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Does anyone cook for their dogs? I need to get some good meals into my foster dog. I was thinking of making her some chicken in unsalted bone broth with some sweet potatoes. What else should I add?
Obviously I would portion this out into several meals.
I had no plans to put grapes, or any other forbidden food, into my foster dog's dinner. Right now I have chicken, pureed pumpkin, and no-salt bone broth simmering in my slow cooker. Think I should add anything else?
Chicken, bone broth, sweet potato, OK. Add a small amount of cooked vegetable chopped small, green beans, carrots, zucchini, or similar. Add a vitamin C tablet and a fish oil pill to their dinner once a day, and I also give powdered bonemeal. The bone broth is good, but might not have enough calcium/ phosphorus or not in the right proportions.
Chicken in broth might be slightly low on fat content. Dogs need fat in the diet. You could add more animal fat or a little bit of vegetable oil to boost the fat content. My dogs right now are eating boneless skinless chicken breast cooked with the fat I cut off of a beef brisket (and also contains carrot, zucchini, and brown rice).
A couple of times a month the dogs get a big spoonful of live culture yogurt and nearly every day they each get a small bite of fresh fruit.
Myself, I would not feed rotisserie chicken to my dogs because it has a high salt content and dogs do not need salt in their diet because they do not sweat.
Dogs can be given a children's multivitamin pill if you worry about their vitamin intake. Be extremely careful about what the vitamin is sweetened with. I don't bother with the vitamin pill because I believe my dogs are getting a balanced diet and the vet is always pleased with their weight and condition.
I had no plans to put grapes, or any other forbidden food, into my foster dog's dinner. Right now I have chicken, pureed pumpkin, and no-salt bone broth simmering in my slow cooker. Think I should add anything else?
With chicken, pumpkin, and broth, I suggest a carb of some sort. Brown rice, oatmeal, or a yam. Plus my suggestions given above.
The AKC page previously linked is to what NOT to use. Their list isn't so hot, IMO. It should include: chocolate, grapes, onions and onion family (garlic), and xylitol (which may be listed on the product ingredients as birch sugar*). Salt is typically not necessary, but some from leftovers isn't a terrible thing, either. The AKC also has a nice page that gives useful advice on what TO use: https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nu...d-ingredients/
THIS page gives you a calculator app, so you can add in your planned food, and see what nutrients pop out. There is at least one more website that does this that I've used before and I went looking for it, but couldn't find it. The app looks like it should work ok. Make sure you UN-select BARF as the default option so that you will see all possible ingredients: https://www.dogfoodcalc.com/en-en/Default
I've been making my own dog "stews" for about 10 years now, maybe more. I try to include protein from 3 sources: muscle meat, organ meat, and fish. I boil it to cook it, take out the meat and use the resulting broth to cook a grain, either white rice or oatmeal. Ratio of raw weight I aim for is about 3:1 (3 lbs of meat to 1 lb of dry uncooked grain). After the grain is cooked, it will be over 50% of the final product by VOLUME. But remember, it has all that luscious, nutritious broth in it now! I'll add some veggies and/or fruits, depending on availability. Typically, for 15-20 lbs of meat to start, that is a couple of sweet potatoes, a couple of pounds of green beans, a cup or so of cruciferous veg (parsley, celery, cabbage), and maybe a bit less of a fruit (except no grapes or raisins). I'll add an equivalent of approximately a half-teaspoon per day of cod-liver oil. I might grind up some eggshells and use that, too (calcium). I will add in fat trimmed from our roasts or chicken dinners. (Except not when my wife cooks the roast, because she uses too much salt!)
I usually use the cheapest chicken cuts I can get as the primary meat base. Should be enough fat there to provide all the fat the dogs NEED. Dogs systems handle fat differently than ours do, btw. No worries about too much, unless your dog is overweight, but then what you REALLY need to worry about is just plain cutting the total calories back.
Avoid sugar or canned products with sugar in them.
I don't cook the rice to human standards. Because of the amount of water used, I cook the rice to soak up all the water. This gives me a rice the consistency of rice porridge (congee), i.e. creamy and soft. YMMV! If you try this, do not OVERcook the rice. Once you see the rice just under the surface of the water, turn off the heat. Let the rice soak. Then let cool enough to mix everything together and freeze in convenient size plastic containers. I'm feeding two dogs, so I use 2-quart containers.
You may want to supplement to provide additional minerals and all. Because both dogs have knee issues, I add joint supplements. You could cook and freeze ingredients separately. At some point I may try that and see if it saves labor. You could do raw ingredients - lots of websites out there to give you advice on that.
One of the reasons I looked for a food ingredient calculator app is so you could pick and choose what is convenient to you. You can add fruit - or not. You can add veggies - or not. Or milk, eggs, cheese, what have you!
In closing, a small anecdote about fruit. I found a huge blackberry patch this past summer. And nobody was touching it. It's on land that was re-landscaped not quite 10 years ago - and this was the set-aside for wetlands protection. It's grown back over now, and nobody goes there. I pulled gallons of blackberries out of there this past summer. My Amy and Andy figured out they liked blackberries - and they would pick them off the canes, low-down, where they could reach them. Thorns didn't seem to slow them down! It was a treat!
"In closing, a small anecdote about fruit. I found a huge blackberry patch this past summer. And nobody was touching it. It's on land that was re-landscaped not quite 10 years ago - and this was the set-aside for wetlands protection. It's grown back over now, and nobody goes there. I pulled gallons of blackberries out of there this past summer. My Amy and Andy figured out they liked blackberries - and they would pick them off the canes, low-down, where they could reach them. Thorns didn't seem to slow them down! It was a treat![/quote]"
When we lived in Oregon there was a huge blackberry patch in our neighborhood. My dogs also loved them, Sophie would push the tall grass on top of the branches and pluck them off without the thorns bothering her, Kona believed I was there to serve her and would bark at me until I plucked them and fed her. I would disappear up there for hours picking gallons of berries, they were so amazing.
I had no plans to put grapes, or any other forbidden food, into my foster dog's dinner. Right now I have chicken, pureed pumpkin, and no-salt bone broth simmering in my slow cooker. Think I should add anything else?
Of course not, but mom used to occasionally drop a grape and the terrier loved them.
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