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home-made dog food

The Holiday Dog Food Jamboree

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So another of the many things you know, if you’ve been reading this site for long, is that one of my many eccentricities is a penchant for concocting home-made dog food for the hounds. This is not very hard to do, nor is it very hard to find out what should go into it, since a number of university veterinary programs and similar credible sources publish discussions of canine nutritional needs.

Vets, when they find out you do this, get very nervous: they define “people food” (a derisive term) as fast-food burgers and pizza. Naturally, anyone with half an ounce of sense does not define junk food as “people food” — or, come to think of it, even as “food.” No. The Funny Farm canids get a mix of something over a third high-quality meat protein, about a third mixed, ground vegetables (yes, Virginia: dogs are omnivores), and about a third starchy food known to be highly digestible dogs. Do not fear: dogs have been living with humans for something over 16,000 years, during which time they have been sharing the humans’ diet with no ill effect. Specially formulated magical “dog food” was invented and sold to a waiting world in the first third of the 20th century…to no great improvement in dog life expectancy.

So, okay. While Cassie has been struggling with her current life-threatening ailment, I became scared by the Veterinary Babble about DIY dog food. (Why this should scare me escapes common sense: it was, after all, MarvelVet’s ill-conceived scheme to convince me that the dog had Valley fever that made the poor beast sick unto death.) But that notwithstanding…during all this, I feared that maybe the home-brewed chow was inadequate, and consequently started feeding her exclusively FreshPet with a little canned food to top it by way of tricking her to swallow pills.

FreshPet is the stuff that comes in rolls. Read the ingredients and compare with other pet junkfood and you’ll see it comes closer than most of them to real food, and it’s available in several grocery stores, obviating yet another annoying trip and yet another stand in line in yet another annoying retail establishment. [If you like to scare yourself, read the ingredients on a can of Pedigree “chicken” dog food: makes a great Hallowe’en tale.]

This seemed to work OK. Cassie doesn’t care. She’s a corgi. Corgis will eat anything.

The dog survived many weeks of debilitating illness. She still lives, though not well.

A couple weeks ago, I took it into my feeble head to cook up some real food for the dogs. Why, I do not recall: probably to clean out the freezer.

Put a dish of this down in front of Cassie…and she inhales it with obvious joy. The other dog is jumping around in ecstasy, too.

Hm. Okay. They like real dog food. Apparently they like real dog food better than they fancy the factory-made gunk.

I did this on December 4.

Within a day — on December 5 — she was significantly improved: up to a 9 on a scale of 1 (moribund) to 10 (normal). Dayum!

She continued to have her ups and downs, but overall the trend from there on was upward. After an episode where she backslid to a 5 or 6, yesterday I would say she was as close to a 10 as she’s ever going to get. She was actually running around the backyard after Ruby.

That’s something, since this dog has barely been able to walk on occasion.

Will she recover her old self?

How do I doubt it? Let me count the ways. But it’s beginning to look like she may survive. And it’s even possible that most of the time she won’t be unthinkably miserable.

Here’s the problem with making dog food…well…one of the several problems: Holidays.

Every.

Single.

Goddamn.

Time…

…a holiday comes along, you will run out of dog food. This means that to buy ingredients for the next batch, you will have to do battle with endless lines in grocery stores. That’s assuming you can find a grocery store that’s open.

Making dog food is a rather messy and time-consuming job, and really not what you feel like doing while you’re wrestling with holiday activities. And certainly not something you want to have to do under the time pressure posed by the holiday closure of the stores that carry the ingredients.

And yep. As is the case every year… Here we are, two days before Christmas, and we run out of dawg food.

So I spent half the afternoon in the kitchen, up to my elbows in chicken grease — the process was made much messier by my having stupidly purchased bone-in chicken thighs instead of Costco’s best boned, skinless things. With, we might add, a bandage that goes halfway up my forearm, having cleverly burnt the bejayzus out of myself yesterday.

We now have a giant pot of dog food.

The dogs eat about a pound of it a day.

This means we will run out…yes…right before New Year’s Day.

😀

And that will mean yet another Costco run. Ugh. Amidst mobs of armchair sports fans stocking up with food and booze for the New Year’s Big Games.

As for now, though: it’s away to choir. Compline. You should try it sometime. You’ll like it.

Dog Food: Make It or Buy It?

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As old-timey FaM readers know, one of my strangest eccentricities is that I cook and feed real, actual FOOD to my dogs, rather than giving them the fake stuff that comes in bags and cans. This came about during the late, great melamine scare, during which we learned that virtually all dog foods, from Walmart’s cheapest to Petsmart’s fanciest, are manufactured in the same few factories in China. And, as we learned from that and a number of other flaps (remember the poison toothpaste?), quality control is not China’s strong suit.

Cooking up a week’s worth of dog food for one dog, even a relatively small one like a corgi, is a job. Fixing it for two is a real chore. Cassie eats a a little over a half-pound of food a day, but because Ruby is still a growing pup, she needs a pound and three-quarters to two pounds a day. That is a lot of artisanally home-cooked dog food!

When the present medical adventure started, I prepared and froze a ton of food for them. But I didn’t plan on two, three, now four and maybe even FIVE surgeries. Even though I made more food between procedures 2 and 3, we ran low.

So I supplemented with a product made by a company called FreshPet. The stuff comes in rolls — my son says it looks like mortadella, a delicacy that tosses his belly — and it contains exactly the same ingredients I put in my concoctions: meat, veggies, some kind of starch, and a vitamin pill. You slice off a chunk in the desired amount, mash it up, fork over the plateful to the dog, and stick the rest back in the fridge.

Okay. Very nice, but you find the stuff at places like Whole Foods and PetSmart (the Whole Paycheck of the pet industry….). Meanwhile, I was pretty fuzzy about how much it costs to make up a week’s worth of dog food in my kitchen — calculating the cost of all those ingredients and then factoring out the number of days they would supply is beyond my English-major math skills.

So, there I am thinking this expensive dog food can’t POSSIBLY cost any less than what I make, probably costs more, and besides, I really do know what goes into my dog food, whereas when I buy a prepared product I have to believe what’s on the label. Decision made: keep on cookin’.

Then, Ruby developed ear infections and runny eyes. The vet, whose experience in this issue proved correct with the now-deceased greyhound, speculated that she had a food allergy. When he learned what she’s eating, he pointed out that beef is one of the commonest allergens among dogs. He recommended taking her off beef — and while we’re at it, let’s cut out the grains, too.

🙄

Well, this presented two problems:

a) Hamburger is the only pre-ground meat that is even vaguely cost-effective. All other meats available in grocery stores — the meats you can afford, that is — have to be ground up in one’s food processor, a messy and time-sucking project.

b) Therefore, I had stocked the freezer with a lifetime supply of hamburger-based dog food. I was not about to throw it away, and with another surgery coming up, neither was I in a position to cook up MORE pounds and pounds of food.

So I paid another visit to Whole Foods, where I found large dog-food rolls. Got a grain-free turkey concoction. Pup was beside herself with joy. And, when I had to board her with my son after the last surgical excursion rendered me too infirm to care for her, it was mighty useful to be able to hand a roll of prepared food over to him.

After about a week or ten days free of beef products, Ruby’s ears and eyes cleared right up. No steroids required, no nothin: just hold the beef.

Then I found some rawhide chews shaped like donuts, a design that makes it hard for her to reduce the thing to a size and shape she can choke on and easy for me to get it away from her before she can harm herself with it. Three or four days of chomping on beef hide: ear inflammation came back.

Obviously, this is a dog that can’t tolerate beef.

Ducky. As it were.

That locked us into the most work-intensive versions of my home-made dog food recipes: highly undesired, under the circumstances. So, it was permanently on the dog food rolls for Ruby. Cassie could consume the rest of the frozen beef concoction.

Now that I’m feeling better, my hot little mind returns to a key cheapskate’s question:

Which of these fancy concoctions — hand-make artisanal dog food from my kitchen or effete natural organic made-in-America(!!) turkey doggy salami from Whole Foods — actually costs more?

Recently, I bought five pounds of boneless chicken at Costco. Combined with a yam and a dose of mixed veggies, it produced seven pounds of home-cooked dog food. That is a shade under one week’s worth for Cassie —  about four days’ worth for Ruby. At about the same time, I’d bought five pounds of turkey roll at Whole Foods; from that I managed to extrapolate how much it would cost to feed Cassie that stuff for a week. Result:

Home-made dog food: about $22.
Fancy turkey roll dog food: about $21

Huh. We call that diference negligible.

And once Ruby is past the high-calorie puppy diet stage — which will only be another three and a half months — her rations can drop to about half of what she’s eating now.  Thus in the near future dog food costs will drop significantly, no matter which fancy cuisine they’re dining on.

Well, as it develops, Fry’s Supermarkets also allegedly carries the elegant FreshPet doggy salami. I don’t go into the Fry’s in my part of town because both of them are in dangerous neighborhoods full of panhandlers and muggers (last time I went to the Fry’s in Sunnyslop, a panhandler parked his wheelchair behind my car so I couldn’t pull out and sat there screaming at me after I told him, truthfully, that I don’t carry cash). It’s reasonable to believe that the customers of these low-rent establishments do not buy their dog food in the shape of staggeringly expensive mortadella rolls.

But the other day when I was at the Fancy-Dan Fry’s in Paradise Valley, I did find it there (why are we not surprised?). They charged $12.99 for a  hefty five-pound chicken roll.

A look at the latest Whole Foods receipt revealed a bill for $20 for a five-pound turkey roll. Other than the different birds — chicken, turkey — the ingredients were identical.

At $12.99/five pounds, I could feed Cassie (and eventually Ruby) for a week for $16.76.

That is a far cry from $22 and change!

So, I’ll be shopping at Fry’s for gourmet dawg food after this. And when Cassie runs out of the home-made stuff, she also be moving out of Alice’s Restaurant and over to the joint that serves up prepared chow.

How is Ruby doing on this food? Well. Exceptionally well.

She was beginning to look a little scrawny, so I upped her rations and added a boiled egg at mid-day. After a week of this, she’s filled out handsomely and is beginning to look like a mature dog. Here she is, on the right, almost as tall as Cassie.

P1030263
My iPhoto has decided its red-eye function no longer works…sorry about that.

Cassie weighs about 23 pounds. Last time  I put Ruby on a scale, about two weeks ago, she weighed 16 pounds. This morning she’s up to 21.3 pounds. She still  looks slender and healthy, but clearly I’ll have to keep an eye on the rations to be sure she doesn’t get fat. Corgis regard food as something that must be vacuumed up (they try to inhale the leftover molecules from each others’ dishes!). As you can imagine, they tend to overweight, a risky condition for long short-legged dogs with vulnerable spines.

For the nonce, though, she looks good. She’s actually becoming pretty: where before she looked like a scruffy waif, now she’s taking on the kind of magical doggy beauty that Corgis can affect. Her coat looks good, her eyes are no longer runny, her ears are no longer red and itchy, and she’s looking more and more like Cassie, who is truly a handsome little dog.

It seems to be working.

DIY Dog Food: Spend a little more and get a lot more

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Condo Blues responded with a little clarification of a post I linked to yesterday, in which she described some doggy treats she’s invented. Her discussion of doggy food allergies brought me back to one of my favorite hobby horses: dog food.

Commercial dog food, besides being equivalent in human terms to a steady diet of cheap hot dogs and processed dry cereal, is full of ingredients that are common dog allergens. Corn, for example, is one of the top offenders among canine allergens, and yet most commercial dog foods are full of it, because it’s very cheap. Fish is another common allergen for dogs, yet it’s touted as a main ingredient for some very fancy, very expensive premium dog foods.

Overall, though, the problem with dog food is that it isn’t food. It’s fake food, an even feebler imitation of food than the fast food and junk snacks that humans favor for themselves. While it will sustain most animals, it may not sustain them well.

This fact came to my attention during the late, great Chinese melamine dog food scare. While that was going on, you couldn’t tell what commercial dog foods, if any, were safe—every time you turned around, another brand was being yanked off the shelves. So, I decided to feed my German shepherd and my greyhound human food: real food purchased from the grocery store’s counters of human food. The result was amazing.

I did a fair amount of research to find out what dogs eat and don’t eat. Humans routinely consume a number of foodstuffs that are toxic to dogs, notably onions and chocolate. Condo Blues provides a useful link to a list of dog no-no food items. Interestingly, domestic dogs are unlike cats in that dogs are not “obligatory carnivores.” A cat is: it must have a diet high in animal protein. Dogs, however, having evolved with humans for many tens of thousands of years, thrive on a diet similar to an omnivorous human diet. Apparently they started down that road before they started hanging around with humans: wolves have been observed eating berries and other vegetable matter in the wild.

Understand, this does not mean that dogs are vegetarians (although some people feed pet dogs vegetarian diets without much obvious harm). A look at the teeth should clue you to this: a dog’s mouth is full of tools designed to rip meat, whereas a human has, in comparison, a limited number of teeth designed for tearing meat. Clearly, the animal needs meat as a large part of its diet.

I’m not going to try to track down the research I unearthed just this moment. If you’re interested, google topics such as canine diet and canine nutrition with edu as part of the search string. Adding “edu” will help bring up serious research papers and articles posted by leading veterinary schools. Use some common sense about what you believe: there is a LOT of woo-woo out there—as much woo-woo surrounds the subject of pet diets as you’ll find about human foods. But in addition to New-Agey silliness, you’ll also find ream after ream of propaganda emanating from the pet food industry, and you will discover that many veterinarians buy this propaganda, as many human doctors buy into what Big Pharma tells them. Pet food corporations conduct scientific research, too, and unsurprisingly that research tells them dogs should be eating nothing but dry kibble.

No.

Dogs should eat about what you eat, with a larger proportion of meat or (if the animal can digest it) cheese. Dogs, like humans, need starches, vegetables & fruits, and animal protein; a healthy ratio of these ingredients (for a dog, not for you) is about 1:1:1. That is, 1/3 starch, 1/3 veggies, and 1/3 animal protein. A little more meat and a little less of the others won’t do any harm.

Don’t even think about trying this on your cat! Cats are not dogs, and their metabolism is different from a dog’s. A cat’s nutritional needs are weird, and you will need expert advice to build a feline diet from scratch.

Corn is indigestible for many dogs, and it should be avoided because it often kicks up allergies. Onions and garlic are toxic. Avocadoes are said to be bad for dogs, too. Otherwise: almost anything goes. Like humans, dogs need a variety of veggies: mix green and yellow items, and don’t feel shy about giving the dog squash one day and spinach the next. I’ve been buying Costco’s frozen “Normandy Style Vegetable Blend.” This gives you a lifetime supply of dog and human veggies. It contains broccoli, cauliflower, and two kinds of carrots. For convenience, I microwave a plateful of the veggies and run them through the food processor, providing a week’s worth of finely chopped, easy-to-serve dog vegetables. Unground, they’re mighty good served up to humans, too.

Starches include rice, oatmeal, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peas. In a pinch, I’ve substituted a little bread. Cook potatoes and sweet potatoes well—you can zap them in the microwave, because the dog can’t tell the difference between cooking methods. Rice and oatmeal are easy to cook on the stovetop. Be sure the stuff is cooled off before feeding.

Meat: some people like to feed their dogs raw meat. My own practice is never to feed my dog anything I wouldn’t eat myself, and I do not think raw meat is safe to eat. You have enough vet bills without deliberately exposing the animal to staph, C. difficile, and E. coli infections. So, I feed cooked meat. For the same reason, egg also should be cooked. When I cook a meal for myself, I cook up enough extra meat for the dog to last for several days. A barbecue grill is particularly handy for this purpose.

Hamburger is amazingly overpriced. Watch the meat sales. You can buy roasts marked down, and most butchers will grind it for you. Keep the bones for the purpose I’ll describe below. And taste the fresh-ground hamburger yourself—it’s much better than what you get off the counter. Last week Safeway was selling hamburger for over $2 a pound, but chuck roast was $1.47 a pound. I got enough ground chuck to feed me and the dog for a week. Rump roast is leaner and also sometimes comes on sale at a substantial mark-down. Chicken is often marked down, too—thighs are easiest to debone after cooking.

There’s no need for meat to be ground. You can cut it up into manageable chunks by way of discouraging the dog from setting it on the living-room carpet to chew it up—I use a pair of scissors to snip cooked meat into pieces for Cassie the Corgi. But if you want to grind it, a food processor will grind raw meat for you in a matter of seconds.

If you have a roast ground, ask the butcher to give you the bones. You can use these to make soup for yourself or, if that’s more work than it’s worth, simply drop a bone into the water you use to cook the dog’s rice. This flavors the rice to the dog’s taste, and it also cooks up the last few bits of meat, which you can shave off and add to the rice. Do not, do not, DO NOT let your dog chew on cooked bones! And never give your dog chicken or turkey bones! A dog’s jaws are strong enough to splinter bones, especially cooked bones; the splinters can lodge in the dog’s mouth or perforate its intestines.

And yes, I KNOW wolves and wild dogs eat bones. In the wild, wolves commonly die of perforated intestines.

Because no one really knows all a dog’s nutritional needs—remember, in the wild they’ll eat anything, including insects and some things you’d just as soon not know about—it’s a good idea to add a dog vitamin to one meal each day. Sometimes Trader Joe’s carries dog vitamins, relatively inexpensive compared to the same thing you get at the vet’s office or PetSmart.

Interestingly, as soon as I put the German shepherd and the greyhound on real food, their health changed. Visibly and drastically. The decrepit Ger-shep perked up. She began to move around with a great deal less discomfort, and where before she could only hobble after the beloved Toy, soon she was chasing it at a fast trot. The grey, a far more low-key character, also seemed healthier and happier. He was allergic to corn—a sensitivity that manifested itself as ear infections—and fixing his food myself meant I knew exactly what was and what was not in his dog dish.

It’s a lot of work to turn enough food out of your kitchen to feed a 90-pound dog (to say nothing of two of them…), especially if you’re not in the habit of cooking your own meals all the time. However, a smaller dog is very easy to feed this way. You can prepare several meals at once and store the food in the fridge.

I feed Cassie, who weighs 23 pounds, about 5 ounces of food twice a day, evenly divided between a vegetable, a starch, and meat, egg, or cottage cheese. I refrigerate the cooked ingredients in separate containers and then combine them at mealtime. Microwaving the food about 30 seconds at a medium setting to take the chill off seems to please the dog, though she will eat it cold. If you try this, be sure none of the food in the bowl is too hot, as microwaving heats unevenly.

If you change your dog over from kibble to real food abruptly, your pet likely will have diarrhea for a day or two. This is normal: dogs get enteritis when you change from one fake food to another, and the same effect occurs when you take them off fake food. Afterwards, though, you’ll find that once the animal is acclimated to eating real food, you can introduce a wide variety of foodstuffs without causing any stomach upset.

Real food may cost a little more than commercial pet food (although given the cost of some of the premium brands…maybe not!), but it’s way worth it in terms of the animal’s health and the savings in veterinary bills. Feeding your dog fake food is a classic case of penny-wise and pound-foolish.