If man’s best friend is your best friend, you’ll want to keep him healthy to ensure his life is as long as possible. By making his dog food at home, you’ll know he’s getting the best nutrition possible. Like packaged people food, packaged dog food isn’t really the best option for your dog’s health. While commercial dog food will supply minimum requirements, it has undergone extensive processing and contains ingredients which have no place in food. Additionally, some pets cannot tolerate a commercial food due to allergies or other health maladies. Whatever your reason, if you’re curious about making healthy homemade dog food for your pet, read on.
I started making dog food because our newly acquired 11 year old dog wouldn’t eat anything but meat. She’d spent the previous two years squatting in our neighbor’s garage. The neighbor, being fond of her but not particularly educated about dog nutrition, had fed her all the meat left over from the local naval base. She was fat and she was picky.
During her first ten days with us, I offered her every available commercial food. She refused every one of them. After reading some of the ingredient labels, I was glad she wouldn’t eat them. One common but disturbing ingredient in commercial dog food is mineral oil. It’s a by-product of gasoline production and is used as a laxative. I concluded that if all the dogs who regularly ate those foods needed laxatives, there was something wrong with the food.
Given her finicky nature and the poor quality dog food available commercially, I decided to make her healthy dog food at home. I realized that I was going to have to wean her slowly off of her all-meat diet. I consulted our vet, who recommended that I aim for 1/3 meat, 1/3 veggies, and 1/3 starch. I started her on a much higher meat percentage, and at every meal mixed in more veggies and rice until I arrived at the vet recommended proportions. She fell for it, and has been happily gobbling her healthy homemade food for over a year now. It takes about 10 minutes once a week, plus an hour for cooking. If I want to make extra, I simply freeze the excess. It works well for us; she likes her food, I know she’s eating a very balanced diet, she doesn’t have any gastrointestinal difficulties and certainly never needs a laxative.
While my vet recommended a 1:1:1 ratio, some sources recommend 25% meat with an even split of the other 75% between starches and veggies. My dog’s food always contains brown rice and carrots. I don’t use any other form of starch because she’s overweight and brown rice gives her the carbohydrates she needs while keeping her feeling full for longer. By adding various herbs like parsley or oregano I not only make the homemade dog food taste interesting, I add micro-nutrients essential for her health.
My homemade healthy dog food recipe:
1 pound ground chicken, turkey, or lean beef. Once per month I use 1/2 pound of meat with 1/2 pound of chicken livers, gizzards, and hearts.
1 pound (dry weight) brown rice. Other starches like potatoes can be used, but avoid processed starches (like potato flakes or flour) as they digest too quickly and your dog will feel hungry very quickly.
approximately 5 cups water
1 pound shredded carrots, added at the end of cooking time (can be any vegetable and doesn’t have to be shredded if your dog will eat the larger pieces.)
plus sometimes garlic, parsley or oregano or other healthful foods.
Place the meat and rice in a pot, add water. Mix well. Heat to a simmer, cover and cook until rice is nearly tender. Add carrots and herbs, mix well, and cook until all the water is absorbed.
Remove from heat and freeze any portion you can’t use within 4 days. Refrigerate the rest.
Because this food is soft, it doesn’t provide the dental care that crunchy food does. I solve that problem by providing dental-cleaning formula bones regularly and occasionally brushing my dog’s teeth. On a final note, there are a few items which are either very bad or a little bad for dogs and which you should avoid feeding them. Chocolate, chicken bones, pork bones, onions (especially larger quantities), apple seeds, and stone fruit pits.
