The 80/10/10
raw feeding ratio.

Ask five raw feeders what ratio they use and four of them will say "80/10/10" without hesitating. It's become shorthand for "doing raw right" — but the number itself doesn't mean much until you know what it's a ratio of, why those specific proportions, and how to turn a percentage on a page into an actual scoop in a bowl.

This isn't a rigid formula that has to be hit to the gram every single day. It's a reference framework — a starting point that approximates what a balanced raw diet looks like over time, built to be adjusted for the dog actually eating it.

What the numbers actually stand for.

80/10/10 describes the weight breakdown of a raw diet across three components:

• 80% raw muscle meat — the protein backbone. Any red meat, poultry, or fish muscle counts here, including the fat naturally attached to it.
• 10% raw meaty bone or ground bone — the mineral component, mainly calcium and phosphorus, plus connective tissue.
• 10% organ meat — split roughly in half between liver (a "secreting" organ, meaning it regulates hormones and processes toxins) and other organ like kidney, spleen, or pancreas. Liver alone isn't organ meat done right; the diversity matters.

Those percentages describe the diet as a whole — averaged across a week or two of feeding, not necessarily hit in every single meal. A dog that gets a bone-in meal on Monday and a boneless organ-heavy meal on Wednesday is still on an 80/10/10 diet if the week nets out close to the ratio.

Where the framework comes from.

80/10/10 isn't the output of a single clinical study — it's a simplified reference point that grew out of the raw feeding community's effort to approximate the rough composition of a whole prey animal without requiring anyone to actually feed whole prey. Muscle, bone, and organ show up in roughly those proportions across a lot of small-to-medium prey species, which is where the ratio's credibility comes from: it's an approximation of a biologically plausible diet, not an arbitrary number.

That also means it's a starting framework, not a law of nature. Individual prey animals vary, individual dogs vary, and the ratio is meant to be a baseline you adjust from — not a target you chase with a kitchen scale for the rest of the dog's life.

Why the bone percentage matters more than people think.

The 10% bone figure is doing more work than it looks like. Muscle meat alone is phosphorus-heavy and calcium-poor — feed muscle meat exclusively and you build a mineral imbalance that shows up over months, not days, which is exactly why it's easy to miss until it's already a problem. Bone is the calcium source that corrects that imbalance and gets the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio into the range a dog's skeletal system is built to handle.

Get the bone number wrong in either direction and there's a real consequence, not just a theoretical one:

• Too little bone, long-term: a slow-building calcium deficiency that can affect bone density and skeletal development, especially serious in a growing puppy.
• Too much bone, short-term: hard, chalky, difficult-to-pass stool — often called "bone stool" — and in more extreme cases, constipation severe enough to need vet intervention.

This is also where raw meaty bone (bone with meat still attached, like a chicken back or wing) and ground bone (bone processed into a blend, the format most commercial raw uses) start to matter for the math. A whole raw meaty bone isn't 100% bone by weight — a chicken wing might be closer to 50/50 bone and meat — so counting a whole RMB as "10% of the diet" and calling it done usually overshoots the actual bone contribution. Ground bone in a pre-made blend is measured and mixed in at the correct percentage already, which is one reason a lot of feeders lean on a formulated blend rather than assembling whole cuts and bones themselves.

Portion math: turning 80/10/10 into a real daily amount.

The ratio only becomes useful once it's attached to a daily total. Most adult dogs at maintenance eat roughly 2-2.5% of their ideal body weight per day in raw food, adjusted up for very active dogs and down for less active or overweight dogs. Once you have that daily total, 80/10/10 tells you how to split it.

Using 2.5% of body weight per day as the baseline:

• 40-lb dog: 1.0 lb/day total — 12.8 oz muscle, 1.6 oz bone, 1.6 oz organ (roughly 0.8 oz liver + 0.8 oz other organ).
• 65-lb dog: 1.625 lb/day (26 oz) total — 20.8 oz muscle, 2.6 oz bone, 2.6 oz organ (roughly 1.3 oz liver + 1.3 oz other organ).
• 90-lb dog: 2.25 lb/day (36 oz) total — 28.8 oz muscle, 3.6 oz bone, 3.6 oz organ (roughly 1.8 oz liver + 1.8 oz other organ).

Split the daily total across one to two meals. If you're assembling a diet from separate cuts rather than a pre-formulated blend, weigh the components at least for the first few weeks — eyeballing bone and organ percentages is where most at-home ratio mistakes happen, since both look small next to an 80% pile of muscle meat.

Common variations you'll run into.

80/10/10 is the most-cited version, but it's not the only one in circulation. Some feeders run a 75/10/10/5 split, carving out a small 5% slice for fish (for omega-3 content) or pureed produce. That's closer to a BARF-style approach than strict prey model — the meat/bone/organ core stays the same, the disagreement is only about that extra slice.

Puppies are a separate case entirely, not a scaled-down version of the adult ratio. Growing dogs typically need a higher daily percentage of body weight (often 5-8% for young puppies, tapering down as they approach adult size) and closer attention to the calcium-phosphorus balance during the growth window, since skeletal development is happening in real time. Talk to your breeder or vet about puppy-specific portions rather than applying the adult 80/10/10 percentage directly.

Whole prey feeding sidesteps the ratio question almost entirely — a whole rabbit or whole game bird already contains muscle, bone, and organ in the animal's natural proportions, so there's nothing to measure out. That's a stricter, more logistically demanding approach than most owners start with, and it isn't required to feed a balanced 80/10/10-style diet.

Six mistakes people make applying the ratio.

1. Treating it as a daily law instead of a weekly average. One organ-light meal followed by an organ-heavy one balances out. Panicking over a single meal that doesn't hit the exact split usually isn't necessary.
2. Counting a whole raw meaty bone as 10% bone by weight. Meaty bones like wings and necks are part meat, part bone — weigh or research the actual bone content instead of assuming the whole piece counts toward the bone percentage.
3. Using only liver for the organ 10%. Liver is one organ, not the whole organ category. Rotate in kidney, spleen, or pancreas so the "other organ" half of the split isn't skipped entirely.
4. Applying the adult ratio and percentage directly to a puppy. Growing dogs need a different daily percentage and closer calcium attention — see the puppy note above.
5. Confusing ratio by weight with ratio by calories. 80/10/10 is a weight-based framework. Fat content varies a lot between cuts, so two meals with the same weight split can carry meaningfully different calorie counts — watch body condition, not just the scale.
6. Never adjusting the baseline for the dog in front of you. A working dog in a heavy training cycle, a senior dog with reduced activity, and a dog that's gaining or losing weight all warrant tweaking the daily percentage. The 80/10/10 split stays the reference point; the total amount shouldn't be static forever.

When to call a vet.

Introducing or adjusting a ratio-based diet is worth watching closely, especially in the first few weeks. Vomiting more than twice in 24 hours, diarrhea that persists past 48-72 hours, consistently hard or chalky stool that doesn't resolve after cutting back the bone portion, refusing food for more than a day, or any sign of abdominal distention all warrant a call. Dogs with a diagnosed medical condition — kidney disease, pancreatitis, a history of digestive surgery — should have a vet directly involved in setting the ratio and daily percentage, not just at the start but as it's fine-tuned over time. Puppies and senior dogs with existing health conditions deserve the same conversation before any ratio changes.

The bottom line.

80/10/10 earns its reputation because it's a genuinely useful approximation, not because it's a precise formula handed down from a lab. Know what each number represents, get the bone math right since it's the piece most likely to go sideways in either direction, and treat the daily percentage as something that moves with the dog rather than a fixed number set once and forgotten.

Beef 80/10/10 is built at the canonical ratio with zero dilution — a straightforward way to feed the framework without assembling it from separate cuts. For the complete portion and transition framework, see the full raw feeding guide.

More from the field manual.

Try Beef 80/10/10