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Soapbox Time ( here goes Anne again).

Several years ago there was a big uproar about several commercial brands of dog food poisoning a great many dogs. At that time I had four dogs, I immediately began to cook and feed home-made dog food. They were already older dogs at the time, and the change in their energy level and attitude after beginning this regime was immediately noticeable - and quite surprising. I have mostly continued to do so since that time.

When my Big Joe came along, I got lazy and for short time I fed a $"premium"$ commercial brand (Blue Buffalo) until he suddenly began to have frequent unexplained bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Joe is a big guy - nearly 50 pounds - so there was a lot to clean up, as I am sure you can imagine. He had no other symptoms - never did seem particularly ill - just the vomiting and diarrhea.

Each time this happened I would put him on boiled rice for a few days, he would have no further problem, I would go back to the commercial dog food and the vomiting would start again.

After a few bouts of this, the light finally went on, and I put him on my home-made dog food (which he loves) and over the last year or so he has been on my food, he has had no further problems. What remained in the bag of commercial dog food at the time went directly to the trash. About $fifty dollars$ worth.

Anyway, I post this story because a new problem with commercial dog food seems to have cropped up again, leading to still another unnecessary death of someone's beloved pet:

http://people.com/pets/dog-food-recall-euthanasia-drug/

This doesn't affect me or Joe, because I don't buy commercial dog food. But I thought I would post it here for those who still do.

Ps. I am not a crackpot. Of my three previous dogs - Staffordshire Bull Terriers all (average life span about twelve years) - one lived to sixteen and-a-half, one to fifteen and-a-half, and one (who had had medical issues the last half of his life) fourteen and-a-half years. Never long enough, of course, but not bad. I was happy to take it.

Making one's own dog food is a bit more effort than throwing a handful or two of brown(ish) who-can-tell-what's-in-it dry kibble into a bowl. It is also a bit more expensive - perhaps by 20%.

But, if you really think about it, how healthy can it be for any animal - or human for that matter - to spend an entire lifetime eating dry brown chunks (laced with food preservation chemicals) out of a bag. The shelf life for your average bag of dog food is about ten years.

Anne

YES, I READ ABOUT THAT TOO. SO SAD FOR SOME PET OWNERS THAT DON'T REALIZE THIS. POISONING THEIR OWN DOGS! LYN

Anne, how do you make your dog food? Years ago my dad would make his own dog and cat food but it was because he wouldn't buy pet food. I think he probably cooked chicken necks in a pressure cooker. When we were growing up I don't remember ever having bought dog or cat food. They ate leftovers.

Martha

Acadianmom wrote:Anne, how do you make your dog food? Years ago my dad would make his own dog and cat food but it was because he wouldn't buy pet food. I think he probably cooked chicken necks in a pressure cooker. When we were growing up I don't remember ever having bought dog or cat food. They ate leftovers.

Martha

I don't give my dog leftovers.

The way I do it is pretty easy. And pretty un-scientific, so proceed at your own risk if you should choose to do this. I have fed my dogs my own "formula" for years. The only times I had a. . . "problem". . . (this happened twice, I guess I am a slow learner) is when, after a couple of years, I told my vet what I was doing, and my vet suggested a name-brand-drug-company that produced a special vitamin and mineral daily pill specifically formulated for dogs. He said that I should do this, just to be sure I wasn't "missing anything".

What this did in my experience (keeping in mind that this was not a scientific study of any kind) is that within a month of starting the vitamins (both times - on two different dogs) it caused my dog/s to break out in recurring histiocytomas (tumors - google it) that never stopped recurring once they started (lots of surgeries performed by the vet - just sayin') and eventually proved to be malignant. Neither dog had ever had a histiocytoma in the past before starting on these "vitamins".

Needless to say, no more dog vitamins for me.

Anyway, understanding that dogs are omnivores (like us) they thus have many of the same dietary requirements that we do. (Cats are strict carnivores - which does make one wonder when one reads the ingredients on a bag of your average cat food - mostly grains and grain products).

My basic recipe (I feed my dog morning and night - remember that Joe is a large-ish dog, at around fifty pounds - a smaller dog would take a lot less):

2 parts cooked white rice (I buy it by the twenty-five-pound bag - costs about $10.00 for the bag).
1 part raw, uncooked, lean ground meat, not the high-fat stuff (I buy the 85/15 in a ten-pound plastic "tube' at the grocery store, bring it home and freeze it in single-meal sizes). This is (obviously) government-inspected, human food-quality meat. Meat used to produce dog food is generally not government inspected (the article under the link speculated that the offending ingredient in the poisoned dog food may have been because animal meat from an animal who had been chemically "put to sleep" entered the food chain.

Add to the per twice-daily feeding:
3 heaping tablespoons of non-fat cottage cheese
1 raw egg

Add to the twice-per-day feeding:

1/2 cup of raw fruit, sliced into small enough pieces to be easily swallowed whole (being mindful that dogs don't always chew their food, and sometimes just wolf it down whole - don't want a choking hazard, or an intestinal obstruction hazard): apples, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, tomatoes, lettuce - I vary the kind of fruit at each feeding:
or
1/2 cup of cooked vegetables - again, sliced into small enough pieces to be easily swallowed whole: potatoes, green beans, pinto beans, broccolli, brussel sprouts, spinach, pumpkin, peas - I vary the kind of vegetables at each feeding.

I often will do the fruit in the morning, and the veggies in the evening.

Typing this out, and reading this over, it really does sound like a major pain to have to put this together twice a day, every day. It really isn't. This is basically just mostly stuff I eat myself every day anyway (except for the raw meat! ), I just make a bit extra for for my dog. No problem. I freeze the meat, in meal-size packages (meal size for my dog or for myself!) and pop it in the microwave at meal time to defrost. The rice I cook in a big pan about every three days or so, and keep the cooked rice in the refrigerator until it is used up, then I cook some more.

It really is easy, especially when you get used to it. When I travel, I form the meat (before freezing it) in to square "bricks" and keep it frozen in my Dometic ac/dc fridge. I also form the rice into bricks, freeze it, then keep it in the bottom of the ice chest, covered with those gel ice blocks that I keep "recharged" by refreezing them every few days in the Dometic (I rotate the ice gel blocks from the Dometic to the ice chest - have two sets or these, so they can be rotated). Last August I was gone twelve days before I ran out of "dog food".

My dog is high-energy, excellent weight (I don't like a fat dog), shiny coat and happy attitude. Another "bonus" I have noticed about feeding my own formula is that my dog's teeth don't crud up with plaque the way a dog's teeth generally do when fed a commercial dog food diet (I wonder what is up with that?). Clean teeth means no "dog breath" - and no anesthesia for a down-the-line teeth cleaning.

Lots of benefits here. As I said in the beginning, the cost of feeding this way - with human-grade food - is a bit more, but the health benefits far outweigh the expenditure. I like to avoid a visit to the $vet$ whenever I can.

Bet you are sorry you asked!

Anne

I make a good portion of Peaches food... Often make a large batch in advance, then freeze in portion sizes. I don't give her raw meat and because of her kidneys, she needs the fatty hamburger with the grease (yuk. LOL). Rice, veggies, etc... But Peaches refuses to eat the same thing every day. She'll starve herself first.

With my pressure cooker I'll sometimes make up food both of us can eat... I just have to remember I can't put in onions and other ingredients. So I'll have broiled chicken, fish, hamburger, etc cooked and shredded to add into her meal.

With her weight loss and skin and bones currently, I promise I'm not letting her skip meals, so I'm being creative and switching up proteins and some other ingredients daily (or should I say twice a day). Having things premade most of the time makes it pretty easy.

Believe it or not she loves dried bread... Sometimes I crumble old bread on top of her food to get her interested.

Bethers wrote: Believe it or not she loves dried bread... Sometimes I crumble old bread on top of her food to get her interested.

Believe it or not, my dogs have always loved fresh tomatoes! (Not advocating this for Peaches - I know and appreciate that she has special dietary requirements).

The way I first discovered this was when my (now ex) husband and myself moved to a rural area and had a monster garden. We even had to put up a six-foot fence, with barbed wire at the top, to keep the deer out.

One day I was out in the garden pulling weeds, my dog was sniffing around, and I glanced up to see (with quite a bit of alarm) bright red running out of my dogs mouth. Instant panic! I immediately jumped up to chase my dog down (of course, realizing I was upset and not knowing why, he ran from me), expecting that my dog had somehow cut his mouth on the barbed wire, and wondering how on earth I was going to get him the thirty miles to the vet without a vehicle.

The guilty look on his face should have been the tip-off.

When I finally caught him, I realized that he had taken it upon himself to "harvest" some tomatoes! It was tomato juice and bits running out of his mouth that I had seen.

What a relief.

Anne

Cudedog wrote:Bet you are sorry you asked!

I don't go to that much trouble for our food. Seeing as how I'm in town everyday, I just pick up plate lunches and maybe cook once a week.

I use to work for a commercial fish plant that made fish meal and their major customers were pet food companies. They were very picky about what went out of the plant. Everything was tested for salmonella. The pet food companies were even more picky and would reject a truck load sometimes. That was some stinky stuff but high in protein.

Martha

Anne,
One of my previous dogs, Tips, loved onions. How do I know? He dug up every one from the garden and ate them. We put a fence around and he bloodied his noise and dug under the fence to dig them out. Needless to say, he never had a bad reaction as he lived to 14 1/2... Long life for a 1/2 Newfie and 1/2 husky.

Peaches won't eat carrots, they were treats for Tips and Moxie... Peaches won't eat many vegetables and fruits... Spits them out. And if I grind them to hide them in the food, she might refuse it entirely.

Anne
how do you determine how much to give your dogs? Shadow is 20 lbs give or take
occasionally I am tempted to do a home made food for him...but have to wonder how
it affects the poop...
Shadow doesn't get table food very often. so I don't know how he would react to foods like fruit and veggies...
sheila

snowball wrote:Anne
how do you determine how much to give your dogs? Shadow is 20 lbs give or take
occasionally I am tempted to do a home made food for him...but have to wonder how
it affects the poop...
Shadow doesn't get table food very often. so I don't know how he would react to foods like fruit and veggies...
sheila

Good question!

First, couple of things that I forgot: I also add a bit of water to the mixture, maybe fill the bowl (with the food in it) about 1/4 full of water - the reason for this is that it causes my dog to eat slower. Another thing to keep in mind is that many dogs have allergies - mostly to corn and to corn products (which is why so many dogs that are fed commercial foods have itchy skin problems) but some also can have allergies to rice. If the commercial food you are currently feeding is rice-based you are probably ok on that score.

I determine how much to give my dog (I only have one dog these days) mostly based on his weight. If I can see that he is losing weight, I feed him a bit more. If it looks like he is gaining weight, I feed him a bit less.

I know that this is probably not very helpful (like the printing on a bag of kibble that says 'a cup of kibble for a dog this weight' or some such), but feeding home made dog food is a bit of an art (Kind of like how you feed yourself! ), it is not "scientific" (in that it is not based on a feeding study conducted somewhere).

A 20 pound dog would likely eat far less than my 50 pound dog. But then a lot of this is based on activity level as well - for example, a dog that lies around all the time will need fewer calories than a dog that is always on the run. The "proportions" should hold true over any size dog - i.e., 2 parts cooked rice to one part lean ground meat. The fruits/veggies, instead of by the half cup as for my dog, might be by the tablespoonfull for your dog.

I don't "hide" the fruits and veggies that I feed in any way - I just cut them up small enough so as not to be a potential choking hazard/intestinal impaction hazard. Sometimes I will give the bowl a stir (to make sure that I haven't left any large chunks), sometimes I will just give my dog his bowl with the rice on the bottom, the meat on top to one side, and the veggies/fruits on top to the other side, just to see what he will choose to eat first. Surprisingly, more often than not the first few bites will be of the fruits/veggies, followed with a bite of the meat.

The poop ( we really do talk about anything and everything on here!) is usually not hard like it can be when feeding dry kibble - but neither is it soft or runny.

snowball wrote:Shadow doesn't get table food very often. so I don't know how he would react to foods like fruit and veggies...
sheila

Understand that I do not consider the fruits and vegetables that I feed my dog to be "table food". The fruits are sliced/chopped small, fed raw, without any "additions" that people like to add to their fruit (like sugar) and the vegetables are fed cooked (cooked because this makes them easier to digest, also served without the usual human garnishes like - butter, salt or pepper). I never feed any kind of "table scraps" (like the leftovers from a human's plate - particularly I never feed fatty meat table scraps).

The best, and easiest, way to find out how Shadow would react to cooked rice, or fruits and vegetables is to just offer him some! Try a variety of different things (there are some things one should not feed to dogs, generally speaking onions is one - and never chocolate!). Offer him, say, a spoonfull of cooked rice. Or maybe a couple tiny morsels of apple. Or maybe a small bite of morsels of cooked potato.

Shadow will let you know if he likes these things or not. I never advocate "hiding" or "insisting" that my dog eat a particular food. If he eats it he eats it. If he doesn't, I just toss it out.

Another of the things that my dog really loves to eat is iceberg lettuce!! When I am making a salad, I generally remove the outside layer of leaves and just give them to him as they are (I don't chop/cut up the lettuce - not saying one should do this, just saying this is how I do it). He chomps on the lettuce just like it is candy.

If anyone has any further questions, please ask.

Thank you.

Anne

Bethers wrote:Peaches won't eat carrots, they were treats for Tips and Moxie... Peaches won't eat many vegetables and fruits... Spits them out. And if I grind them to hide them in the food, she might refuse it entirely.

I never try to hide fruits or veggies in the food. I just put them in the bowl with the rice and meat, if he doesn't eat them I just toss them. Although there are very few things he doesn't like - Joe (lucky for me) is not a picky eater.

Anne

Anne, I applaud your description of determining how much to feed. Even the recommended serving size on the sides of commercial bags is so general as to be almost useless. As you mentioned, each dog has their own energy and activity level and their individual requirement for calorie intake to stay a healthy weight. I often get compliments on the condition and weight of my English Cockers. I give all the credit to the measuring cup that stays in the food bin. Yes sometimes I notice someone putting on some extra pounds or beginning to feel a bit too thin and adjust the measure. And I remind folks that all those "treats" whether just to show love or for training count as calorie intake.

Alas, if only someone measured my portions so faithfully I would not be struggling to get back into some of those hiking pants. Not to mention adding a voice in my head to remind me that the "only one cookie" here and one desert there adds up and not in a good way.