Does anyone else on here prepare their own cooked dog food, as opposed to feeding raw?

I currently feed my lot (2 Goldies, 2 Dobes and a Sussex Spaniel) on Naturediet but the current situation with them is driving me mad. I have now started using naturesmenu which is OK but does work out much more expensive. I have thought about BARFing but don't feel ready to take that step yet. So, I am contemplating preparing my own food. Does anyone else do this and if so could you give me any idea how to prepare a balanced feed.

Thanks in advance
Karen

Hi Karen
I'm new to BARF and initially was very wary of it - thinking it was going to be time consuming and difficult, but it isn't!

If you are going to prepare your own cooked food, why not just prepare it and not cook it?  Healthier for the dogs and easier for you?  You'll just need a good juicer for the fruit and veg and a good mincer for the chicken wings, if you are going to mince these, lots of people don't so this is not a necessity!  Also a freezer so you can make up food in advance.  (I'd say a large freezer with your 5 dogs)!

Maria

Thanks Maria

It's just that I don't like the idea of raw and have never given my dogs bones of any description (they chew nylabones). Perhaps I am being daft. I'm sure the bigger dogs would eat anything and I know Lottie loves finding decomposed rabbits to eat on our walks!

Karen

Hi Karen

I feed raw, but occasionally, eg if travelling, feed mine Forthglade menu - similar to Naturediet.  Have you looked at that?

Well you have to really want to do it I guess!   But just think about it, if Lottie loves finding decomposed rabbits to eat then I'm sure she would like the odd raw bone, I must say I'm still nervous of giving Jasper whole chicken wings, it wasn't too bad when he was a little puppy, but now at 3 months I thing the chicken breast with a wing joined to it is safer!!!   We still mince the majority of his chicken wings though.  But the other bones I don't worry about so much.

If you are going to prepare their food and cook it, then steam the vegetables lightly.  Or you could juice and mince them without cooking, adding some yoghurt and raw eggs!

Maria

mmmm juiced veg and raw egg incl shell, trickled over the minced raw chicken like a thick salad dressing,  delicious :D My dogs love it :P

I guess to some extent I am "humanising" the dogs and thinking about what I would eat. Perhaps I will have to just bite the bullet and go BARF!

I don't mind the time consuming bit when it comes to cooking and when you look at the Naturediet ingredients it is basically meat, rice, carrots, seaweed, natural ground bone and vitamins/minerals. I could probably just follow their ingredients and add a vitamin supplement, it is just getting the balance right that worries me.

Hi
The balance is the key thing - you don't have to balance every meal as long as the food they have over a couple of weeks balances out.

Try Ian Billingurst books Grow your pups on bones and Give your dog a bone!  The reason I suggest the puppy book is that it gradually explains how and what to feed with recipes for the patties. 

Don't humanise your doggies it's bad for their health!
Maria

If you are worried about being nutritionally complete why don't just add 1/3 to 1/2 of a good dry complete (Burns, James Wellbeloved) to a homemade cooked or raw mix.  

I share your concerns. I have not had a problem with Naturediet, but I have small dogs and even when supply was virtually nonexistent I had enough.  However, I am very concerned about the number of people that are reporting that packages of food have not been sealed properly and the food is spoiled.  I've been lucky so far, but it really has made me much less confident about feeding Naturediet.

I'm just using up the last few packets and then go back to my old regime - a good dry complete (JWB) mixed with a little cooked meat.  Mine are fed two meals a day and the second has always been meat and veg anyway, so packaged dog food has never amounted to more than 50% of their diet. (Last night was extra special, they had chicken Tikka with potato and a bit of spinach. I got sick of cooking in this hot weather and called up my local Indian restaurant for delivery to my door!)

Oh, I also give them a dog vitamin tablet every other day or so, just to be sure. 

A good book on home prepared food is Natural Health Care for Dogs & Cats by Pitcairn.  You can feed raw or cook his recipes.

Thanks Cairnmania, I'll try and source the book, it sounds good.

http://www.drpitcairn.com/books/pitcairn_book.html

Thats the link about the book, its a great book & will give you all the info you need for a homecooked diet :)

Missie you are making me hungry ! :D :D

I am a new Barfer and it really is easy and the girls love it :)

Lucy
xx

Don't feed your dog raw eggs. Raw egg white contains a substance called avidin which interferes with the bodies own production of biotin, and can lead to a biotin deficiency.

Really? Most barf sites include raw eggs, as does the recipe for satin balls and salmon cakes.

Saxon,
Egg whites indeed contain a protein which ties up the vitamin, biotin. Many people avoid feeding their dogs raw eggs for this reason.However Funny thing is, the yolk contains more than enough biotin to make up for any that the egg white binds to. So feeding raw egg whites alone is a problem; raw whole eggs however are alright. Boiling the egg destroys the biotin-binding protein and kills off any salmonella.. I wouldn't flip out about feeding the occassional ( as a lot of folk do, me included) whole raw egg. ;)

Also giving the egg shells, I feed mine a couple each week and can be an additional source of protein :)

>Also giving the egg shells, I feed mine a couple each week and can be an additional source of protein<

Missie most people give Egg shells for the calcium part of a homecooked diet :) 1/4tsp per lb of meat. The egg itself is regarded as the perfect protein,it is the one against which all others are measured.

>Raw egg white contains a substance called avidin which interferes with the bodies own production of biotin<

I fully agree with huskygal,the avidin/biotin 'problem' has been debunked for many years.

Eggs are a great source of protein :) But there is no need to feed the shell if you are feeding bones.

But as I'm lazy it takes less effort to drop them onto the dogs food with the egg, than lift the lid of the recycling bin :D :D

Daisy

ktee I meant the eggs being protein not the shells. sometimes I think my thoughts are clear but my words get muddled up :D :D
I give the shells because of the calcium because one of mine can't have raw meaty bones as too much fat on them can make her runny. (maybe because she has to have enzymes added to all her food so giving a rmb is really out of the question).   She has bones minced in with her chicken but obviously not in the quantity that would be by eating bones, if you see what I mean, so when she gets the eggs she gets the shells as well and if I have an egg she also gets that shell :)

Oh I've probably muddled up even more now :P

:)

Pedlee, I've just started feeding my dog on cooked food after problems with Naturediet.  Well I had problems with the two foods she was on prior to that so having got to the end of my tether I have almost given up on dog food!  My OH won't let us go down the BARF route, although I am interested, but I think his complete reluctance gives me an excuse not to try it so the happy compromise we are now trying out is cooked food.  There are also other factors like I have a small kitchen and small freezer, I work from home and don't get out to shops each week so a trip to Sainsburys on a Thursday night needs to enable me to get food for both man and dog together, and I can mix and match storage wise e.g. some meat in the freezer, some in the fridge, tins in the cupboard etc. 

Because there's only two of us and a small dog it also works out well for us as we usually get a chicken which is two much for the two of us normally, the vegetables don't go to waste now (guilty as charged for buying veg which doesn't get eaten because it gets overruled in favour of burger and chips so now at least I don't feel so guilty as I can dish them up for the dog instead (the veg not the burger and chips!)).  The leftover sausages from the standard pack of 8 came in useful tonight and so on - so instead of having to find extra space in the freezer for frozen meat specifically for the dog if we were feeding BARF, a lot of her meals will be what we were having ourselves anyway.  Pasta, rice and tuna are already in the cupboard, and I already feed a tinned oily fish once a week so that's normal.

I used to feed my dog Burns before but stopped for reasons that will take up too much space to explain but I have bought a bag to keep in the cupboard for convenience and to hopefully supply any vitamins I may be overlooking (and its handy at breakfast when I'm too dozy to do anything else for her!) and until I can find somewhere to get bones from which I would like to include occasionally but is proving difficult for me

A cheap pack of mince picked up whilst at Sainsburys does a couple of meals, and I have discovered that cook-from-frozen in 5 mins turkey mince from the freezer section is often on BOGOF and very handy for those emergency "sugar I forgot to get something out for the dog" moments!  We are also able to keep Millie's diet interesting as the other week I discovered a little pack of frozen chicken livers that I will probably buy again if the OH can bear to handle them again!

But anyway its only been a few weeks but I'm really liking it as we've had so many problems with different foods over the past 2 years (supply, storage, convenience, dog refusing to eat dry food every night) that although this requires a little more effort on our part, its actually more convenient for us than feeding dog food.  And maybe one day when I have a bigger kitchen and a bigger freezer I'll finally bite the bullet and go BARF!

I got so carried away rabbiting I forgot the original question which was about!  And I'm not the one to answer having only just embarked down this route fully myself but on researching on here it seems you need the meat and the veg, rice is a good idea as is tinned oily fish once a week (good for coats), raw egg is usually recommended (!) but also the thing missing from the diet when you stop a dog food is the ground bone so if you can get raw bones from your butcher for your dogs to gnaw on occasionally its generally well recommended.  Also vitamin supplements are often suggested, I need to research further on this but at the moment am backing up my dog's feeding with occasional Burns as its only been a few weeks and I need to get my head round exactly what I want to do and what to give but there are lots of past threads on here as I have been reading a lot myself lately.

Me again, just reminded me I have a question, something that has been popping into my head since embarking on real food, about a year or so ago there was a poster who told about a terrible situation whereupon her dog had died because of the food she had given her.  It was something to do with a specific combination of defrosting and cooking which is dangerous for dogs - it was something like cooked meat that had been frozen and then reheated, or frozen meat that had been defrosted and then cooked and then frozen and then defrosted...I can't remember the pattern, and it wasn't either of the above examples but it has stuck in my mind and I'd certainly like to remember what the combination was so I can avoid it!

If anyone has a fab memory they can delve into and remind me I would be most grateful!

Thanks

I don't have a fab memory :D but might it have been this you are thinking of:

http://www.champdogsforum.co.uk/cgi-bin/board/topic_show.pl?pid=554084;hl=mince%20freeze;hlm=and

Ah-hah, that may have been the one I was thinking of, thank you for that!

I think it is Beef fed raw needs to be frozen first if bought fresh.

If you get chicken anyway why not bone it and let the dog have the carcase raw, otherwise the bones are just wasted as of no nutritional value at all once cooked, and in fact dangerous.

If you really want to roast the chicken you could cut the back off totally before roasting so you are only roasting the breast and legs attached to the ribs.

Use any left over cooked veg and water to cook your rice (oats are good too, Pasta and cooked Potatoes also), but wizz up most of the veg for the dgo raw in a blender (doesn't have to be a lot, and this will have the vitamins.)

I would also give a good supplement of vitamins and minerals designed for dogs.

Even with shared fridge and freezer space yo7u wshould still be able to give the dog a fair amount raw.

I can't understand why your wish to use only the human storage areas means you have to cook the food you are giving .  I always thought the seperate freezers that BARFers used was just a storage solution to buying in bulk for economy.  I appreciate you might not wish to use some of the meat that BARFers use, although I presume it is all human grade so that would only be a case of squeamishness perhaps ;) but I can't understand why you can't just use the ones that would be acceptable to you and feed raw anyway. 

To reply to both Brainless and Isabel, the answer really is laziness.

The chicken we have is ready-cooked - so we are unable to give the bones to the dog, and to feed raw to the dog would mean having to buy two seperate chickens, bringing us back to the storage problem.  My freezer door only opens a third of the way it should due to a protuding wall so we can only fit small things in there because we can't pull any of the drawers open more than a couple of inches! (Don't ask!)  When we're big grown ups with a proper kitchen and I've learnt to cook food rather than buy it ready-cooked, I may start buying things like frozen chicken and learning what to do with it myself!

Here's a question though, can you mix and match with raw food/cooked food?  I have always assumed you can't, so because I couldn't feed raw all the time, I don't consider it as an option but if you can, then some things that I do buy uncooked and freeze could be fed raw on occasion.  I just don't think my hubby is ever going to agree to go down the barf route, I completely understand what people say about it being easier, and for me who has as little do with kitchens and cooking as possible it would be ideal but its convincing him that's the problem!

>can you mix and match with raw food/cooked food? 

Yes, certainly. After all, people have salad (raw, uncooked, unprocessed food) with cooked meat, don't they? (Someone's bound to pop up and say that you should wait umpteen hours between feeding cooked and raw, and that they should never be fed at the same meal, and kibble should never be mixed with anything, but that's honestly a load of twaddle! ;))

ha ha, okay thank you - it probably is from reading posts like that in the past that gave me that idea.  In fact having just replied to a different thread, I've noticed that every post I make concerns something I do or don't do because of a horror story I have read on here.  A case of too much Champdogs, my brain is exploding!

>The chicken we have is ready-cooked

:o is the closest I can get to a jaw dropping emoticon :D  If you learned to cook your own chicken you could save enough money to buy another freezer! but then again if you did you wouldn't need it :p
How to cook a chicken :) :- Buy a medium chicken, preferably fresh and preferably free range.  Turn oven on to roast ie 190C, gas mark 5, wait ten mins for it to heat properly.  Buy a tub of goose fat or use half butter half oil and spread a couple of tablespoons over the breast.  Slam it into the oven, baste a couple of times cook for about an hour and twenty mins, stick a skewer into the chunkiest part of the leg and check the juice runs clear.  Sit on a warm plate for about 20 minutes before carving.
What could be easier than that?  When you taste your freshly cooked chicken you will be so proud, you will never buy precooked again and your husband will never leave you :)

>Sit on a warm plate for about 20 minutes before carving.

I don't have one big enough to sit on; can't I use a chair? ;) :D :D

For actually cooking chicken I swear by my chicken brick. It couldn't be simpler - no need to even baste. :)

:D Oh, you!

goose fat, basting, skewers - what is this strange language you are speaking!

:D
Saving 20 quid a week on cooked meats, comprende that one?

OH pays for shopping and if he saved any money I wouldn't see it anyway lol :D

Ah! So, if you gave him freshly cooked chicken and saved money on his budget he would never, never leave you :)

Ah but you could add so much else to the shopping list like lots of healthy fruit and veg so you would have more for your/his money

You mean more Fox's Triples and Mini Toffee Yum Yums of course!

Isabel, your tactics are starting to work, I am getting paranoid that if he keeps on paying for shopping and doing all the cooking he is going to leave me.  And then I'll starve, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!

Hi Karen,

I purchased a book that gives recipes for home cooked diets from Mr Cusick, he offers recipes that are breed specific and I can honestly say it has made a huge difference to both of my dogs, they no longer have dandruff and they no longer suffer from bouts of upset stomachs.

The recipes were inexpensive and very easy to make and best of all the dogs love them and their overall appearance has improved.  The book I purchased cost $30 that's about £16 and that included postage.   

http://home.att.net/~wdcusick/free.html

Hi All

I'm seriously thinking about going down the BARF route and am busily reading Tom Lonsdale's "Raw Meaty Bones" at the moment and anything else I can find on the Web. The only problem I can forsee is that of feeding 5 dogs, one of which is nearly 14 and has recently had his spleen removed, another is quite fussy and would rather roll on a dead rabbit than eat it, and the other three eat so quickly they really just swallow their food. Am trying to source some good quality RMBs at the moment, before all the Naturediet and Naturesmenu runs out. How do you that feed raw manage with large numbers of dogs?

A couple of the dogs went to the vet for their 6-monthly check-up last week and when I mentioned to the vet I was considering the RMB route he said "Why would you want to when your dogs are so fit and healthy and you would be unbalancing their diet leading to possible heart problems and more. Pet food manufacturers spend a lot of time and money researching the correct balanced diet for our canine friends". Why is it that vets are so anti-BARF?

"why is it that vets are so anti- BARF?"

I recon it is because all dogs on BARF rarely have to use therir services as they are so healthy. ;)

I'm astonished that there are people who seem to believe that vets want animals to be unhealthy. If a person seriously thinks their vet wants animals to become sick then they should report him/her to the RCVS.

(If it's meant tongue-in-cheek, and has gone over my head (happens frequently!), a smiley helps ... ;))

yes i was only joking. I work at a vets and would never think that as i know how much they all love animals. My vets have been very supportive of my change to barf.

I should have made it more clear sorry.

Sorry

No probs. :) The written word doesn't always put across humour very well! :)

Is that better

Sorry

>I recon it is because all dogs on BARF rarely have to use therir services as they are so healthy.<

I must admit this thought had crossed my mind! It doesnt make sense that vets would knock a diet that is the dogs/cats natural diet and recommend a processed to death completely foreign and un natural dry food

Let me iriterate(sp?) that i do feed dry food,i am just trying to come up with a theory on why so many vets bash the barf diet!One theory could be that they would see clients who have completely massacred this way of feeding and therefore their dogs health because they had no clue what they were doing and thought all their dog needed was a chicken wing and a bowl of raw whole uncooked veg :rolleyes: They would also see countless cases of bone perforations from owners feeding cooked bones. They would also see sickly,malnourished dogs come through their doors from owners who feed the 'barf' diet,but rarely would they ask what exactly these owners are feeding,9 times out of 10 there would be some serious facets of the diet missing,but would the owners admit to this,or would the vets ask?? Most likely the vet would think "pfft here's another case of the 'barf' diet"!

Finally it would be a hell of alot easier and quicker for a vet to say "grab a bag of science plan on your way out" or "go down to the pet store and buy X,Y or Z food" then it would be sit down with the client and go through an intricately devised diet plan and the whats and hows of feeding and what the dog needs to thrive,and the do's and donts. Most vets think that the layman pet owner would not have the first clue on how to feed their dogs a home made diet,and if the vet did happen to recommend this route and the owner stuffed up and ended up making their dog sick,who would get the blame....the vet,ofcourse :( :rolleyes:

Getting back to vets rarely see barf fed dogs,well it is true,isnt it! :D My dogs get a predominately raw diet with some dry food on the side,friends and aquaintances of mine who feed raw see their vets for once a year health checks and thats it.Once people start researching into this way of feeding they usually also start looking into vaccinations et al,and then next thing you know they opting for 3-5 year vax or take the homeopathic route,all of this means less visits to the vet and therefore less money coming into the vet.

You have got it in one.

My Friend is a mainly BARF feeder and her Vet of many years was concerned about it not in principle but in the application, especially by people who might not apply it properly.

For example she had already seen people who would not feed organ meat as they disliked the idea of it, and pretty soon some of the dogs were on a very limited raw diet which would eventually lead to problems.

I think that many vets see BARF as a dangerous Fad, and frankly I wouldn't suggest it to most Pet owners, and only mention it in passing a a method of feeding for those inclined to research that way of feeding.

Fewer and fewer people cook and prepare fresh and natural food for their families too.

>>My Friend is a mainly BARF feeder and her Vet of many years was concerned about it not in principle but in the application, especially by people who might not apply it properly.<<

That is how my vet feels about it. I have had lengthy chats with her about what mine get and how often and about the herbal supplements I give them and she is happy that they are getting a good diet and is also very impressed with how good they look. HOWEVER she is very concerned about the number of people she sees that don't feed much offal or tripe (becuase of the smell) or people that feed mainly chicken and don't give their dogs much variety and then make up for it by adding large amounts of vitamin supplements :-( It really concerns her that so many people are feeding raw and not looking into it properly first and when she tries to talk to them about it they apparently seem to think she is against it which she isn't. I get whole rabbits from my butcher (head skin and insides removed) but it makes me cringe every time I chop them up. I don't know why it just does but I wouldn't stop feeding them as they love them and rabbit is a good meat for dogs, I also get pigs trotters and ears and they really are quite icky to touch but keep them occupied for ages. I know people that won't feed anything that looks like the animal it came from regardless of how good it is for their dogs............ :-(