| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Treacodactyl |
Dog foodLooking at the pet food today and I noticed you can buy jerky for your pooch along with dog-food gravy and even dog deserts (some form of summer pudding).This reminded me, I've been meaning to ask what do people feed their dogs with and I'd be especially interested to hear about home made food and natural raw food diets? |
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| Cathryn |
Mine used to get raw chicken carcasses, free range I'll have you know. The butcher supplied them - large box fulls for about £4. Some made great stock and the rest was for the dogs. They did really well on it and when I have a freezer back I will be doing this again. Also some veg and some things like rice and pasta left over from our meals. There was never enough of this though. 
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| judith |
My dog won't eat raw meat and bones disagree with him so my pressure cooker gets used a lot. When we put a batch of chickens in the freezer, I tend to joint them, and then cook up the carcases with a few carrots or other dog-friendly vegetables. Ditto with any other meat or game that comes my way. Once all the meat has been pulled off the carcase, there is a lovely gelatinous soup for pooch that we serve with plain mixer biscuits or terrier meal. I then freeze the soup in roughly 2-day portions.
Occasionally we run out of our own meat, so I buy bags of cheap frozen minced beef and cook that up with the vegetables. Sounds a bit outrageous, but it is cheaper to buy minced beef for humans from Iceland than it is to buy minced beef for dogs from the feed merchant. Not sure what that says about the state of the world we live in! I also keep in a couple of spare tins of dog food, but I really hate the smell of the stuff, so it is very much for emergencies only. |
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| Contadino |
Our dogs are on croquettes at the moment, but we tried them on chicken & blitzed veg in the autumn and they loved it. When the rabbit breeding programme comes online they'll have a choice of chicken or rabbit.
Agricultural shops here sell pasta for dogs, so we mix this in with the chicken to bulk it out, but by summer I'm hoping that they'll be on homemade pasta offcuts, biltzed veg and either chicken or rabbit for good. The idea/plan is to move away from manufactured dog food as IMHO the ingredients are dubious. |
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| greenfire |
I have never fed dog food. Spoilt mutt is on organic meat and veg with pasta or rice. Have recently read about the B.A.R.F diet for dogs, a raw food diet. www.barfworld.com. | ||
| dpack |
what i eat
different extras for them if im greedy |
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| Nanny |
i am afraid i have let the side down here as i feed mine of beta racing greyhound complete - yes i know i am naughty
but it keeps weight on them and isn't so unpleasant coming out the other end either so on that they will stay |
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| Bebo |
Mines just had a chicken biryani and she enjoyed it very much. Trouble is she sleeps in the bedroom and I anticipate a windy night ahead. | ||
| dpack |
a surfiet of chicken wings or the bones from 50 litres of stock is windy in a wrong way | ||
| Green Rosie |
Mine get dried dog food and whatever plate scrapings there are (but there are never many in our house  )
There are an awful lot of things you are not supposed to feed your dogs though. Click here for info. I knew dark chocolate was really bad for them but there are planty of things on that list I have fed dogs - admittadly only ever in small amounts. I did wonder, however, if this list had been drawn up by a vet in association with a pet food manufacturer 
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| kevin.vinke |
Our dog gets Science diet and the odd crust of stale bread. | ||
| judith |
We found that was the absolute worst for foul doggy emanations. I reckon I could still tell you if our dog had been eating it! |
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| jamanda |
Chudley's working crunch (£8.50 for a two month sized bag!) and left overs. He seems to do well enough on it. | ||
| Green Man |
...and VAT Free 
Imagine being taxed to feed your dog. |
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| sean |
He works extremely hard. | ||
| judith |
At what? | ||
| sean |
Bouncing around like an idiot mainly. Trying to scrounge extra food consumes a lot of energy and all the sleeping in front of the fire doesn't do itself you know. | ||
| judith |
Are you sure you aren't overworking the poor dog? | ||
| Tradbritfowlco |
I feed my german shep raw meat, nothing else (maybe the odd crust of my toast or a piece of carrot). Before i started this he was very thin no matter how much i fed him and everyone looked at me suspiciously as though i was underfeeding him! Well, I put him on raw and haven't looked back! now he's positively CHUNKY and his coat is sooo shiny, I have to put sunglasses on to look at him directly...well, nearly. he is calmer, poops less and what he does do dissolves to chalk in the rain unliek the copious gloopy poops he did before. If I run out and he gets a tin of dogfood for just one day, you can notice immediately how much more hyper he is - like a kid after sweets and cola!
Now i have found a butcher who does 2lb individual bags of dog mince, it's only £1 a day to feed him too. |
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| LisaP |
I first started looking into home prepared dog food several years ago when the dogs we had then, both GSDs, were ill - one with hip displaysia, the other later with cancer. I used to feed a good quality kibble but when we switched to home cooked (at that time based on a diet of about 1/3 each protein, carbs and veg with various additives) there was a noticable change in their health and behaviour. They were more alert but in a calm way, their coats improved, their smelly dog breath disappeared and they stopped farting! The change in diet didn’t cure the original problems, but the remaining time we had with them was noticably better…
The 2 GSDs we have now get a diet based on raw meaty bones (never cooked, always raw). Mostly I get local free range chicken carcasses from the farmers market (and get some great chicken soups into the bargain) and occasionally lamb or rabbit bones Variety is good, but not always easy to source. To make it a more balanced diet they get some other things too: Once a week they get raw offal. Usually ox, as it’s the cheapest I can get (Morrisons sell it, and sometimes the lamb bones). They always get liver, plus heart and/or kidney if available. And once a week they also get oily fish – a large tin of pilchards in tomato sauce does the job. They also get a variety of veggies. Dogs don’t have the necessary enzyme to digest veg properly themselves these need to be either juiced or cooked. I prefer to cook the veg (various reasons) so once a week I cook up a big pan of whatever veg I have and they get portions of this (cold) with either a raw egg (from our own chooks) or the tinned fish, or the offal. So they don’t get it every day but it all balances out over a week or so. They might get some healthy extras added too, occasionally, like a crushed clove of garlic, some live yogurt or a splash of oil, but I don’t add these regularly. Used these more with the other dogs that were old and ill. They would get left overs from our food, but there's rarely any of these! 
I don’t regularly feed carbohydrates to them (rice, pasta etc). They don’t need them in their diet, but can eat them and do like them if they get them: my standby "oh b****r I’ve run out of bones in the freezer" meal for them would be wholewheat pasta, cooked veg and a raw egg, but it doesn’t happen very often these days. They can also eat fruit, but I don’t give them much of this. Its best for them if its very soft and to the point of being over ripe. They do share the occasional (skinned) banana that has seen better days, and in the summer they kept helping themselves to our raspberries in the garden! I would never feed chocolate, grapes, raisins, onions or raw yeasted dough to dogs as these all have the potential to do harm. And no garlic to puppies under 8 weeks. Other than that I tend to work on the premise that if its good for us it is probably good for them. And moderation in all things – its usually excesses of anything that are bad. I also use food for training, either for clicker training, or as a distraction (something for the puppy to chew on instead of the living room furniture!) For treats for training I sometimes use kibble (Burns range) simply because they like it and its easier to carry around with me than fresh food. Plus I’ve got a some activity balls – the ones that they can roll around and the kibble falls out. I have sometimes baked home made treats for them (liver cake, and a fish version). I tend to use something better like this for teaching them something new (the youngster is going to learn agility when he’s old enough) or difficult (the older one is a rescue who had serious issues with other dogs). For chews I either give whole carrots (we get a bag of juicing carrots with our veggie box) or I blitz some of their offal and veg mix in the food processor and use that to stuff kongs, which I then freeze for them so they take even longer to eat. There are some companies that sell frozen BARF foods (bones, offal, and a raw mince and veg mix). But I think I’d need to buy a bigger freezer first to be able to order from them. These are the ones that have been recommended to me: link to landywoods link to TPMS Finally, if you feed a home prepared diet and don’t feed raw bones as part of it (or have bone in the mince) you do need to look for an alternative calcium source as they need it for healthy bones. |
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| contadina |
CityChick's got the quantities spot on for dogs: a third each of protein, veg and carbs. My dad always fed our dogs either cooked rabbit or chicken, bran and veg. Over here you can get at 25 kilo sack of bran from the mill for about 8 euros as Italians don't really do wholemeal. Both the chickens and dogs get some on a regular basis and thrive on it. | ||
| Treacodactyl |
Many thanks for all the comments, please keep them coming. A special thank you to CityChich for such a detailed post. 
That's roughly what I had read although I thought you should also leave garlic out even for fully grown dogs and they shouldn't eat tomato based products - I could easily be wrong though. You mention "various additives" do you use any vitamin or mineral supplements? When we get a dog we would like to do roughly what you do although I might need a bit of courage feeding the raw bones, you seem to see conflicting advice but a wild dog would obviously eat them. |
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| villager |
My goodness, what lucky dogs you have in the First World.
Here in Malawi, we have a small pack of dogs to act as a deterrent against thieves. If thieves come over the wall at night, the dogs are supposed to bark loudly and waken up the watchmen, who can then run away and hide. The dogs are then free to get on with their main job of ripping-out the throats of the thieves. With so many dogs, we have had to find a way of feeding them cheaply, but also to keeping them healthy. We feed them on chicken feed, diluted 3:1 with maize bran. To try to make it more tasty , we add a little soup made from boiled--up bones or offals etc from our meat animals. We do NOT use layers mash, which is very high in calcium, but whatever else is cheapest at the time. The chicken feed is made up of: whole maize maize bran soya beans fish, and/or meat & bone meal vitamins and minerals (appropriate to chickens) We have been feeding this to our dogs for ~15 years. All of them appear very healthy, are full of oomph, and when dying of old-age are typically 11 years old. Because of the high fibre content in their food, their droppings are less disgusting compared to what I recall seeing on UK pavements before I left there. The chicken feed costs about £9.00 per 50 kg bag. To reduce our costs, we then dilute this with maize bran (considered as waste from the processing of whole maize) , bought from other villagers for about 50 pence per 50 kg. This works out at about 14 pence/kg for the final feed. Right now we have some mid-sized "grower" dogs who each consume ~½ kg/day, and have put on ~11 kg in 15 weeks (average ~0.7 kg/wk) from age 8 to 23 weeks. This is 7 pence per day per dog. I suspect that most people on here are not too concerned about the economics of feeding their dogs. However, can anyone see any problems in the long term with feeding chicken food to dogs? I can't, although I wonder if I should pay heed to what CityChick said, "Dogs don’t have the necessary enzyme to digest veg properly." Ta |
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| Treacodactyl |
Welcome to the site villager. I recently walked through a pet store and it had an isle of freezers which had all sorts of dog food in including fish fillets. To be fair many of the more natural diets seem to feed stuff that most people class as waste here.
I can't help with your question about chicken feed but if you get enough thieves the dogs should eat well.
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| Tradbritfowlco |
that does seem a pretty hardcore vegetable matter feed for a carnivore, but if they can live on it and cost of of primary concern -*shrug*.
I don't really worry too much about the cost of the feed for a day for the dog, I get plenty of enjoyment out of him and he pulls me to the shops on the bike/cart so he earns it!! |
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| chez |
Slightly OT (me? never!) but we switched our cats from generic cat food to organic, hideously expensive stuff three years ago and they all had personality changes. It reminded me of someone going through caffeine withdrawal. They were much calmer afterwards and their coats are incredibly shiny. I toyed with the idea of making my own food; but all the literature I could find banged on about taurine and how without it they would become malnourished, and it scared me off. |
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| sean |
Cats need Red Bull for a balanced diet? Who'd have thunk it? |
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| contadina |
Hi villager,
It sounds to me that your dogs are very lucky to have you provide them with such a balanced diet. As they sound happy and healthy, I wouldn't think about changing it. If you weren't feeding them I'm guessing that their diet wouldn't be anywhere near as good. I think that the thing about dogs and vegetables is that they wouldn't get the necessary goodness that they need from them if you just fed them raw chunks. By providing vegetables blitzed or juiced, and, to a lesser extent cooked, they area able to process the vitamins, minerals and nutrients in them better. As chicken feed contains vitamins and minerals I'd imagine that they work in much the same way a dog croquettes. |
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| Tradbritfowlco |
check out very carefully that what you read isnt written by someone connected with the petfood industry in some way! My partner wont let me feed his cats solely raw because he says its 'extreme'  but i know they follow me around begging for pieces of raw heart and liver when the dog gets some! and they have no problem polishing off the odd raw chicken leg between them. cats are even more highly adapted carnivores than dogs.
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| chez |
Yes, it's definitely a case of being careful where you are getting your information from with a lot of these things.
Sean - I hadn't thought of mixing red bull in with it ...  .
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| fenwoman |
Re: Dog food
I feed mine a bit of everything. Culled bantam cocks, raw tripe, beef heart, and a bog standard cheapo low protein kibble (awkrights) They also get raw eggs which they eat shell and all, raw horse carrots, raw bones weekly from the abbatoir and any meal scraps off my plate. Saying that I eat well, don't cook with salt and don't have packet food, highly spiced or fatty stuff. If I did, I wouldn't give the remains to the dogs. The best place to get frozen tripe and other meats is a company called Landywoods' which deliver.They are very reliable and have keen prices. http://www.landywoods.co.uk/price_list.html |
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| Treacodactyl |
Posting this here from anther thread.
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| cab |
I normally choose to avoid this issue by not having pets that need to be fed on meat. Simple, easy... But now that we're over-wintering a hedgehog I've been forced to look into it.
And it ain't easy. She won't eat anything with chicken, rabbit or pork in it, leaving 'meat' based hedgehog food or cat/dog food based on other meats. I've yet to find anything local and ethical that she'll chow down, and as she's had successive worming treatments on her food, as well as starting out chronically underweight, we've gone with what she'd actually eat rather than sorting something more ethical. As we'll have her till Spring we need to sort out something better. |
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| marigold |
Article that may be of interest - http://www.wisebread.com/make-homemade-dog-food-with-your-slow-cooker | ||
| chez |
It sounds a stupid question, but can't you just catch her what she'd eat normally and feed her that? My Ma kept a badger for a few years and used to take it out for midnight walks to catch worms. Not suggesting that you parade through the parks of Cambridge with a foraging hedgehog at midnight - but you could perhaps go round the allotments? |