Any ideas to make homemade dog food (border collie, bite, stomach)
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I do have a couple of other questions and that is about bones, lol.
1. I know that we are not supposed to give dogs chicken bones but I assume that's cooked bones. How do raw bones differ?
2. Someone mentioned marrow bones and cutting them up to feed the dog. Can you be a little more specific as to where these come from. Aren't these bones too hard for the dog to chew?
3. Whether we are talking about raw or cooked, how do you all process the meat? Chicken for instance, do you just shred it by hand or run it through a grinder? As for raw chicken, I would assume you grind bones and all? What about the cooked?
My dog was diagnosed with cancer a few months ago (now in remission, but still undergoing chemo), and JFFD was among the recommendations made by her very particular internist.
The food is expensive, but my dog definitely rules and let me know that our budget can handle it. I like the fact that the meals are designed by veterinary nutritionists, and there is no garbage in them.
I agree that the option of following their recipes, with JFFD's added nutritional supplements, seems like a great one.
As far as the old days are concerned when dogs ate table scrapes and few saw vets, well, some lived long lives, but I wonder how many suffered.
You may be right about dogs suffering in the old days. Most of us treat our animals much better now.
I hope your dog recovers. A dog on chemo--that sounds rough.
You may be right about dogs suffering in the old days. Most of us treat our animals much better now.
I hope your dog recovers. A dog on chemo--that sounds rough.
It's a wonder that our dogs put up with us in the past.
That's for the good wishes. She's in remission for now from her lymphoma, and became so within one month of starting treatment.
The chemo makes her a bit nauseous, but she usually responds to antiemetics.
Doggie cookies (Hill's Hypo-Treats) also put a big smile on her face!
Given the poor quality and unknown ingredients in most dog food available today, I had the idea of making my dog some food.
I am thinking I could buy some chicken leg quarters, boil and shred it and give that to my dog. I could add some other ingredients like rice or vegetables and salt or whatever to make it more palatable. The chicken is normally about .39 cents a pound so it is economical. I'm sure she would like it way more than either canned or dried food.
Another question is storage. Maybe pre-package and freeze and then defrost as you need it?
I do have a couple of other questions and that is about bones, lol.
1. I know that we are not supposed to give dogs chicken bones but I assume that's cooked bones. How do raw bones differ?
2. Someone mentioned marrow bones and cutting them up to feed the dog. Can you be a little more specific as to where these come from. Aren't these bones too hard for the dog to chew?
3. Whether we are talking about raw or cooked, how do you all process the meat? Chicken for instance, do you just shred it by hand or run it through a grinder? As for raw chicken, I would assume you grind bones and all? What about the cooked?
TIA
Never feed cooked bones of any kind.
Sometimes smaller raw bones can be a problem, but usually only if your dog is a gulper. Or if the bones are so hard, they cause damage to the teeth. I personally prefer turkey necks.
There are HUGE differences between feeding raw or cooked balanced meals. Which way are you leaning? That would help with providing you with more info.
Never feed cooked bones of any kind.
Sometimes smaller raw bones can be a problem, but usually only if your dog is a gulper. Or if the bones are so hard, they cause damage to the teeth. I personally prefer turkey necks.
There are HUGE differences between feeding raw or cooked balanced meals. Which way are you leaning? That would help with providing you with more info.
I'm leaning towards cooked and I'm going to start with chicken leg quarters.
How do I deal with the bones?
I do have a good quality meat grinder.
By balanced, do you mean adding other ingredients?
While I am preparing the cooked, I plan on trying some raw. Just a little bit to see how the dog likes it. I've never done raw, not with my pets but I am keeping an open mind. It could be she really likes it.
I do have a couple of other questions and that is about bones, lol.
1. I know that we are not supposed to give dogs chicken bones but I assume that's cooked bones. How do raw bones differ?
2. Someone mentioned marrow bones and cutting them up to feed the dog. Can you be a little more specific as to where these come from. Aren't these bones too hard for the dog to chew?
3. Whether we are talking about raw or cooked, how do you all process the meat? Chicken for instance, do you just shred it by hand or run it through a grinder? As for raw chicken, I would assume you grind bones and all? What about the cooked?
TIA
#1: Cooking makes the bones brittle. All bones, chicken or otherwise. When they are brittle, they can splinter, and the splinters can be a big problem in the digestive tract. They can puncture the gut, and cause big problems. However, dogs do digest the bones, so bits that they eat don't just lie in the GI system like somebody's lost penny. The day after giving a big bone to chew on, my dogs are usually a bit constipated - the poop gets hard from all the calcium. Often the poop will quickly turn white when left to sit.
Raw bones still have some flex left in them. A dog can and will chew them up somewhat, but what they chew up can be digested and pass safely through the GI tract.
#2: Where do marrow bones come from? You mean from the butcher or a grocery? Either one - ask the meat dept. Or do you mean which bones are they? They are leg bones. Almost all bones have marrow, but you only find enough to be usable for eating in the leg bones. The fact that they are leg bones actually creates a conflict in the information you will get. When you start reading up on raw feeding, you will find people saying "Never give a dog a weight-bearing bone". Well, the weight-bearing bones are leg bones. The WHY of saying "never any weight-bearing bones" is because (supposedly) they can splinter due to their thickness.
I don't think "never any weight-bearing bones" is good advice. It's simple advice, and easier to understand if you don't know about this stuff. BETTER advice is to do like NoMoreSnowForMe does - know what your dog can handle. You learn that by watching your dog carefully when first feeding bones. NoMoreSnowForMe has found what bones her dog will chew without splintering them up. If she had a 100-lb Rottweiler, she would have to find different bones! You CAN feed cooked bones, IF your dog won't splinter them up and eat the shards. Your dog can chew bones down to practically nothing, and generally this is ok. I like to only feed bones to my dogs when I am around and can keep an eye on things.
On the other hand, people have been feeding dogs COOKED marrow and knuckle bones since I was a kid, and I assume before that. I know this because my mother was a breeder, and we cooked marrow and knuckle bones for our dogs. But we also took those bones away after a 30 minutes to an hour. And, if it was a big dog, like that Rottie example, who would just splinter the bones right away - we didn't give them those bones. When cooked, the bones should be big enough so that the dog won't splinter them, but will chew on them. With a large dog, they may only get knuckle bones. Knuckle bones are actually knee and hip joint bone ends. They are big and tough.
And you should observe something of the same idea when feeding raw weight-bearing bones. If the dog splinters the bones, take them away, and don't feed a bone like that again. Other bones - ribs, necks, spine, let your dog crunch away. If they can crunch it, it'll be fine.
#3: When feeding raw meaty bones, you give the dog the whole thing. You don't grind it up or anything. (I scald mine before giving them to the dog). Grinding things up is for convenience - it makes it easier for you to portion, and it makes it easier for the producer to sell you stuff. Doing it yourself is harder than it sounds - a good grinder is not cheap - and a cheap grinder won't do the job.
When I give my dogs a chicken back or neck, I just give it to them. They crunch it right up and swallow it. bones and all. Dogs can swallow big chunks of stuff that would choke us - just built differently. Grinding those backs up would defeat one purpose for doing this - clean teeth. That chewing action against the firmness of the bone is what cleans the teeth. Like other responders, I have particular blankets - dog blankets, that I put down when I feed RMB. They keep the mess on the blanket, and I can wash the blanket.
When I cook the chicken, I cook it until it is beginning to fall apart. Then I just pull it off the bone by hand, and stir it back into the rice or oat mixture.
#1: Cooking makes the bones brittle. All bones, chicken or otherwise. When they are brittle, they can splinter, and the splinters can be a big problem in the digestive tract. They can puncture the gut, and cause big problems. However, dogs do digest the bones, so bits that they eat don't just lie in the GI system like somebody's lost penny. The day after giving a big bone to chew on, my dogs are usually a bit constipated - the poop gets hard from all the calcium. Often the poop will quickly turn white when left to sit.
Raw bones still have some flex left in them. A dog can and will chew them up somewhat, but what they chew up can be digested and pass safely through the GI tract.
#2: Where do marrow bones come from? You mean from the butcher or a grocery? Either one - ask the meat dept. Or do you mean which bones are they? They are leg bones. Almost all bones have marrow, but you only find enough to be usable for eating in the leg bones. The fact that they are leg bones actually creates a conflict in the information you will get. When you start reading up on raw feeding, you will find people saying "Never give a dog a weight-bearing bone". Well, the weight-bearing bones are leg bones. The WHY of saying "never any weight-bearing bones" is because (supposedly) they can splinter due to their thickness.
I don't think "never any weight-bearing bones" is good advice. It's simple advice, and easier to understand if you don't know about this stuff. BETTER advice is to do like NoMoreSnowForMe does - know what your dog can handle. You learn that by watching your dog carefully when first feeding bones. NoMoreSnowForMe has found what bones her dog will chew without splintering them up. If she had a 100-lb Rottweiler, she would have to find different bones! You CAN feed cooked bones, IF your dog won't splinter them up and eat the shards. Your dog can chew bones down to practically nothing, and generally this is ok. I like to only feed bones to my dogs when I am around and can keep an eye on things.
On the other hand, people have been feeding dogs COOKED marrow and knuckle bones since I was a kid, and I assume before that. I know this because my mother was a breeder, and we cooked marrow and knuckle bones for our dogs. But we also took those bones away after a 30 minutes to an hour. And, if it was a big dog, like that Rottie example, who would just splinter the bones right away - we didn't give them those bones. When cooked, the bones should be big enough so that the dog won't splinter them, but will chew on them. With a large dog, they may only get knuckle bones. Knuckle bones are actually knee and hip joint bone ends. They are big and tough.
And you should observe something of the same idea when feeding raw weight-bearing bones. If the dog splinters the bones, take them away, and don't feed a bone like that again. Other bones - ribs, necks, spine, let your dog crunch away. If they can crunch it, it'll be fine.
#3: When feeding raw meaty bones, you give the dog the whole thing. You don't grind it up or anything. (I scald mine before giving them to the dog). Grinding things up is for convenience - it makes it easier for you to portion, and it makes it easier for the producer to sell you stuff. Doing it yourself is harder than it sounds - a good grinder is not cheap - and a cheap grinder won't do the job.
When I give my dogs a chicken back or neck, I just give it to them. They crunch it right up and swallow it. bones and all. Dogs can swallow big chunks of stuff that would choke us - just built differently. Grinding those backs up would defeat one purpose for doing this - clean teeth. That chewing action against the firmness of the bone is what cleans the teeth. Like other responders, I have particular blankets - dog blankets, that I put down when I feed RMB. They keep the mess on the blanket, and I can wash the blanket.
When I cook the chicken, I cook it until it is beginning to fall apart. Then I just pull it off the bone by hand, and stir it back into the rice or oat mixture.
Great post!
OP, here's a picture of the kind of bones I feed my dog. If you need to ask your butcher, ask for beef marrow bones, or sometimes they just call them soup bones. This is an image I found that shows the size I get from my butcher:
At my local Safeway in the San Jose area, they cost me around $2/pound. They're frozen and I give one to my dog frozen. She'll lick it until it starts to thaw out and then will start chewing on it.
Sometimes you'll find these bones sliced down the middle, so they cut through the marrow, and you end up with two halves. My dog will devour those, including the bone and then she does have a hard time with constipation and her poops are rock hard pebbles because it's ground bone. I didn't like that. Made me worry she might end up with some splinters inside her intestines, so then I started asking the butcher to just cut me some up that are whole. She will scrape it with her teeth, but she can't devour the whole thing when it's not split in half. I end up with dried round bones around the apartment that she'll chew on, but she can't just eat the whole thing, even though she is a really strong chewer.
Here's a pic I found that shows them split down the middle - the kind I DON'T like for my dog:
As to how to process cooked chicken leg quarters - I bake them, and then cool them and then separate the meat from the bones. I throw away the cooked chicken bones. If I was still eating meat, I'd save the bones to make soup out of later. I don't save all of the skin, either, as it's just so greasy and fatty. I give her some of the fatty skins chopped up and mixed in with the meat, but not all of them. If I feed her too much of the fat, her poop can get runny or just looks like fat globs. I figure that's too much fat. So, I try to keep an eye on that.
Then, I just freeze up a handful of chicken meat per freezer baggie, and throw them in the freezer. I take out a freezer baggie of meat at night to feed her the next day. Right now I have some cut up chunks of raw pork I bought in bulk at Costco, some cooked chicken I got cheap, and some raw beef I cut up and got really cheap.
Today, for instance, I fed my dog some kibble for breakfast. For lunch she got some of my bean and rice and veggie mix from tacos I made myself, with some raw beef, and she got some of my cut up tomato. For dinner she got a small baked potato and some raw pork chunks and some green beans. I also gave her a hard boiled egg after we went for a walk, since she convinced me she was hungry :-) She also had a marrow bone I gave her to chew on while I had to run some errands without her. Before bed, we'll probably eat a few blueberries as our before bed snack.
Sounds like she should be fat, but she's not. She's just right. She can eat a lot of the above foods, and stay lean. A friend even told me she thought she was maybe on the skinny side. But, according to my vet, she should be just right. She said I should be able to feel her ribs. You can't see her ribs, you have to feel for them, but there isn't a thick layer of fat over her ribs, either. So, she's lean, not too skinny and not too fat. And she still has lots of energy - she's around 10 years old. So, this diet seems to be keeping her quite healthy. And she enjoys it.
Last edited by NoMoreSnowForMe; 06-20-2018 at 09:04 PM..
This is a great thread, and I think I found a dog meat vendor here so I am very interested.
I read not to do weight bearing bones because they are so hard they can crack the dogs teeth. But I think if they are sliced down the dogs wouldn't be trying to crack the bones to get to the marrow.
I always read so much conflicting info. So what are the things you can feed raw (after freezing to minimize pathogens)?
Neck bones
back bones
what about a whole rabbit?
how about chicken feet?
I have big dogs, but neither gulp their food.
Right now they are working on a bowl of kibble with cooked liver, oat meal, assorted veggies and left over sushi.
The vendor I found carries a huge assortment of things like tripe, hearts and the rest of the parts so I'm kinda excited.
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OP
I will try to convince you to go raw one more time. It REALLY is easier and healthier then cooked. If you are still not interested, I will go away.
This is about the easiest (and balanced) I can find for beginners.
Buy the meat you want. Run the meat only through your grinder.
Add: https://www.drharveys.com/products/d...og-food-premix plus oil.
The above has all the supplements your dog needs on a daily basis. No grains. No carp. BALANCED.
Make in batches and freeze meal size portions.
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and let me know that our budget can handle it. I like the fact that the meals are designed by veterinary nutritionists, and there is no garbage in them.
