Home made pet food

Code2High wrote:
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.

Totally agree.

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.

Totally agree again. Only once have I had a dog who could eat anywhere near what his dog food manufacturer recommended he eat per day. And that was my Brittany for a few years when he was young and super, super active. Other than dogs like that, I suspect most of us with healthy weight pets are feeding about one-half of what is recommended on the bag/can/package. Talk about nutrient deficiencies!