Making Your Own Dog Food
The main reason for making your own dog food is to offer better nutrition than most commercially prepared foods. See here for one experiment where we found this to be true
Sometimes, but not always, shopping for and preparing the ingredients yourself is cheaper than buying readymade dog food.
Will making your own dog food take a lot of time? Not necessarily.
Having the right tools and a store where you can get all the ingredients you want will help.
If you're organized and make a big batch of homemade dog chow once a week, the rest of the time it will only take a few minutes a day to feed even a large dog.
The bigger challenge seems to be figuring out what type of diet to follow.
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There are many conflicting ideas regarding what offers a dog the best nutrition. Some people swear by a raw food diet; others say raw foods are too dangerous and cooking for your dog is the way to go. Others choose to do a combination of kibble or canned and raw or cooked foods.
After Comet's bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, we fed him a special diet that included some raw and some cooked foods including a small amount of cottage cheese or plain yogurt, a vitamin supplement, and some protein powder; then a combination of 25% cooked rice (brown or white), 25% grated raw vegetables, and 50% lean hamburger, fish, or chicken (sometimes raw, sometimes cooked). He also had a soup marrow bone or two to chew on daily.
For raw food diet options, see Canine Raw Diet: Make Homemade Dog Food
For cooked food diets, see Cooking For Your Dog
If you're feeding a commercial type dog food and wondering how good it is for your dog, see Dog Food Analysis
Rest assured that the exact diet you choose can vary and your dog can still get all the nutrition needed. After all, people who live in the Far East may eat very differently from ones in Mediterranean countries but still have healthy diets.
The bottom line is that your dog needs a balanced diet for optimum health and making your own dog food or part of it is likely to be the best option.
Many dog owners add supplements such as a canine multi-vitamin and calcium, just in case.
By the way, although dogs can eat a lot of healthy, natural foods that people also eat, there are some foods that are dangerous for dogs but not for humans.*
* Raw bacon caused an extreme reaction with Comet that almost killed him. He had not had any in years. It may have been exacerbated by the fact he had no real exercise for two days, coupled with his aging digestive system. Also, one vet told us many dogs do not tolerate pork or fatty/greasy meats well and it often causes acute pancreatitis, which may have been what happened with Comet (we weren't able to pay the extra $500 for an accurate diagnosis)...
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