Mixing cooked meat with kibble...
actually this is a question i'm finding myself answering quite often.
i've spent quite some time researching the topic of adding extras to kibble, regardless if it's raw or cooked.
here is what i've found:
all the claims that kibble and other foods digest at greatly different rates and feeding them together is dangerous come from internet sources that have no hard facts to back them up. nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero. they are just passed on from one person to another (generally by those who are pretty zealous raw feeding extremists) and if people hear things often enough, they tend to take it as fact.
then i turned to professional sources.
dr. richard pitcairn, a respected vet practicing alternative medicine, recommends supplementing kibble with fresh foods and even has specific recipes for kibble mix-ins in his book (page 45, dr. pitcairn's complete guide to natural health for dogs and cats).
monica segal, the "doggie dietician" and author of the book K9 Kitchen, Your Dogs' Diet: The Truth Behind The Hype had the following to say on the K9 kitchen yahoo group:
Quote:
Kibble leaves the stomach after 4-5 hours and, in fact, anything over 8 hours is considered a problem in that the dog would now be considered to have "delayed gastric emptying". Someone, somewhere decided that raw food is digested a faster rate but then we hear that raw food leaves the stomach in 4 hours -- which, of course, isn't faster at all. In any case, to the best of my knowledge, the "informtation" about digestion rates of raw foods is nothing more than one person passing information on to the next person and you know how that goes. If we hear something long enough, we start to believe it
My concern about mixing kibble into raw food only extends to one being dry and another being wet. If a dog is a serious gulper, there's a bit of a chance that a piece of dry kibble will be thrown into the back of the throat, causing the dog to choke. This is no longer a concern for me if the kibble is mixed in well so that it's as wet as the raw food, therefor going down the throat in the same way.
if you go by what the manufacturers of pet food say, they generally make recommendations about mixing canned and kibble, which is basically the same situation. in some cases (like with solid gold's holistique blendz, natura's innova evo and eagle dry foods) you even get recommendations about mixing with meats.