Determining The Right Amount To Feed Your Dog
Knowing how much of a home-cooked meal to feed your dog can be difficult for those just starting on the pet food journey. The rule of thumb is about 2 to 3 percent of body weight for adult dogs and cats. That translates to about 16 ounces of food for a 50-pound dog, or 4 ounces of food for a 10-pound cat. These are just starting points you will need to adjust up or down based on whether your pet is gaining or losing weight.
Breaking Down Barriers To Home Cooking For Dogs
For years, veterinarians and certainly dog-food manufacturers have warned us about the dangers of homemade meals. Following are three of those warnings, and the reasons we dont need to let them stop us from doing better by our dogs.
Home-cooked meals arent nutritionally balanced and complete. Were told that homemade meals cant provide our dogs with all they need for good health and expose them to a host of potential nutritional deficiencies. While its true that dogs require a particular balance of protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals, a proper assessment of your dogs health and specific nutritional requirements will give you the information you need. Work with a qualified veterinary or animal nutritionist to calculate the essential supplements needed or tap into the expertise reachable online. Fortunately, several all-in-one supplement solutions are now available, including Balance It® and Chefs Canine Complete, and in Europe, Trovet Balance.
It takes too much time to prepare their food. While there are many meal-specific recipes, you can achieve cost and time savings by cooking your dogs food in quantity. A large batch can provide your dog with meals for a week or two, or even a month if you have a small dog. No matter the size of your dog, by cooking in batches and freezing what cant be eaten in three or four days, you can save both time and money.
Recommended Serving Size For Homemade Dog Food:
The amount of homemade dog food that your dog will require is dependent upon how much your dog weighs and how active he or she is. This amount varies from dog-to-dog. I suggest talking to your vet and getting their advice on a good starting point.
You can also monitor your dog to make sure they are maintaining their weight and staying happy and active.
This recipe makes about 6 cups of food, which is 3 days worth of food for Charlie who is about 45 pounds. You can easily adjust this amount based on the weight of your dog. Also, feel free to scale this recipe up and double or even triple it, if you wanted to cook less often.
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The Ultimate Guide To Homemade Dog Food
Its no secret in the health & wellness world that a quick way of transforming your diet is to eat fresh, homemade meals versus junk food or eating out. The reason this has such an impact on health is that low-quality nutrition and ingredients like preservatives and additives in commercial foods are harmful to your health. How many times have you had a bag of chips and felt pretty bloated and bad afterward? The same is true for your pet!
Think of it as eating the same highly processed food for every meal, day after day, for years, Joe Bartges, DVM, Ph.D., board-certified veterinary nutritionist and diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Nutrition says.
Wow, that makes a lot of sense! According to Dr. Bartges there are many reasons why you might want to prepare vet-approved homemade food for your dog.
The simplest way to ensure your dog is eating well is to be confident that they are eating more natural, whole ingredients, and less processed foods. Even if commercial dog food brands advertise fresh meat proteins and high quality ingredients, their production methods mean the end product will not be as healthy as advertised. More dog owners are catching onto this fact, and feeding dogs human-quality food has risen in popularity along with our increased awareness for the benefits of eating clean ourselves.
Healthy, human-quality food has risen in popularity among pet parents who are becoming more aware of the importance of clean, natural food for their pets
Is Homemade Food Healthy For Puppies
Like humans, dogs have specific caloric requirements and need certain vitamins and minerals to stay healthy. Puppies have even more specific needs in order to grow at an appropriate rate and thrive. The food you feed your puppy must be complete and balanced. It must also be designed to support growth.
One of the biggest mistakes pet owners make when they decide to feed home-prepared diets is not following the right recipes . Preparing the right puppy diet is about more than just feeding enough calories. It must also have the proper balance of protein, fat, and calories for a growing puppy. The diet must also contain the right amounts of vitamins and minerals.
When you begin to develop a home-prepared diet, make sure your puppy gets everything it needs in its diet to keep it as healthy as possible and help it grow. The best way to do this is to consult with your veterinarian. You might even want to ask for a referral to a veterinary nutritionist.
Working with a vet, you can design a diet that meets all of your puppy’s nutritional needs. Your vet may have recipes for you to use or may guide you to a website like BalanceIT.com or PetDiets.com. These websites have recipes developed by veterinary nutritionists. They can help you choose a diet that is complete and balanced but also meets other needs. In many cases, you can choose your preferred ingredients or find formulas designed for puppies with specific needs or health issues .
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Complete And Balanced Dog Food Diets
Its important homemade dog food is complete and balanced, meaning it meets all of the dogs nutritional needs. It is not important, however, that every meal be complete and balanced, unless you feed the same meal every day with little or no variation.
Home-prepared dog diets that include a wide variety of foods fed at different meals rely on balance over time, not at every meal. Similar to the way humans eat, as long as your dog gets everything he needs spread out over each week or two, his diet will be complete and balanced.
A human nutritionist would never expect someone to follow a single recipe with no variation, as veterinary nutritionists routinely do. Instead, a human would be given guidelines in terms of food groups and portion sizes. As long as your dog doesnt have a health problem that requires a very specific diet, homemade dog food should be the same way.
Keep in mind that puppies are more susceptible to problems caused by nutritional deficiencies or excesses than adult dogs are. Large-breed puppies are particularly at risk from too much calcium prior to puberty. See Puppy Food: Nutritional Guidelines to Maximize Health, for more on puppy nutrition.
Cooked Vs Raw Diets For Puppies
There’s no doubt that home-cooked diets for puppies can be healthy when done correctly, but what about raw food? There is much controversy over raw food for dogs. The AVMA and other agencies warn of the risks of dangerous pathogens in raw pet food. Some other experts see the potential benefits of raw food for healthy adult dogs. However, puppies are a different story. Raw food may contain dangerous pathogens that can lead to illness in people and some dogs. Like children, young animals may not have the immune systems to fight off pathogens found in raw food.
If you feel you can safely handle raw food and you are willing to assume the risks, talk to your veterinarian about transitioning to raw food when your puppy gets older. In the beginning, you might choose to offer a combination of cooked and raw foods to see how it works out.
Raw diets should never be fed to dogs coming into contact with immunocompromised humans. In addition, raw diets are not recommended for dogs with immune system issues.
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Blood Tests Dont Lieand Hoochs Numbers Shifted Drastically In Just The First 6 Weeks We Made These Diet And Lifestyle Changes
He noticeably had more energy, was suffering less from inflammation, was shedding less with a more luxurious coat, and for the first time EVER he had zero bloating! NO GAS for the first time in his entire life! The best news though, was that those stage 4 kidney disease blood levels he had at his yearly checkup had climbed back up to to midrange stage 1 kidney disease blood levels! The extra time and energy invested in making his food and the other small changes we made to his lifestyle have given us more quality time with our beloved Hooch which is more than we could have ever hoped for!
If youve made our Easy Homemade Dog Food for your pup I would be so grateful if you would rate the recipe and let me know what you think in the comments below! I just love hearing from you and your reviews and comments really help others that visit This Mess is Ours. Want to be a part of our online community outside of the blog? Its easy!! All you have to do is follow @THISMESSISOURS on , , , , or to see cooking demos, and peeks into our day to day life.
- Prep Time:30
790 grams cooked organic brown rice
700 grams ground lean beef, cooked through, fat drained
4 hard boiled eggs, peeled and diced small
207 grams carrots, shredded or thinly sliced
14 grams minced curly parsley
22 grams of olive or safflower oil
Important Ingredients In Your Dogs Diet
In general, homemade recipes should contain a high-value protein source , a fat source , a fiber-containing carbohydrate , and a phytochemical source . Substitutions can be made: for example, if you know your dog likes whole-grain pasta, substitute pasta for barley as a carbohydrate source. Some dogs, , hate veggies but will eat fruit, so use fruit instead.
Yogurt, cottage cheese, beans and tofu can occasionally be used as protein sources, but keep in mind that not all dogs can tolerate dairy products beans or soy may turn them into a tooting machine or cause them to experience other gastrointestinal âissues.â Test your dog’s tolerance with small quantities before serving them a whole meal.
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Making Homemade Dog Food Is A Big Time Commitment
Finding the time to prepare a healthy meal for yourself and your family is often difficult, let alone preparing your dogs meals from scratch.
Prepping meals in advance for the week can helpfor example, preparing one large batch on a Sunday and dividing it into meal portions for each day would minimize the daily time commitment.
Also, recipes can be made to be freezer-friendly, so large batches can be prepared in advance and stored for future use.
Pumpkin Ginger Dog Biscuits
This recipe has a prep time of 20 minutes plus around 2 hours of baking. The recipe makes 18 dog biscuits.
Ingredients
- ½ teaspoon of ginger powder
- 3 cups of wheat flour
- 1 large egg
- A tablespoon of coconut oil
- ¼- ½ cup of water
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F
- Combine the flour and ginger in a bowl or mixer
- Add the pumpkin, coconut oil, and egg in the bowl and mix until the mixture gets crumbly
- Slowly add water, one tablespoon at a time, with the mixer set to low, until the dough comes together and is no longer sticky.
- On a flat board or surface, roll out the dough to ¼ inch thickness and then cut using a cookie cutter. If you use a bone shape, remember to press holes in the center of each biscuit with a fork. If you want to use a pumpkin shape, press lines into the biscuits with the edge of the spoon.
- Place the biscuits on a baking sheet and bake in the oven until the bottoms turn brown and the tops start showing cracks. Just to be sure they are ready, press gently to see if they have become firm. The bake time can be anything from 2-2.5 hours.
- Once ready, cool the cookies on a wire rack and then store them in an airtight container.
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Dogs Eat Canned Salmon Fresh Salmon Or Salmon Dog Food
How to cook frozen salmon for dogs. It’s simple to prepare and can be frozen for use when you don’t have time to cook for fido. Besides salmon, sardines and tuna are great for dogs. Dogs can eat salmon when prepped correctly.
For more advice, theres plenty more out there on the health benefits of salmon in dogs. So next time youre looking for something special to give your pup, consider salmon. Our salmon ‘dogs’ cook from frozen in just eight minutes.
Cover and cook until salmon is opaque throughout, about 5 minutes .9 dec 2017. Bake frozen salmon burgers for 18 to 20 minutes, flipping halfway through. Salmon and broccoli homemade dog food recipe.
First, most dogs think that fish is delicious! These are great for brain and heart health and so much more! Whatever you choose to feed them, you may notice changes in your pet like better mobility, healthy skin, and maybe even more energy.
However, if salmon isn’t available in your area, you can substitute other healthy fish. Not only can dogs eat fish, but fish is good for dogs. Primewaters atlantic salmon from norway, 5 ounces, frozen 5 ounce 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Health risks of feeding raw salmon to dogs. It took years to perfect our wild alaskan salmon ‘dogs’, and folks find the results deliciously rewarding! Cooking salmon for dogs is a pretty straightforward process.
Salmon Yakizuke Recipe (Marinated Grilled Fish Local
Pin on Food and Spirits
Should You Cook Your Dogs Food
Is cooking dog food at home really better for your pup? While there may be claims made to that effect, theres no hard scientific evidence to support it.
Owners are told by many sources that homemade food is superior to commercial products. However, there is no proof to support this claim, says Dr. Larsen.
Larsen cautions dog owners to be aware of fearmongering within the pet food industry. This is often driven by myths about ingredient quality. While there are no scientifically-supported benefits to homemade diets, whole ingredient-based diets are better in the long term. Commercial foods are made to be complete and balanced, adds Dr. Bartges, albeit not the most exciting of meals.
Think of it as eating the same highly processed food for every meal, day after day, for years, he affirms.
Put that way, feeding your dogs a variety of whole foods makes a lot of sense. In fact, there are a multitude of reasons why you might want to prepare homemade foods for your dog, according to Dr. Larsen and Dr. Bartges.
These include gaining control over your dogs diet, appeasing picky eaters, combatting food intolerance issues, concern over food recalls, or simply for the bond-building joy of preparing a home-cooked meal for your dog.
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Keep your dog healthy and fit with this easy peasy homemade recipe its cheaper than store-bought and chockfull of fresh veggies!
I never thought I would be one of those dog owners who made homemade human food for their pups. Not in a million years.
But when Butters recently fell sick with an upset stomach, our vet advised us to feed him a bland diet chicken and rice without any kind of seasoning. So thats what we did we poached a chicken, shredded it in a food processor, and mixed in some white rice and fed him this bland diet for 3 days.
Thats when I started to do some research on homemade dog food, and I have been so amazed as to how many different kinds of vegetables dogs can have. And with the help of Balance IT, you can create so many different recipes for your pup!
Now the best part about making homemade dog food just like making anything at home is that you know exactly what is going into the dog bowl, and not any of that questionable gelatinous gunk from the canned food.
But its important to note that dogs have different nutrient requirements than humans for their proportional body size, such as:
Now this recipe here has a balance of 50% protein, 25% veggies and 25% grains, but the ratios can easily be adjusted to suit your pups breed and/or needs.
Not Properly Transitioning A Dogs Diet
Just like with us humans, your pets digestive system needs a little bit of time to get used to a new diet. Follow this quick guide when transitioning your pet to home cooked fresh pet food meals :
- Day 1 & 2: 75% old food, 25% homemade
- Day 3 & 4: 50% old food, 50% homemade
- Day 5 & 6: 25% old food, 75% homemade
- Day 7: 100% fresh, human-grade homemade dog food meals
These measurements dont need to be exact. Just guesstimate to the best of your ability.
If youre making the decision to home cook food for your dog, make sure youre doing it correctly by avoiding a few key mistakes.
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