Do you make your own dogfood? Tell me how.

March 15, 2011 9:27 AM

Several questions about dog foods, specifically, grain free dog food & making your own dog food without going broke.

The vet has recommended that one of my three dogs (this one; you may remember him from such questions as this) go on a grain free diet to a) lessen or stop his persistent ear infections and b) make him lose the 20 extra pounds he's carrying around. I am kind of bewildered by the grain free thing - does this really mean gluten free? What about rice? Oatmeal? I am also kind of stuck on how to do this. Feeding one dog one diet and the others the other diet seems like a giant hassle, so I thought I would just feed them all the same thing. However, I can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars a month on dog food. On Sunday, I spent roughly $60 on grain free kibble, a big thing of cheap hamburger and cottage cheese and a big bag of frozen chicken breasts and I don't think this mix will last more than ten days. That's more than I want to spend. For years they've eaten Sam's Club Exceed kibble, which costs $35 for a huge bag that lasts about a month. They each got 2.5 cups of kibble and 1/3 of a can of Alpo every day. The other two are not overweight and have always been perfectly healthy.

If I start making my own dog food, what do I use? Whenever the dogs have digestive issues, I've always made them boiled chicken and brown rice, sometimes with a can of pumpkin thrown in, but that's been rare and not as a staple diet. Is that a good start, though? How much food does each dog - a 30 pound collie mix, a 70 pound Heinz 57 with some hound in there and Django the spaniel, who weighs 75 pounds and should weigh 55 or less - need? Is there a good source for dog food recipes? And, what is the absolute cheapest way to do it?

posted by mygothlaundry to Pets & Animals (27 answers total)

Here's how I make dog food:

1) First I make stock. (Beef, Fish, Chicken, whatever bones/scraps I've saved.) 99% of that stock goes into jars for me.
2) I then strain out all the meat scraps from what's left, discarding the bones.
3) Meat scraps and a small amount of the broth become the the base for my dog food.
4) Into that I usually toss some frozen vegetables and rice, let them simmer till the rice is cooked, and that's basically it. Generally I use that to supplement rather than replace purchased foods.

The dogs love it more than words can describe, and while I haven't done math for the nutrients and calories, it seems great to me.
posted by Stagger Lee at 9:41 AM on March 15, 2011

I should add that the way I do it costs me about 2 cups of rice and 2 cups of frozen vegetables. The meat scraps would otherwise be garbage.
So the cost is negligible.
posted by Stagger Lee at 9:45 AM on March 15, 2011

the cheapest route to go with your dogs is to buy protein from you local butcher or meat purveyor. you can get organ meat (heart, lung, kidney) from beef, pork, or poultry relatively inexpensively in bulk. that's what i did with my weimaraner (75lbs) when i was feeding him raw. i just cut up all the organs into chunks in advance and put them in freezer bags with veggies. i thawed out what i needed for a couple of days, and just added a raw egg (including the shell) in with his meal. i also supplemented with vitamins. sometimes i added green tripe if i was able to get it. i forget the ratio of proteins to veggies, but i based my recipe off the the barf diet.
posted by violetk at 9:50 AM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

stagger lee, OP needs to feed one of the dogs a grain-free diet.
posted by violetk at 9:51 AM on March 15, 2011

You cannot feed rice to a dog on a grain free diet, though.

You can get a 26lb bag of Wellness Core (to pick one example of a commercial grainfree dog food at random) delivered for $52. How much does your dog weigh? My 42lb boxer can eat off a bag that size for a month if not more if she's eating nothing else.

We actually top feed raw, which is probably the simplest and most nutritionally balanced option for you. Whenever anything is on sale - chicken legs, thighs, liver, beef on the bone - buy it and freeze it. You can defrost in chunks and feed it for one meal a day. If you have a deep freezer, this is even more cost effective; you can buy in bulk from a wholesaler.

Fish oil and raw eggs are a good thing to add to the mix also, just FYI.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:52 AM on March 15, 2011

Yeah, I realize that one of the dogs had dietary requirements. I'm assuming you'd want to swap the rice for something else in that case... although the OP had mentioned feeding them rice before, so I'm unclear there.

Anyway, good luck. ;)
posted by Stagger Lee at 10:18 AM on March 15, 2011

My recommendation would be to get a referral to an internist. This may not be food related. Your regular DVM sees run of the mill things and is most likely not well versed in these issues. Seeing a specialist will cost you some money up front, but you will be able to nail down the problem and treat it correctly.

Or, another way of putting this- say you don't heed my advice and go ahead and make your own food for a couple of weeks. Say your dog's ear infection doesn't clear up, or that as soon as you switch him back, it comes back worse. Now you are out a month's time with no definitive results/underlying causes AND you have to continue making the food for your dog, which is a PITA.

There are plenty of hypoallergenic dog foods out there. Some are better than others. An internist will be able to pinpoint what is actually going on and make recommendations on food, if it is allergy, or other treatments (which it very well could be).

If you do end up making food for your dog, you need to be super careful of pancreatitis. Fish and eggs (raw or cooked) can cause pancreatitis. So can other meats.
posted by TheBones at 10:31 AM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Feeding one dog one diet and the others the other diet seems like a giant hassle

Separating out one dog to feed from the rest is a lot less hassle than making and storing your own food in my opinion.

I feed seven cats three different diets. The cats that are special needs get crated to eat their food and then released when eating time is over.

Can you prep the food bowls, take the grain free pup into the bathroom with his bowl, close the door, and then feed the other two as normal? Of course, if you free feed, you'll have to change.
posted by crankylex at 10:52 AM on March 15, 2011

For years they've eaten Sam's Club Exceed kibble, which costs $35 for a huge bag that lasts about a month. They each got 2.5 cups of kibble and 1/3 of a can of Alpo every day.

One thing to remember is that with the Crazy Dog Lady level of dog foods, including some grain-free, you feed a *LOT* less. Because it's all food instead of being 25% food and 75% unfood. As an added bonus, this also means small poops (both because there's less going in, and because more of what goes in turns into dog or energy instead of poo).

Our dogs are small, but not miniscule; the "big" male is ballpark 30 pounds. They each get 1/2 cup of Crazy Dog Lady kibble a day, sometimes with a spoonful or two of canned stuff, and we occasionally have to cut one of them back for a bit.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:57 AM on March 15, 2011

My dog had food allergies and since we've put her on Natural Balance, she's had no more problems. She loves the stuff, I can buy it at the local pet store, and they have grain free and allergen free mixes with sweet potatoes instead of rice. It's more expensive than Alpo, but less of a hassle than making it yourself.
posted by jillithd at 10:58 AM on March 15, 2011

2nding going to an internal medicine specialists. Regular vets are great for basic stuff, but complicated stuff is best dealt with by a specialist.

And if you end up putting your dog on a special diet that is home cooked, you want to find a pet nutritionist that can help you create a balanced set of meals for your pup. Winging it might not be best for you or him.
posted by k8t at 11:09 AM on March 15, 2011

Best answer: I've had 2 dogs, one with a grain allergy and another dog that almost bleed to death from hemorrhagic gastroenteritis when I changed his kibble brand. So now I avoid kibble as much as possible.

I've had good success with the RAW diet when I lived in Australia and it was actually recommended to me by my vet there, it worked wonderfully for the allergies. When I moved to the US the vets here (and my new US husband and MIL) were so freaked out by feeding dogs raw food I switched to cooked to keep the peace. Now a days I feed a cooked meat/veg/rice mix. Some dogs can eat some rices that are allergic to grains, I found corn to be the main culprit with my allergic dog. You can use potatoes with dogs but make sure they are well cooked. Raw or green potatoes can make them sick.

You don't have to feed your dog chicken breasts either, you can pick up bulk packs of legs and thighs or whole chicken and boil them up and pull the meat off the bone works out much cheaper. I avoid hamburger as its very fatty. I am only feeding 2 active small dogs both 14lbs in weight and they get a cup of mix a day each over 2 meals. I spend an afternoon a month cooking up the chicken in a big stock pot, debone it mix it with rice & veggies and freeze it in 4 cups to a bag, so I pull a new one out the freezer ever other day. If I remember I mix a raw egg through the mix and some flaxseed oil as I find it helps the dogs coats stay nice and shiny.

There are some starting to be some better commercial foods out there, but I find it so much cheaper to make my own and I like to cook.

What you will find when feeding good quality foods is that you need a lot less food for your dogs as they are not getting all the filler. When I switched my dog from kibble to raw the poop easily halved in size and became very very firm.

It can all seem so overwhelming at first and I am more than happy to answer any questions or just offer moral support if you want to MeFi mail me.
posted by wwax at 11:34 AM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

My Kenda had a severe attack of struvite bladder crystals a few months ago. It's all cleared up now, and I keep her on a low-grain diet. I buy Taste of the Wild, a grain-free brand of kibble that she loves and supplement it with people food. When I'm feeling ambitious, I'll cook up a batch of ground beef and veggies (usually sweet potatoes, zucchini, squash and carrots.) The TotW kibble gives me the flexibility to cook or not cook, and also gives us a portable, travel-friendly way to feed the pup when we're out and about. I pay $44 for a 30lb bag, and it's available at Tractor Supply, most feed shops and some (but not all) PetSmarts.
posted by workerant at 11:38 AM on March 15, 2011

The sticker shock you're experiencing is definitely partly because - if I may be blunt - you've been feeding your dogs a crap food. Sam's Club and Alpo is the dog equivalent of a diet composed solely of McDonald's dollar cheeseburgers and Coke. It's cheap, sure, but it's a false thrift.

A better food (either homemade or a fancy grain-free brand) will cost more at the outset, but you'll quickly reap the rewards. In the form of better health for your dogs, better skin and coat, less volume of poop, less stinky poop, less stinky farts, better breath, and less overall usage.

If I were in your shoes, I would probably try switching them to a better food before I went the DIY route.

My aunt, who runs a high-end pet store, recommends Canidae. It's grain-free, made in the USA from quality ingredients, and not too much more expensive than the Sam's Club stuff.
posted by ErikaB at 11:45 AM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Nthing Canidae and Taste of the Wild as good quality kibble options.
posted by gnutron at 11:52 AM on March 15, 2011

I have two goldens who each eat grain free Wellness Core - one eats the regular one, one eats the low fat variety because she's not as active. They do get less food, but seem satisfied. Both get one cup of their respective food twice a day. I end up buying a large bag of food for each dog once a month. It works out to about $130 a month to feed them - a small price to pay for healthy happy dogs (and not stinky! Good food definitely makes a difference).
posted by cecic at 12:10 PM on March 15, 2011

Best answer: Our dogs eat raw meat and are on a 80%-10%-10% ratio of meat (skin, fat, tissue), edible bone and organ (liver, kidney, spleen) respectively. It's roughly a prey-model diet. Rufus eats at 2.5% of his body weight for maintaining his weight and the Maui eats 2% of her body weight to lose weight.

Maui's current weight is 56 pounds or 25,401 grams. At 2% of her body weight I give her 508 grams of raw food a day. So she gets 408 grams of meat, 50 grams of edible bone and 50 grams of organs. I don't bother to weigh out the edible bone so I just make sure they get raw chicken bones for some of their meals during the week. To make it easier, I weigh out the 50 grams of organ and then top it up to 508 grams with meat.

They get RAW chicken, beef, pork, turkey, fish and game meat. I'll buy a whole chicken or turkey and dice it up, bones and all, and weigh it out for their daily meal. They get medium ground beef instead of lean or extra lean so there is some fat in their meat. Maui won't eat raw beef liver so I do a quick pan fry and cut it into small chunks. None of their food is cooked so I don't have to worry about bones. Never feed your dog cooked bones as they will splinter. Raw bones, like chicken, are okay as they are bendy. You can give your dog raw meaty bones like soup bones.

On top of this, they get 1/2 teaspoon of kelp and a dollop of fish oil every day.

As a treat, I'll throw in some canned tripe, an egg, a dollop of yoghurt, some expired deli meat or left overs. I do have a small bag of kibble that I use in their food toys and for emergency meals. Read the ingredients to make sure that the first three ingredients are meat and that there is no corn.

Don't bother with chicken breast as it's too expensive. You should be spending $2/lb, less since you live in the States. Start buying whole chickens and cut them up and, over the course of the week, feed the entire thing to your dog, bones and all - no more crappy, grain-filled kibble. After he gets used to this, start introducing other meats like beef and pork.

You can look at the quality of dog food here. Your Member's Mark Exceed dog food has two stars, is not recommended and has corn gluten meal as the third ingredient followed by brewers rice as a fourth and yellow corn meal as a sixth. That's a terrible food as dogs can't digest corn and dog food companies basically use it as filler. That's why your dog has allergies and gigantic poops (and probably tartar-filled teeth). Feeding raw alleviates all this - your dog poops less as their body uses up all the food, has more energy, has less medical issues, better teeth from chewing bones and a softer coat.

Also, don't mix the kibble and raw meat together in the same meal as it'll make your dog bloat and uncomfortable.

And good for you to have a vet who is suggesting a grain-free diet! My vet poo-poos my dogs being on raw and insists they should be feed kibble, Science Diet of all things. Hell f-ing no. I'm a third generation raw feeder to our dogs and they're in great health. Maui had allergies when she was younger that have now cleared up.

Here are some links that I like:
MM/RMB/OM (muscle meat, raw meaty bones, organ meat)
Raw Learning
Raw Feeding Recipes
Pets 4 Life Feeding Calculator - I used this to calculate meals for our dogs
Raw Meat Diet
Raw Feeding for Dogs (and 1 cat) on Flickr - a series of photos of meals, not for the faint of heart!

Mefi mail me if you or anyone else has any questions. I know it may seem intimidating at first but it gets easier as you go along.
posted by KathyK at 12:40 PM on March 15, 2011 [5 favorites]

Yeah, we recently switched our dog to a grain free food, and the amount of food he gets is SHOCKINGLY less. Read the back of the bag and make sure that you are feeding only the recommended amount, even if it looks like not enough. For our 60lb dog, one of the big bags of blue buffalo (~$50) easily lasts more than a month.
posted by katers890 at 12:41 PM on March 15, 2011

I find it pretty odd that your vet just suggested that you go to a grain-free diet rather than consulting with you about allergies in general. Sure, the recurrent ear infection may be due to a food allergy, and it may be to a grain--but it might be an environmental allergy, or it might be a food allergy that isn't grain.

I have a dog with both a food allergy (to beef, FWIW) and an environmental allergy. We tried swapping his food repeatedly trying to find a novel diet that eliminated his allergies, and nothing worked--because the environmental allergy needed to be addressed before we could isolate the food allergy. Just going gung-ho on food isn't necessarily the answer, and I'm not sure why your vet didn't address this.

Even if it is a food allergy, your dog might be allergic to ANY of the ingredients in his previous food. Or his treats. Or any other tidbits he gets. Anything he gets often enough to keep the food allergy going could be the culprit--and food elimination diets recommend 6, 12, sometimes 16 weeks of being on "novel" foods before you're sure the allergen has completely cleared the system. I suggest reading up on food elimination diets; these are how you determine what a pet is allergic to, and then you simply avoid THAT ingredient. It's much easier than the vague "Oh, this grain-free diet worked for my dog" that seems to be everywhere when you bring up food allergies.

It's entirely possible that switching to a higher-quality food might help with the overweight part. Some dogs get sluggish on poor-quality foods, and start losing weight on their own when they get more energetic due to better quality nutrition. (Of course, feeling somewhat unwell due to constant food allergies can make dogs a little depressed, too.) But the food doesn't have to be grain-free to be higher-quality.

Also, if you're under the impression that you need to feed the full amount recommended by a bag of dog food, don't be! :) Their guidelines are often way, way over what most dogs need. For example, I had a 45-lb dog who maintained his weight well on 1/2 cup of food a day, when the bag recommended 3-4 cups! Also, with higher-quality food, you're even more likely to be feeding less; less of the food is indigestible filler. So the dog might benefit not only from better food, but from a heckuva lot less of it. (If you do switch your other dogs also, they also likely need less than they were getting.)

I think the internist suggestion is a really good one, if just because I think you should be discussing this with someone who has a better grip on the current state of the science than "feed grain-free food." :)
posted by galadriel at 1:47 PM on March 15, 2011

Working off wwax's excellent advice, I just want to add that my approach to dealing with vets who freak out at raw feeding is to... not tell them we feed raw. It's pretty mainstream now, the choking hazard comes from cooked bones, dogs do not get salmonella, and while I'm not a grassy knoll conspiracy theorist, I know of no vets who are not selling manufactured food from the front of the shop.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:36 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

There's no reason to not give all your dogs grain-free food. We switched to Blue Buffalo Wilderness, which is 100% grain-free for our two dogs. It's expensive (~$60/ 24lb. bag) but worth it to keep our dogs healthy. One of our dogs was scratching a lot and that's gone away. The other dog has a high metabolism and no matter how much we fed her she wouldn't gain any weight. After a couple months on the BB Wilderness, she's finally at a healthy weight and her hip bones don't stick out anymore. We cook up a couple pounds of ground turkey every week and keep it in a tupperware and add a couple spoonfuls to their bowls along with the dog food. We'll also add leftover vegetables from dinner when we have them. Our dogs have never been more healthy. Amount of food varies by dog weight, but it's listed on the bag. We give 1 cup twice a day to our 40 lb. dogs. One 24lb. bag lasts just about a month.
posted by wherever, whatever at 4:51 PM on March 15, 2011

Best answer: the choking hazard comes from cooked bones, dogs do not get salmonella

I'm sorry, but neither of these things are true (dogs can choke on anything, raw bones are no exception). I've got nothing against raw, but it is not risk-free, or cheap.

You feed far less of high quality dog foods, and you do get what you pay for (and FYI, most vets who sell food only sell prescription diets, this vet is suggesting a grain free food which s/he in all likelihood does NOT sell). And "grain free" means "no grain" (rice and oatmeal are both grains). If you choose Canidae, be aware that there is a grain-free and NOT grain-free version. Wellness CORE is pretty reasonably priced for grain-free, as is Before Grains, as is the new Nutro grain free (although I have no idea how good it is), as is Natural Balance, which has a few grain free options. Making your own food will be far more expensive as a general rule, and a ton more hassle.
posted by biscotti at 6:37 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

When I was growing up, my mom made MFK Fisher's sludge for our ridiculously healthy, long-lived dog. You could easily improvise a grain-free version.
posted by tangerine at 12:14 AM on March 16, 2011

Best answer: There's only the two of us plus the dog, and I work at home, and high quality food is hard to come by here, so I have the time, and do cook for her every day. A typical meal is chicken breast, sweet potato and green beans, and I include a 500mg calcium tablet, with no added vitamin D. (She weighs around 30 lbs; I hear different recommendations for amount of calcium, but this is what I've gone with.)

Veg I use: frozen mixed veggies (peas, carrots, potatoes, green beans); any combination of carrots, zucchini, spinach, broccoli, beets, green beans, peas, sweet potato. The microwave makes cooking the veg easy... and I cook it because I've read that dogs do not digest vegetables easily, so they need to be cooked or otherwise minced very small.

Protein I use: Chicken, turkey, fish, occasional beef, occasional pork, eggs, sometimes liver, but usually I buy some liver and cook it to use as in-house treats. She also gets some yogurt several times a week, and she's a Greek dog, so she gets the random bit of feta. :)

If I give her fish with edible bones (sardines, say), I leave out the calcium tablet. I usually have frozen chicken, frozen fish and frozen veg in the freezer for her. The fish and veg are easy to cook; the frozen chicken takes longer, but I use the pressure cooker and end up with chicken broth for other cooking. So, right now, I have cooked chicken in the fridge, frozen green beans in the freezer, and some carrots that I will cook and keep in freezer or fridge (depending on how much I cook), and that will be her meal today.

I sometimes toss in some brown rice or cooked potato if it's on hand, or beans if I've made a bean dish for us, or even some pasta, but this is a small percentage of the dish in relation to the meat and veg. Emergency food is eggs or canned sardines (with vegetables). If there's basically zero fat in the food, I might add a bit of olive oil. I try to give her occasional treats of what fruit she will accept — pear, maybe banana, kiwi. She hates apple, unless it has peanut butter on it.

If I were more pressed for time, I'd cook in bulk and freeze for the week/two weeks.

It's so hard to get an idea of how to home feed because there's so much conflicting info. After 3 years, I just basically go with my feeling: she's healthy, energetic, good coat, bright eyes, not over- or underweight, quick healer, no hot spots, etc., and the food I give her would grow a healthy child, so I'm satisfied. If she eats only my food, she has great, solid but not hard poops that pass easily... when I give her other stuff (commercial dental chews like the vet said I should, rawhide, commercial treats, etc.) she often gets too-soft clingy poo.

I'm a doting dog-mom, for sure (never having had kids myself, for one reason), so when money was super tight, she was eating better than we were, it must be admitted. Anyway, MGL, you helped soothe my anxiety a lot when we first got Sky, so I hope I can soothe yours a bit by saying that you can't figure out the perfect way to feed right off the bat (and apparently, SCIENCE is no better decided on how to feed dogs than it is on how to feed humans), so just think of it as a process — and the visible health of your dog will help you along. Basically: more protein than carb; make the vegetables digestible; add calcium if you don't use bones; ideally a small bit of organ meat every day is better than one meal with organ meat a week.

I'd try to buy slashed-price meat/poultry that's going past its sell-by date, and freeze; you can ask your friendly grocers when the best time to get that is. If you have hunter friends, you might get rabbit or venison; fishermen friends also welcome! Eggs are good for dogs according to my sources, and you can use that as your main protein a couple times a week. Tell your pals that if they happen across a super good deal on chicken/meat to grab it and you'll pay them back. Basically, you need a big freezer, instead of the chilly matchbox that I have. :)

Here's a source of info for homemade dog food I like a lot, and here's another one of my favorites.
posted by taz at 5:07 AM on March 16, 2011 [3 favorites]

A typical meal is chicken breast, sweet potato and green beans

Er, I should clarify that this doesn't mean she gets a whole chicken breast each meal! One large lasts at least three days.
posted by taz at 5:21 AM on March 16, 2011

I switched our dog over to Orijen kibble after doing a lot of reading about it and he LOVES it. Even the neighbor dog prefers that to a treat. (Really. I give her kibble pieces and she does a happy dance for them.)

He's scratching a lot less (had some bad skin issues - he's old (14) and just not as healthy as he used to be) and seems to be doing much better. He gets some soft food (Evo protein) and has lost some weight from that.

Grain and all that corn crap is just bad news, I think.
posted by Mysticalchick at 8:00 AM on March 16, 2011

When I was looking for a feeding solution for our recently adopted mutt, Bandit, I found two excellent sites that analyze dog foods: Whole Dog Journal, and DogFoodAdvisor.com. Both are stock full of excellent advice you might find helpful. In particular, the Dog Food Calculator is quite helpful at figuring out serving sizes: as another poster mentioned, many premium dog foods have more concentrated calories, so the serving sizes can be smaller, as is the case with our eventual choice for Bandit (Embark, from The Honest Kitchen). Good luck finding a solution for your dog.
posted by apennington at 9:33 PM on March 16, 2011