It's a Dog's Life

The Backstory ...

Wow! It's been 15 months since I've blogged anything. Partly because I'm not getting the interaction I'd hoped for but mainly because life just keeps happening. Right before starting today's entry, I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes, "Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once." Thank you, GOD, for that! This past year brought a lot of changes - most significantly the shifting of most of our extra time and energy to figuring out how to co-exist with eight dogs as we venture into the world of dog rescue. Yes, I said eight dogs. Yes, they live inside with us (they've taken over the largest room in our house); and no, our house doesn't smell like eight dogs live inside. (That's probably where 80% of my "extra" time is going now!)

When I started this blog, my intention was to create a dialog with people from all over about GOD and theology and Christianity. I still hope that happens, but in the meantime I realize that we are involved in this dog rescue thing for a reason and it's our job to blossom where we're planted and spread the seeds, so ... This blog entry will be the first in a series on life with the dog pack. Once again, I'm sincerely hoping for some interaction. I'm not writing this blog just to spew my own thoughts out to the world -- seriously, I want input, feedback, suggestions and dialog!

If you have one or two dogs expenses usually aren't a big concern. You can afford to either buy a high-quality commercial food and treats or even make your own, and you can bring them to the vet for all of their health maintenance. But when you have eight dogs you start looking for opportunities to minimize expenses pretty quickly -- especially when your monthly food bill before treats is about $160. We're lucky to be surrounded by friends who are also animal lovers and who've all been excellent resources for us in one aspect of pet care or another. Not everyone has that support system so I'm sure that, like me, many people turn to the internet in the hope of finding resources.

I'm constantly researching one thing or another in regard to the dogs -- especially economical-but-still-healthy options for foods and treats. If you've ever Googled that topic, then I'm sure that you were just as overwhelmed as I was, and you were probably left with more questions than answers because most of the information online is un-researched opinion. That was when I came across an article on Dog Food Advisor that gave me way more information than I ever wanted to know about commercial dog food. But, what has been seen cannot be unseen, and that was when I decided that I cannot in good conscience feed commercial dog food to my dogs anymore. And so my quest begins ...

I've decided that my Christmas break this year will be dedicated to two initiatives -- (1) figuring out how to transition to a menu of healthy homemade dog food, and (2) working on building up a pet portrait side business/hobby to help generate revenue to support the dogs and our rescue efforts. Yesterday I began working on the dog food and dog treats. I started at about 9am and finally called it quits around midnight. Today, I've already put in another 2 hours. Hopefully as I figure all of this out the production time and process will get A LOT quicker and easier! And, if this blog truly becomes interactive, we can all share our successes, failures, tips and tricks and come up with a really good set of recipes and options.

Homemade Dog Food - Trial Run

In doing my research I found many articles with homemade dog food recipes, and they're all about the same and they all require a vitamin supplement. I also found a report on a recent study from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine that found most homemade dog foods nutritionally inadequate. But I suspect what we'll find with regard to animal nutrition is the same that we see with human nutrition - very few of us ever meet the minimum daily requirements of every nutrient we're supposed to ingest, so you just do your best, take vitamins and make alterations to your diet as needed, and in most cases we don't notice that we were a few percentage points short on this vitamin or that one on any given day.

The basic recipe floating around out there is protein source (30%) plus carbohydrates and healthy fats. Most recipes call for rice and vegetables in the carb category, but there seems to be a lot of discussion about white rice versus brown. Many people argue that white rice is nutritionally devoid and puts too much sugar in the dog's system and others argue that brown rice is too hard for dogs (who have short digestive tracts) to digest. I've also read that white rice is a good quick energy source for active dogs and that brown rice is more easily absorbed if it's cooked long enough. I've decided to "split the difference" for my first batch and I've prepared three cups of white rice, one cup of brown rice and three cups of whole, rolled oats. My theory is that where one ingredient falls short, hopefully one of the others will make up for it. I cooked all three in meat stock for flavor and to retain the nutrients that boil out of the meat as you cook it. I also cooked about two cups of chopped carrots and celery in the stock and added it to the carb mixture for the complex carb properties and for bulk.

As I said earlier, I've been blessed with some great resources which includes a friend at a meat processing facility who gave me about eight fresh beef kidneys and a few one-pound packs of bone meal to experiment with. I don't know what this would have cost if I purchased it, but I don't think the expense would've been much. My research indicates that both of these ingredients will make great additives, but neither should be used as the main source of protein. Food grade bone meal is a good source of vitamins that are easily absorbed, but it's high in phosphorus and low in absorbable calcium - so it needs be included in low quantities. In this first batch, I mixed about 1/3 of a pound into the rice/oat mixture. The kidneys are a very nutritious supplement, but organ meats are too rich to feed to dogs as their primary source of protein, so I'm going to try making it about 10% of the daily ration of the total protein.

So, for the main protein I decided to try to make a meat meal -- which according to Dog Food Advisor is more nutritious. I didn't find a lot of instructional information on making meat meal, so I decided to just jump in and sink or swim. According to that article, I knew that I had use a rendering process which is to boil the meat and then bake it, but I didn't know any details about times, temperatures or any other steps that might have been obvious to a professional but not necessarily a layman. I chose a chicken to start with because it seemed easiest to tackle as a novice. I boiled a whole chicken, neck, organs and all, for a little more than two hours until the bird was falling apart. Then I put chunks of the bird, bones and all, into the blender hoping that the blender would literally make minced meat of it all. Not so much. There were still significant pieces of bone and shards. So, I put it all back into the pot with the remainder of the broth it was boiled in and continued boiling it on the stove for another two hours to get further along in the rendering process and to hopefully soften the bones a little more.

At this time, most of the water had evaporated and the consistency was kind of like a concentrated potato soup (but much more fibrous in appearance). I decided to try to bake it at this point, so I put the entire mixture into a glass baking dish and set the oven to 350 -- I baked it for two hours. By now it was midnight and I could tell that this was going to take a while longer so I turned off the oven and left the chicken in the oven to cool. This morning I got up and started baking the chicken again after stirring it in the pan to mix it up and expose some of the moist center to the heat. I baked it for two more hours, stirring it up every 30 minutes and it was finally ready to be chopped again. This time the chopper made easy work of the chicken and it came out the consistency of moist saw dust.

The next step would be to figure out how much of each food item to feed the dogs. I used the dog food calculator on Dog Food Advisor to figure out how much total food the dogs needed based on their weight, activity level and daily caloric needs. Because of the varied array of ingredients in the carbohydrate mixture, I had to guesstimate the actual calories per cup. One cup of cooked white rice is approximately 170 calories, half a cup of oats is 150 calories and a cup of brown rice is about 200 calories. Cook them in meat stock and you increase the calories, plus add in the calories from the bone meal and other ingredients I added to the mixture like coconut oil, oregano oil and fish oil -- I'm estimating that one cup of that mixture is approximately 300 calories. I have no idea how many calories are in the rendered chicken, but a cup of cooked chicken is about 200 calories so I'm guessing that a quarter cup of rendered chicken might be the same.

My dogs are large and due in part to the poor quality of affordable commercial foods, and probably more specifically due to poor parenting on my part, they're accustomed to eating a certain amount of food each day - about 4 cups in volume. I've tried to introduce healthy alternatives to their diet in lieu of just straight kibble -- foods that would meet some nutritional deficiencies I was observing and that would help boost their immunity. So they were getting about 2 cups of kibble, 2 slices of whole wheat or whole oat bread and 1/2 cup of yogurt -- but what I've been afraid of in switching to a homemade, more nutrient-rich diet was that the volume of food would decrease and they would feel hungry because of the missing volume. According to the calculator and my caloric guestimations, I should be feeding about 2-3 cups of this food to the dogs each day. Luckily the carbohydrate mixture is fairly bulky, but when I measured everything out in the recommended portions (one cup of the carbs, 1/4 cup of the rendered chicken and 1/8 cup of the kidneys) the volume was still a little low -- I think if the chicken was just boiled and not rendered the volume would be dead on. So, I'm going to keep feeding them the bread and yogurt to fill the void. This also helps keep a variety of animal- and plant-derived proteins and complex carbs in their diets.

But this still leaves their diets lacking in calcium. According to everything I've read egg shells are the best source of calcium for the dogs. They're pretty easy to prepare and include in a dog food or dog treat recipe. More information on the calcium to phosphorus ratio and the amount of calcium per egg shell can be found here. Since dogs need about 1,000 mg of calcium a day, I thought it would be easiest to put the calcium in dog treats. There are a number of easy recipes for dog treats available so I won't go into them here. To prepare the egg shells, just clean them, bake them in the oven for a little while to dry them out (I put them on the cookie sheet with some of the dog treats and left them in the oven for the same amount of time and that worked just fine). Then pulverize them or grind them up in a spice mill to make a powder. Each teaspoon of ground egg shell has about 2,000 mg of calcium.

So there you have it -- the sum of my research and experience so far with homemade dog food. Yesterday the dogs began their transition from commercial food to the new homemade menu so I'll post updates as we progress. So far, they're loving the new palette! Whether or not this proves to be a more economical solution remains to be seen, but I think the health benefits (especially in light of all of the recent recalls) are obvious. My total expense so far has only been the $6 for the whole chicken -- everything else was either something we already had in the cupboards or was donated. Normally I spend about $20 a month on yogurt, and $10 a month on the bread (I buy bags of feed bread from the local day-old bread store and freeze them until I'm ready to use them - I only buy the freshly bagged bread, nothing that's already expired). I'm estimating that the carbohydrate mixture will last about five days in the quantity I made it and it looks like the reduced chicken may last just as long. Right now the economical aspect seems very promising.

My hope is that others who are interested in making their own dog food and treats will find this blog and leave comments, suggestions and questions and in doing so we'll create a network and a great resource that leads to happier, healthier lives for us and our pets!