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how does this meal plan look?

This is the place to share your best homemade dog food and treat recipes with each other! Remember to use caution if your pet has allergies and to make any diet changes gradually so that your dog's stomach can adjust to the new foods you are introducing.

  
Lily

Woof!		 
 
Barked: Wed May 9, '12 3:36pm PST 
Would this be a complete diet?

Ground meat, mashed veggies, rice or oatmeal.
Two to three times a week give a raw meaty bone.
Should liver, hearts & giblets be added? If so how much and how often? Thanks!
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Maxwell

I'm triple- superior MAD- now!		 
 
Barked: Thu May 10, '12 7:18am PST 
Sounds like a fine start!

It is all about ratios. Dogs need a lot more meat and less plant foods than we do to provide a lot more calcium, zinc, vitamin Bs and other minerals than we do per pound.

Are you planning for the meaty bones to provide all the calcium for the dogs so you don't need to put calcium into the cooked part of the food?

I would use liver, especially just a little beef or lamb liver. Chicken and pork is good for vitamin A and minerals but beef and lamb liver are the best source of copper. Just need about an ounce per pound of meat fed is all.

So for Max I could do a normal meal sized 10 ounce chicken bit 3x a week for calcium, tooth cleaning and protein with a mix of 50-75% ground beef with 25-50% mixed stuff that is at least half veggies and half oatmeal, rice or potato. I would add in 1 ounce of liver per pound of total meat fed and also offer up an additional 1-2 ounces of fatty fish like salmon, sardine or mackerel per pound of meat as an omega 3 source, canned is fine. See how I keep bumping up the meat content???

Any reason you don't want to go all out raw? Easier to deal with for sure and cheaper. Grains are cheap enough but veggies can cost as much or more than meat.

What is pushing you to feed fresh food? If it is for health reasons avoiding grains very often helps but I was very surprised at Sassy's improvement on a rice heavy diet, her anal sacs stopped being a constant but minor annoyance for both of us. It had nothing to do with stool firmness either.

This feeding plan makes sense to me. Read to the bottom and the links to the other pages on B-Naturals are broken, find each post on the main listing page.
http://www.b-naturals.com/newsletter/low-glycemic/
and this site has all the readings you can want.
http://www.dogaware.com/diet/homemade.html
From there you might check out the recipes in the second post on this page.
http://www.petfinder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1360043
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Lily

Woof!		 
 
Barked: Thu May 10, '12 12:00pm PST 
Mostly just researching and looking into the home cooking right now and trying to figure out if it is do-able. I wasn't sure on ratios and if RMBS would be enough calcuim or not or if it still should be added. I can get frozen veggies at a decent price. (How are frozen veggies cheaper than fresh!?) Meat in my area isn't that cheap so the meat would probably be the most expensive part, and the only organs I've ever seen in the grocery stores are chicken liver and occassionally beef liver. I haven't come across any ethnic markets in my area for more 'assortments' as of yet either. Right now we just give RMBs once or twice a week in place of a kibble meal, and sometimes we give them the giblets that sometimes come with "roasting chickens", but I'd like to give them more fresh foods if we can swing it. Thanks for the tips!

Edited by author Thu May 10, '12 12:22pm PST

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