I have a Rottweiler whose previous owners had her on a raw diet so I want to continue that. I bought an AAFCO book for guidance on what a recipe should be. The AAFCO book recommends (in a table) a daily requirement for a dog in maintenance, per kg of body weight. So let's say I want to make up 10lbs of food in a batch. The table recommendation is per kg of body weight per day. How do I equate what's in that AAFCO table to what I need to put in my 10lbs of raw dog food, without adding fillers, or non-natural food sources of the nutrients. One of the roadblocks I'm hitting is for example the nutrient Arginine. AAFCO recommends 0.11 grams of Arginine per 1kg of body weight. If I try to relate that directly to my 10lb batch it says I need 147g of Arginine. In order to get that much, the highest food source I found was Pumpkin Seeds and I'd need 2900g of Pumpkin Seed in my 10lbs batch. That's more than half of the batch which works out to 4.535kg. It thought that it was this simple. Calculate the total number of grams of nutrients in the AAFCO table and see what percentage of that total the nutrient was ( in this case Arginine ). Then I applied that percentage to the total weight of my batch of dog food. This is apparently not the way to do it.
Thanks for any suggestions