Homemade Diets
If you decide to use a homemade diet, you have to be careful to provide good nutrition and safe ingredients. You can't decide you're too tired to bother and serve your dog leftover spaghetti one night and French toast the next. You'll need to use a tested recipe and all the ingredients it calls for on a consistent basis.
Raw Food
Some breeders, even Yorkshire terrier breeders, are now promoting raw-food diets for their dogs. You should think seriously about this before following such advice. Raw foods and bones diets have been promoted largely by two veterinarians from Australia, neither of whom is a nutritionist, and are untested and unproven.
If your breeder feeds raw and her dogs look great, why shouldn't you feed your Yorkie the same way?
You certainly can. First, be sure you're willing to spend the time and energy to gather the ingredients and prepare the food. Then be fanatically dedicated to cleanliness to avoid infection. Finally, realize that dogs have died from intestines punctured by bone fragments and required surgery for fractured teeth or impacted intestines.
If you choose to follow this diet, be advised that raw meat must be handled carefully to avoid exposing yourself and your family to E. coli and salmonella bacteria. Dogs fed the diet for the first time often react adversely, with vomiting and diarrhea. The bones can cause tooth fractures or, worse, punctured intestines from bone fragments. Yes, wolves may eat raw meat and bones. But no one knows how many wolves die young from problems with bone fragments. And Yorkshire terriers are most definitely not wolves.
Home-Cooked Diets
You can find tested recipes for home-cooked dog foods in books and on the Internet. Your veterinarian may even have one available, if you ask. Some of these recipes started as alternatives for dogs suffering from food allergies, while others were created just because owners wanted to cook for their dogs.
Be sure that any recipe you choose has been time-tested, and then follow it carefully. Some ingredients used in small quantities may seem unimportant and hard to find, but they provide essential vitamins and minerals.
