…compared to a comparable canned dog food?
Cassie and Ruby eat a diet of real food — about 1/2 high-quality meat protein, 1/4 dog-friendly vegetables, and 1/4 starchy foods, plus a daily vitamin. It’s comparable to an ultra-premium canned food, except that rotating the ingredients doesn’t make either dog sick, as changing up commercial pet food is apt to do (yes, this should tell you something about commercial dog food).
By way of preparing for the upcoming surgical adventure, I’ve been cooking up piles of dog food in advance. Just finished shoveling another 10 pounds’ worth into the freezer, and I’m not at all sure it’ll be enough to last for a week or ten days after the surgery, which is about as soon as I figure I’ll feel like shopping for Costco-sized packages of meat and frozen mixed veggies, cooking it, grinding it, and packaging it.
Because Pup is eating half again as much as Cassie, they’re going through a pound and a quarter of food a day. (At her present age, Pup really should get twice as much as the aged Cassie, but there’s a limit to what I can handle, and besides, she looks pretty healthy — she surely isn’t emaciated!)
Lordie, but that’s a lot of food, even though just half of it is meat. And holy mackerel is it a lot of work to lay the stuff up in advance! And…speaking of holy mackerel, how much does it cost for a pair of dogs to eat their way through a pound and a quarter of food every day?
And would it be enough cheaper to feed them commercial dog food to make it worth sacrificing the health benefit of knowing what they’re eating each day? Would it, indeed, be cheaper at all??????
Let us consider:
Cassie eats 8 ounces a day of Her Royal Highness’s Custom Cuisine. Half of that is meat, whose price ranges from about $2 to about $3.50 per pound. Let’s say, then, that the average is around $2.75/pound. That’s a little on the high side, because it’s a rare day when I pay as much as $3.25/pound, to say nothing of $3.50. But for the sake of argument: average cost of meat = $2.75/pound.
Just now, a package of Costco “Normandy-style” vegetables, the mix I favor, is $7.64 for 6 pounds, or $1.27/pound. The proportion of meat to veggie is 4:1 (i.e., 1/4 pound veggie to 1 pound meat).
The cost of rice, oatmeal, or other starch is essentially negligible. The proportion is the same: 1/4 pound cooked starch to 1 pound meat, and a package of oatmeal or rice, which is cooked with twice as much water as dried product, will last a couple of months, at least. Let’s say that is subsumed in the overestimate of the meat cost. Round up the $1.27 to $1.30, too. So the average cost of veggies + rice is probably about $1.30/pound.
One-half of that (i.e., 1/2 pound @ $1.30/pound) is added to each pound of meat to create dog food; $1.30/2 = $.65. So, to make 1.5 pounds of dog food we spend $2.75 + $.65 = $3.40 for a pound and a half of food, or $2.26/pound of the final mix.
Premium dog food costs, pretty much across the board, $2.60 per can. But a can does not contain a pound of dog food! It only contains 13 ounces of food. Together, Cassie and Ruby are presently consuming a pound and a quarter of food a day: that’s 20 ounces a day.
So how does that shake out, cost-wise?
Well, let’s look at the monthly cost of canned food first:
Cassie eats 8 ounces a day:
8 oz x 30 days = 240 ounces a month
Divided by 13 oz/ can = 18.46 cans per month
Ruby the Corgi Pup eats 12 ounces a day:
12 oz x 30 days = 370 ounces a month
Divided by 13 oz/can = 27.69 cans per month
18.46 cans Cassie food + 27.69 cans Ruby food = 46.15 cans/month
46.15 cans @ $2.60/can = $119.99 a month
Okay: so, $120 a month to feed both dogs a superpremium dog food that makes at least one of them mighty sick.
Total monthly cost of home-made dog food consumed by Cassie (8 oz/day) and Ruby (12 oz/day):
240 oz (Cassie) + 360 oz (Ruby) = 600 ounces/month
600/16 oz per pound = 37.5 pounds/month
37.5 pounds x $2.26/pound = $84.75/month
That’s a difference of about $35.25/month, or about $423 a year.
And that’s pretty conservative. I’m sure I pay less than $2.75/pound on average for the dogs’ meat, sometimes much less. And we’re not factoring in the veterinary bills that you get to pay when you have your dog on commercial food: either the immediate cost of the resurgent diarrhea and vomiting or the long-term cost of ailments likely related to low-quality food, such as thyroid disease, obesity, and diabetes.
Obviously, it would be cheaper to feed your dog kibble than canned food (well…maybe not: ultra-premium kibble is darned pricey!). But…you do not want to know what’s in dog kibble. And most of it is made in China, where quality control is nil and manufacturers think it’s OK to add melamine to pet food and infant formula. The number of recalls for dog food, which come fast and furious virtually every week of the year, simply boggles the mind. You haven’t seen vet bills until you’ve seen the effect of tainted food on your dog…
Makes the crazy little old lady look a lot less crazy, doesn’t it?
I used to feed my Rottweilers the very best commercial kibble I could find, purchased (at considerable expense) at a local pet food specialty place (not Costco, where everything else was bought). I was assured that it didn’t contain chicken or corn, which the wisdom of the day said were bad for dogs.
However, I was always amazed at the sheer amount of vomit and diarrhea the male could generate on occasion, he had the weaker stomach of the two. Also, when I mixed in veggies or pasta (which they loved) both would be absent in the “by-product”, like they were magically digested while the kibble was chewed and expelled practically untouched.
After reading your blog entries on home-made dogfood, I swear I’ll never buy kibble for the next fur-kids, should they ever show up. Although my Rotties lived to a respectable age, I wonder how many more years they would have seen if I had fed them proper food.
Some dogs have sensitive stomachs, just like people. My son has been convinced by a vet that Charley the Golden Retriever has irritable bowel syndrome. He has given up on experimenting with different feeds, settled on an astronomically expensive no-grain kibble, and resigned himself to cleaning up rivers of diarrhea.
I don’t know. All I know is that ALL of my dogs have done as well or (often!) better on real food than they have on commercial food.
Dogs, unlike cats, are NOT obligatory carnivores. Even wild canids eat some degree of plant matter: wolves have been observed eating berries, leaves, and the like. And if you’ve ever observed what a coyote will eat…well… Literally, a coyote can and will eat anything.
It is not true that dogs cannot digest grains. It is not true that dogs cannot digest cruciform vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage). It isn’t even true that they can’t digest corn. The problem with corn is that it’s among several foods that frequently spur allergies in dogs; others include fish and beef. Dogs, like humans, develop allergies to certain proteins when overexposed to them. Because beef is the most common ingredient in commercial dog foods, beef allergy is one of the most common allergies among dogs.
Some foods that humans eat every day are toxic to dogs: onions, garlic, and chocolate are the most dangerous of these. But in general, over the tens of thousands of years they have shared our dens, dogs have evolved to eat a diet very similar to what humans eat. Dog food was invented less than 100 years ago; dogs have coexisted with humans for at least 14,000 years. What on earth do we imagine dogs ate for 13,900 years in the absence of kibble? And if dogs MUST have commercial dog food, how do we imagine all these dogs survived all these centuries?
Check out this entertaining, useful, and often surprisingl site: http://www.candogseat-this.com/