Why Feed Tripe?

So what is Tripe? Tripe is the name given to the stomach of grazing, or ‘ruminating’ animals, mainly cows, sheep, deer and ox in Great Britain. It can come in 4 different colours, white, black, yellow, or green. ‘Green Tripe’ is recommended for our pets, and this is not referring to the colour of the tripe, but the state of how processed it is, so Green Tripe is either lightly rinsed, soaked, maybe cut, and frozen, nothing else, and certainly Not bleached. We recommend you use a supplier who only rinses their tripe, as soaking loses valuable water-soluble nutrients.

So, What is so Good About Tripe?
*The food the grazing animals eat is broken down within the four chambers of their stomach, using large amounts of gastric juices, digestive enzymes, beneficial bacteria and amino acids which are very  beneficial to our dogs in aiding with their digestion.
*Tripe also contains essential fatty acids, calcium & phosphorus in the right proportions needed by your dog, omega 3 fatty acids aswell as various beneficial vitamins and trace amounts of the minerals (A,C,D,E, Magnesium, Zinc, Selenium, Copper, Iron, Manganese, Potassium).

THE best kind of Tripe for our animals, containing the most goodness, is unwashed Green Tripe – sometimes but not always the colour green, where the animal has fed on grass and the Tripe has either not been touched, or only lightly been rinsed to remove large bits of undigested recent foodstuffs eaten.
Some raw food suppliers will soak their tripes, but this will result in the loss of any water-soluble nutrients, so the stinkier and least washed it is, the healthier for your dog.

Green Tripe is not always the colour green:
*Yellow-creamy Tripe, in an unwashed state/lightly rinsed, is still beneficial, and is simply where the animal was fed Barley. This will give slightly different nutrients, but still very beneficial.
*Black Tripe, in an unwashed/lightly rinsed state, also contains lots of nutritional goodness, and is black because the animal it has come
from was fed on oats, this often happens during the winter months.

Again the nutrients here will be slightly different to those in Green tripe, but still too good for your dog to miss out on. You can get Tripe which has been put through an industrial spin-dryer-type cleaner, which is Not bleached, but may be mistaken for bleached tripe as it will be closer to white in colour than any other, as the spinning action of the machine takes off the outer layer of the tripe, which is where the colour is.

White Tripe has been fully washed, cleaned and then bleached, this is not good, and may even contain bleach residues. All the goodness has been washed and bleached away, so there’s little point in giving this to your dog at all.

You will see from the NHD Diet Guide that we do advise that Tripe be part of your dogs diet, as it is beneficial for our pets, but we would not have the % be more than 10-20%, so it does not have a negative impact on other necessary important nutrients. Tripe can be fed in the form of chunks, which resemble carpet underlay and are quite rubbery in
texture (very good for teeth but sometimes difficult for pups unless cut smaller), minced, or a meat/tripe mince mix, such as chicken & tripe.
We suggest Tripe be introduced very early on in the diet for dogs newly changed over to raw, usually in a chicken & tripe mince mix as the first raw food given, but this may not be best for very health-compromised dogs as it is harder for the digestive system to deal with than meat protein, which is why we tweak the changeover guide to suit the individual.

It always saddens me, knowing the benefits for a dog from raw Tripe, if an owner decides not to feed it just because it smells, it does smell, it Reeks, and it is not pleasant, but you do get used to it and after a while, although you never begin to like it, you are able to hardly notice it, and it helps when you realise the amount of goodness it contains, and the less it smells, the more it has been washed, which means more goodness has been washed away and lost.

So, peg on nose and give your dog a good 2 meals a week containing tripe, just as:
 ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ for us,
 ‘a portion of tripe a couple of times+ a wk, plays a key part in less vet visits and better health’ for your dogs!