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RE: Making Homemade Cat Food--Save Money AND Make Your Cat Happy!
We haven't got cats, but do have dogs and we have made our food for our dogs over the past couple of years. It has greatly decreased our cost of feeding the boys, decreased the amount of "waste" from our harvested game and increased all sorts of happiness and the health of our dogs.
You have provided a great service to cat lovers and people trying to be more frugal on steemit. Great share, quality content from you every time. Thank you!
Wow, thank you!! Did you find a good recipe online for your dogs' food? Or did you make one up? When I started making cat food, I did a little research on dog food but didn't find one that wasn't really complicated and/or cost efficient to make. We'd love to put the waste game meat to good use that way!
Well it started off that I was purchasing the raw diet stuff from the petfood store. So I took the percentages of what ingredients they used for their product and just use similar amounts in the ones that I make. So here's how I do it:
I Rex, my greatpyrenees/black lab eat's a half pound of raw meat per meal. (I've only used deer and moose venison). He weighs about 85 pounds. We feed the boys twice per day.
I give them one half fruits and vegetables of what they eat for meat. So in Rex case, he gets four ounces of frozen vegetables.
The reason I specify frozen is a solution also
With the different plants that we have in our garden there's more than we can use. When things like squash need to be used, I dice them up and chuck them in the freezer. Things like brussels sprout leaves and other plants that can be eaten, but just need to be trimmed back can also be frozen.
-Here's the important part about this: Dogs digestive tracts are much shorter than ours, and so they can't digest the nutrition from plants unless it's already partially been digested by something else (you know, just like how God made them, to hunt something down and eat it) - The process that takes place in the animals stomach breaks down the cell membranes and makes those nutrients available to the dogs digestion. if you freeze the vegetables and fruits the cell membrane breaks down as it freezes and the same benefit occurs for the dogs digestion.
Then when hunting season rolls around and we have gotten our game we take the meat that we won't eat: like the stuff with all the gnarly tendons and layers of grisle (sp?) and the organs (I can't bring myself to use the lungs, and won't be convinced they're good for my dogs) and weigh it out.
8 ounces meat
4 ounces fruits and vegetables
two tablespoons of bone meal (anyone that can tell me how to DO this would be my hero, we currently purchase it from the same petfood store).
The bone meal is good for their digestion, like fiber for us and a few other ways that I don't feel I need to describe on here at risk of being super gross.
There's a few other uses of the game that are quite nice if you aren't trophy hunters. You can cut the ears off, dehydrate and they're great snacks for the dogs, or chew toys depending on the size ;)
The ribs can be cut in half and served in chunks of two ribs whole to a dog 45 pounds (our other dog, Mumin) up to twice a week for a meal. They eat the whole thing. Rex is a rescue and doesn't have the best genes perhaps? so he can't digest the ribs quite so well and gets sick when he eats them, so he gets something else.
I need to note the carbohydrate consideration also... vegetables have different values for nutrients so a blend is best. We have berries by the truckload here, but can't always feed them to the boys because they'd get too fat! They really love beans in there.
If you have any questions or anything - just let me know!
Wow, that's awesome! Thank you for explaining all that!! Looks like the Husband would have to take a herd of deer just for the dogs though if we were going to make that work. They're kind of on the small side around here. I doubt he'd complain about the excuse to do more hunting :)))
I'm glad to hear from someone who has tried the homemade raw diet solution for their dogs and has had it work out well. Gives me hope that we can integrate it in the future! Thanks so much for sharing!
I recently took on a client who farms cattle. He said they have a ton of "waste" from when they butcher. My thought is that if one of them would make their waste mine it would help. We are currently able to take a moose two out of three years, so that helps with the amount of meat we collect for sure.