Raw food for Samoyed with allergies

Paw chewing in a Samoyed that tracks with the seasons is a classic sign of environmental or food-triggered inflammation — and you're right to consider raw as a tool here, because a proper elimination diet can genuinely help you identify what's driving it. Raw feeding done well can be excellent, but done badly it creates nutritional gaps that cause real harm over time, and the difference is balance and sourcing. To point you in the right direction: what's your Samoyed's current weight, have you fed raw before, and are you looking for a ready-made complete option or are you planning to prepare meals yourself?

That's exactly the right approach for a first-time raw feeder running an elimination trial — keep it simple, use one protein source, and watch what changes. For a 28kg Samoyed the daily feeding amount will be around 560g, split into two meals. Before I recommend a specific product, one important question: has he ever eaten duck before, or is his current diet chicken or beef based? That matters a lot for an elimination diet to actually work.

Perfect — duck is a novel protein for him, which is exactly what you need. For a clean single-protein elimination trial I'd recommend Natural Instinct Pure Duck. It's a complete raw meal, DEFRA-approved, and contains duck meat, duck bone, and duck liver — nothing else added, no chicken, no beef, no fillers. That purity is critical when you're trying to isolate a trigger. Run it exclusively for a minimum of eight weeks; anything shorter won't give you a reliable read on whether food is a factor. Keep his treats single-ingredient too — plain dried duck strips, not mixed-protein biscuits — or the trial is contaminated from the start.

You might see some reduction in paw chewing within three to four weeks if food is a significant contributor — but partial improvement can be misleading. Some dogs show a 40% improvement on a food trigger and owners assume it's just seasonal variation and give up. The full eight weeks lets you see the complete picture, and then deliberately reintroducing chicken tells you definitively whether that was the culprit. It's worth doing properly once rather than guessing twice.

Yes — a few things. Transition gradually over seven to ten days, mixing increasing amounts of the Natural Instinct Pure Duck with his current dry food, to avoid digestive upset. Loose stools for the first week or two are common and usually settle. Watch his energy levels and coat condition — both typically improve noticeably on a well-balanced raw diet. And keep a simple diary: note the paw chewing frequency, any redness between the toes, and any digestive changes. That record will be genuinely useful whether you're reporting back to a vet or just tracking it yourself.