Home made pet food
We are considering making our own dog food. If anyone has comments about THIS particular method & product we'd love to hear them. Thank you.
Forum Discussion
Dogs have gotten sick... and died... from salmonella in recent years with these recalls. With kibble and with the jerky type treats. And yet, dogs eating "BARF" (bones and raw food or biologically appropriate raw food, as you prefer) diets don't seem to do that. Harder to digest? Changes the gut environment? Dunno. Never had anything resembling salmonella in all the years of having raw food eating animals in the house, nor met anyone who has.
Best Friends, which is an organization run by vegetarians (all meals meatless when they provide them to humans) nevertheless gives their animals that need immune system help raw meat for their diet. Or did a few years ago, at least. Apparently they find it helpful.
Freezing is hard on both e-coli and salmonella, harder on salmonella but I read one study where after two weeks both are 99 percent gone. Not sure if most home freezers get to the same temps they used, so that's something to look at. There's a study somewhere but I have to be up early to drive my fosters to their ride north, so I'm finishing up my supper and going to bed rather than looking it up. Long day! And tomorrow will be another.
Ground beef would concern me more if it's in the "chubs" where a billion pounds a day of meat are going across a machine. That's a set-up for contamination as we've seen over and over. Meat ground in-store is a little better bet. Then again, both ground beef and kibble test dirty with some regularity, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that the raw meat is less safe than the kibble. Of course, if you aren't comfortable with raw meat you can cook the meat, you won't be a BARF person, but you will have zero concerns about microbes regardless of the meat source, providing you use appropriate cooking/handling practices in the kitchen.
As far as the nutritional aspect, dogs don't have a built-in requirement to have an exact amount of vitamins and minerals at every meal, any more than people do. What makes "complete and balanced" so critical is that so often we feed them the same thing every single day for years at a time. So, that diet has to cover all the bases, or problems will result. Some people who feed holistically rotate ingredients in the diet in order to balance it out over time. Honestly, that's healthier, but not everyone is going to do that. Or even can do that, especially with animals with specific dietary restrictions or needs.
If you look at the back of any dog (or cat) food, you're going to see a list of ingredients. It will start out as either meats or grains or whatever the "macro nutrient" ingredients are that provide the protein, carbs, and fat. Then there's a long list of supplements. Basically, the way the food becomes "complete" is that they add the equivalent of multi-vitamin and mineral supplements to it. The only problem with that is that when you stop and think about it, they consistently, as a group, over-estimate the amount of food a dog of a given size needs to stay at a healthy weight. So, most dogs are getting half of the food they suggest and thus getting half the amount of vitamins and minerals that the company says they should get for their size. Oops.
There are, however, about a bazillion multivitamins on the market specifically designed for dogs. Or cats. So that regardless of what you're feeding, you can be sure that your dog or cat is getting those bases covered, with a dosage based on the weight of that animal. Just like you'd take a daily vitamin supplement to insure yourself against shortfalls in your diet.
But there's another issue with the amount of calcium and the ratio of calcium to phosphorus. That's supposed to be 1:1` or 2:1 depending on who you ask. They seem to have done some math on that for this recipe... I didn't research it or do that math to check if they did it correctly.
The supplements they include in this food recipe seem to be based on the dyno-vite covering the micro-nutrient bases, the eggshells covering the macro-mineral bases, and the EFA supplement covering the specific EFA needs. Then you only need protein, fat, and carbs. Which it has. Whether or not the dyno-vite is that complete, I don't know. If it is, then it might be just boffo, I guess. Supplements or not, I prefer to have a little more... well, I like some veggies in the mix, and plain white rice all the time would not be my idea of awesome nutrition. Especially with the arsenic thing... you want to get California rice to avoid that issue.
I think having a recipe that's veterinary nutritionist approved is a great idea, but unless you have a dog with particular needs, it shouldn't have to be customized. Someone ought to write a book and odds are, someone already has, with a group of such recipes in it.
Best Friends, which is an organization run by vegetarians (all meals meatless when they provide them to humans) nevertheless gives their animals that need immune system help raw meat for their diet. Or did a few years ago, at least. Apparently they find it helpful.
Freezing is hard on both e-coli and salmonella, harder on salmonella but I read one study where after two weeks both are 99 percent gone. Not sure if most home freezers get to the same temps they used, so that's something to look at. There's a study somewhere but I have to be up early to drive my fosters to their ride north, so I'm finishing up my supper and going to bed rather than looking it up. Long day! And tomorrow will be another.
Ground beef would concern me more if it's in the "chubs" where a billion pounds a day of meat are going across a machine. That's a set-up for contamination as we've seen over and over. Meat ground in-store is a little better bet. Then again, both ground beef and kibble test dirty with some regularity, so I'm not sure it's fair to say that the raw meat is less safe than the kibble. Of course, if you aren't comfortable with raw meat you can cook the meat, you won't be a BARF person, but you will have zero concerns about microbes regardless of the meat source, providing you use appropriate cooking/handling practices in the kitchen.
As far as the nutritional aspect, dogs don't have a built-in requirement to have an exact amount of vitamins and minerals at every meal, any more than people do. What makes "complete and balanced" so critical is that so often we feed them the same thing every single day for years at a time. So, that diet has to cover all the bases, or problems will result. Some people who feed holistically rotate ingredients in the diet in order to balance it out over time. Honestly, that's healthier, but not everyone is going to do that. Or even can do that, especially with animals with specific dietary restrictions or needs.
If you look at the back of any dog (or cat) food, you're going to see a list of ingredients. It will start out as either meats or grains or whatever the "macro nutrient" ingredients are that provide the protein, carbs, and fat. Then there's a long list of supplements. Basically, the way the food becomes "complete" is that they add the equivalent of multi-vitamin and mineral supplements to it. The only problem with that is that when you stop and think about it, they consistently, as a group, over-estimate the amount of food a dog of a given size needs to stay at a healthy weight. So, most dogs are getting half of the food they suggest and thus getting half the amount of vitamins and minerals that the company says they should get for their size. Oops.
There are, however, about a bazillion multivitamins on the market specifically designed for dogs. Or cats. So that regardless of what you're feeding, you can be sure that your dog or cat is getting those bases covered, with a dosage based on the weight of that animal. Just like you'd take a daily vitamin supplement to insure yourself against shortfalls in your diet.
But there's another issue with the amount of calcium and the ratio of calcium to phosphorus. That's supposed to be 1:1` or 2:1 depending on who you ask. They seem to have done some math on that for this recipe... I didn't research it or do that math to check if they did it correctly.
The supplements they include in this food recipe seem to be based on the dyno-vite covering the micro-nutrient bases, the eggshells covering the macro-mineral bases, and the EFA supplement covering the specific EFA needs. Then you only need protein, fat, and carbs. Which it has. Whether or not the dyno-vite is that complete, I don't know. If it is, then it might be just boffo, I guess. Supplements or not, I prefer to have a little more... well, I like some veggies in the mix, and plain white rice all the time would not be my idea of awesome nutrition. Especially with the arsenic thing... you want to get California rice to avoid that issue.
I think having a recipe that's veterinary nutritionist approved is a great idea, but unless you have a dog with particular needs, it shouldn't have to be customized. Someone ought to write a book and odds are, someone already has, with a group of such recipes in it.
