 Natural includes a small amount of raw carbohydrates sourced from fruit and vegetables. These are classed as being both complex and low glycaemic in structure, the same as what nature provides. The result in that a dog will receive an even supply of energy from this nutrient without the risk of being converted to body fat, a process displayed in highly process, simple carbohydrate sources and commonly used in kibbles and canned dog foods.

For overweight dogs we recommend feeding 1% of the dogs bodyweight, this ensures a slow and steady weight loss. Dramatic weight loss can lead to loss of muscle rather than fat and is not recommended.

Why did I develop K9 Natural? Well that’s a long story which I will break down into shorter parts;
The main reason being I lost faith in humans, as cynical as it sounds that is what I became having worn a uniform all my life, first in the Military and then the Police it became difficult to remain trusting of anyone.
Conflict of any kind tends to leave scars both physical and mental, I was the lucky one as I don’t let things bother me however I soon learnt it was the lies which drove me wild.
Anyone that works with animals knows they never lie, you get what you see, they warn you before they attack which is more that can be said for humans so I began to trust dogs more than people as strange as it sounds.
We as humans are no different to our dogs and cats; they require the same things in order to survive. That is the key to this story and the success of K9 Natural.

Survival consists of three key elements;

1. Food.
2. Shelter.
3. Protection.
Look familiar? We all need these things to survive but humans take these things for granted. Take food for example, this is the key to our survival yet expect food to cost less and less but expect better quality. Our K9 and Feline friends however look at food as being the key to survival because they trust their instincts and follow them, that is why they survive in harsh envirnoments and they understand that as a team/family they have a greater chance of survival.
Do we? In my view no, we have been accustomed to looking after number one, we have become greedy, lazy, obsessed with material things and happy to eat anything that remotely looks like food as long as it is cheap. Would your dog choose to eat the food you feed now, given the choice?
That’s easy to test with a food like K9 Natural, just place a bowl of what you currently feed next to one of warm, bleeding steak and see which one they choose. You already know the answer, no one has ever got that wrong yet people still believe what they are told by someone in a white coat. Why do humans listen to scientists who are learning what K9 Natural already knows, and understands?

When I talk about a good meal what do you think of? What do you consider as good food? Or more to the point what’s your favourite food? It will probably be something that is not always good for you however it may be the opposite too.
As humans we have a fantastic choice of foods, they are available every day and we choose them for ourselves. Now imagine being a cat or a dog, they too have a large selection of food available but can they choose their own? We choose to feed them the food we fed them on a daily basis, but if you gave them a choice what would they eat? rice, corn, wheat and potato? These are ingredients in most dog foods out there, or would they choose meat on the bone? Cats and dogs will tell you what they prefer if you put those ingredients out by eating the right one, and they would also prefer you answer the question correctly.
Why did we as humans start eating junk food? There are 3 ingredients in food that drive us to buy it, these are sugar, fat and salt, and are the key ingredients to palatability. They may not be the key ingredients to our health but that is our choice to eat them, remember we have the choice that our cats and dogs don’t have.
Next time your cat goes out to hunt look at what they choose, it is warm, covered in fur or feathers and runs or flies. Give your dog the same chance to go out and feed itself, they too will catch something warm, covered in fur and running past its nose ie a rabbit. This is a suitable diet for our pets and is so logical. I often say to people if it doesn’t make sense, don’t feed it, if you can’t understand the ingredients on the back of the bag without a science degree don’t feed it.
One question for you, have you ever seen a cat or dog cook its food?

Nature has been around for millions of years, science has been around for how long? Yet at K9 Natural we are constantly being asked to back up our food with science, well my answer is we do not mess with nature, nature in our view is perfect and undisputable.

Consider this; nature has done a fantastic job for millions of years without our intervention. It has fed every species of animal on this planet on its own for millions of years, humans in the last century so less than 100 years have been playing with nature and we have managed to make a series of events that is now threatening the planets very existence, let alone our own lives so who is right?
Well I look to nature to show me the right way to feed its animals and in this case we produce a diet that is as close to nature as we can make it, so a raw, natural, un-cooked, un-irradiated food based on the principles of a natural diet for the 2 species we focus on, dogs and cats. I assure you it is not perfect, it can never be, nature is the only thing that can make real food for cats and dogs but we certainly try our best to get as close to that as possible.