Make nutritious dog food at home with whole-food ingredients you recognize! Your furbaby will love her homemade diet, and you'll love the ease of preparing the food and creating your own recipe with my approachable guide.
She’s a purebred, born from a line of AKC champion pugs, but with that came the typical hereditary joint diseases of overly bred “perfect” pugs.
Don’t get me wrong; Bug is perfect in every which way and I wouldn’t trade her in for anything. But raising her these last few years, especially, has taught me a lot about dog health and nutrition as both my girls settle into their senior years.
Best Homemade Dog Food Recipes: 7 Vet Approved & Nutritionally Complete
Just before she turned 8, Bug started showing signs of degenerative joint disease. Her hips would give out a little every time she walked.
She grew up in one-story homes with hard floors, and after the move to our 1920s original bungalow, the split-level rooms and terraced yard seemed to exacerbate her condition.
Disclosure: All products on this page are independently selected. If you buy from one of my links, I may earn a commission.
Justfoodfordogs Pantryfresh Lamb & Brown Rice Recipe Fresh Dog Food, 12.5 Oz Pouch, Case Of 12
At home, she moves around by dragging her body with her front legs. (She has the strongest front legs of any dog I know!)
When she’s out and about, she rolls around in a dog wheelchair and we can barely keep up with her. I almost expect her wheelchair to have flame decals!
If you just saw her sitting, you wouldn’t know that she had a handicap. She’s full of smiles and high spirits, and doesn’t seem to realize that she can’t walk on all fours like her sister can. She’s still a speedy little thing, especially when it’s meal time or beach day!
Lucky And Rippy's Favorite Dog Food Recipe
Bug wasn’t always like this though. In the month that her hip dysplasia finally advanced, she was weak, tired, frustrated, and we thought for a moment that we were going to lose her.
Since she no longer had control of her hips to squat and potty, she became incontinent for a few weeks. With her age, and the fact that she showed no pain in her joints (just lameness), we opted to skip any kind of corrective surgery and approached her condition more holistically.
Ever since I started raising my own dogs, I’d always wanted to make their food at home but thought it would be too expensive or too time consuming, or that they wouldn’t get the nutrition they needed.
Vet Approved Homemade Dog Food Recipes
During the month of Bug’s doggy depression, I vowed to make her precious life (or what I felt might have been the final stages) as comfortable as possible.
Both of my pugs had a range of health issues growing up, which I unfortunately found out were common for the breed.
My older one had persistent hot spots and itchiness that no commercial dog food could cure (and I’ve tried them all, from grain-free kibbles to lamb, veal, fish, and many more things she would simply spit out).
Best Homemade Dog Food For Sensitive Stomach Recipes
Bug was overweight for a while when she was younger, even though she ate the recommended amount of food for her target weight. Eventually, I settled on Wellness kibbles and they did well with that brand.
But, I wanted to explore other options. I wanted to give them real food — fresh, nutritious ingredients that I recognized and could even eat myself.
I’ve mentioned in my post on homemade whole grain chicken feed that the entire household (humans, dogs, and chickens) all share the same whole grains and seeds that we buy in bulk, as well as the bounty that comes from our edible garden.
Turkey And Veggie Dog Food Recipe Made With Whole Food Ingredients
Everything our animals eat, we can eat. (Well, I’ll admit that fig beetles and other bugs are not our thing, but our chickens love it!)
When it comes to homemade feed for our laying hens, we stick to a tried-and-true formula that works for every layer: 16 to 17 percent protein (determined by my chicken feed calculator), vitamins, minerals, and amino acids from a wide variety of grains and seeds, and free range of a pasture for weeds, greens, and insects.
These numbers vary depending on the age of your chickens, but for optimal health and egg production, it’s easy to devise a diet that fits within those parameters.
Lamb And Rice Dog Food Recipe
Like humans, dogs’ dietary needs can vary wildly based on age, breed, health history, and activity level. What works for one dog may not work for another.
When I first started thinking about this post, I almost hesitated to share my recipe for homemade dog food since it’s so tailored to the needs of my pugs.
But, I wanted to show other dog owners that homemade, wholesome, healthy food is possible, and doesn’t take much more time than preparing your own meal at home.
Dog Food Recipe
Depending on how many dogs you have and how much they eat, you may only need to prepare their food once or twice a week.
My DIY dog food recipe is more of a general guideline, rather than an exact meal plan that I follow each week. My dogs’ diet changes the same way ours does, depending on what we do and what we buy or grow.
Protein is always meat and usually chicken, though we’ve also used turkey, pork, and beef. We feed any and all parts of the animals, but most commonly, we saute chicken breasts or chicken thighs in coconut oil and ground turmeric.
Diy} Homemade Cooked Dog Food
Coconut oil has a host of health benefits for dogs, such as improving the skin and coat, increasing energy, aiding digestion, reducing allergic reactions, promoting wound healing, preventing yeast and fungal infections, and supporting arthritis or ligament problems.
We add it to the coconut oil since it is fat-soluble, and use it to support our pugs’ joint health. (Turmeric-spiced dark meat chicken happens to be quite delectable to a dog!)
Speaking of dark meat, we feed thighs and breasts interchangeably. While we’ll remove the skin from poultry and trim off excessive fat from red meat, we don’t worry about buying the leanest meat possible for our dogs.
The Best Diy Dog Food With Turkey And Veggies
A little fat is necessary for a well-rounded diet. (If your dog is prone to being overweight, you might want to stick with only lean meats.)
Raw vegetables come from whatever is currently growing in our garden. Sometimes we’ll even throw a few pieces of fruit in there, like in the fall when cranberries are in season. (Bug has a history of urinary tract infections, so we typically give her a cranberry supplement as a preventive measure.)
We vary the vegetables each week so the pugs don’t eat too much of any one thing. In one meal they might get broccoli, celery, fava bean leaves, radishes, and nasturtiums. Sometimes apples, bananas, or feijoas that we pick off our trees… and even herbs, like salad burnet, basil, or parsley.
Top 20 Healthy Homemade Dog Food Recipes Your Dog Will Love
This component provides fiber to support digestive health, as well as antioxidants and phytonutrients. In general, the darker the vegetable, the better it is nutritionally.
We feed our dogs all the same vegetables we feed ourselves, and this includes black kale, purple carrots, and green romanesco broccoli. They are garden foodies just like we are!
(But please don’t think you have to get this fancy for your homemade dog food recipe — we’re just able to give our pets all the excess that grows in our garden.)
Minute Vet Approved Homemade Dog Food Topper
While this might sound like a lot, keep in mind that we only need small amounts of each vegetable — a few broccoli florets or stems, a rib of celery, a small handful of carrot tops.
They tend to be the “leftovers” in our produce bin, so we never have to buy, say, a whole head of cauliflower just for the dogs.
We usually focus on broccoli and broccoli leaves as the primary vegetables because they are exceptionally nutrient dense (particularly the leaves of the plant, which we grow in abundance at home).
Nutro Natural Choice Chicken & Brown Rice Recipe Senior Dry Dog Food, 30 Lbs.
To a lesser extent other cruciferous vegetables, such as cabbage and brussels sprouts, also contain sulforaphane, but it’s most prevalent in broccoli. In our household, with two aging dogs, joint health is a priority.
Feed our dogs is onion (and related alliums, like leeks and garlic), which contains a toxic compound called thiosulphate. Even if ingested in small amounts, thiosulphate can damage a dog’s red blood cells and cause hemolytic anemia.
Complex carbohydrates typically come from brown rice, wild rice (or any number of Asian rices the hubby and I make at home, like red or black rice), oats, lentils, split peas, or starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. Wild rice, split peas, and lentils, in particular, have the advantage of also being high in protein.
Beef & Quinoa Dog Food Recipe
These complex carbs provide energy and aid in gastrointestinal function, so don’t think of them simply as filler. We switch up this component every week to give some variety, and sometimes combine a grain with a starchy vegetable (say, brown rice with sweet potatoes).
Eggshells (from their chicken sisters!) are an important source of calcium and added during the preparation of their food. (Unless you regularly give your dog raw meaty bones to chew on, you should always supplement with calcium.)
We dole out the rest of their requirements between two meals a day. Wild Alaskan salmon oil (for omega-3 fatty
0 Comments
Posting Komentar