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Originally Posted by Carmeow  Yeah, I'm totally going to pm Heather! Thalia and Rosie are 2 days apart in age! Everyone keeps raving thatiraw is less expensive than pre-made raw. I don't feed Primal but a 12 lb. bag of Canine Caviar is $40 and lasts a good while. I guess it does have to do a lot with the butcher you use. Where do you even find a butcher? Where do people get their meat? Lol. I'm guessing a big grocery store like Walmart won't work. I also am wondering if you have to have a variety of proteins when you do pmr or I can just use chicken, since it's easy to get? |
I've worked my way up to a variety of proteins at this point...chicken, cornish game hen, pork, beef, lamb. But I did chicken only for the first few weeks...slowly adding bone, liver & other organs. I'm also really picky about where my meat comes from, expecially chicken. So I end up paying premium prices for chicken that is not necessarily organic, but definiately humanely raised with no antibiotics or hormones. I actually get my chicken from a farm. Same with beef. You have to be really careful with liver too. Since the liver basically detoxifies the body, I'd rather be certain that the liver my pups are eating are coming from a healthy source. So I suppose you could go to Walmart or Costco to get your meat if you're not concerned with things like that. But I'm the type of person who needs to know where my meat is coming from & I want to be safe. I'd feel horrible if I made my pups sick in the process of trying to feed them something healthier than kibble.
So let's just say that your pups are eating only chicken, 5% of their body weight & your chicken is $4.99/lb. If you have 2 pups (at 5 lbs each to make the math easy), that's 4 ounces of chicken per day per pup...8 ounces for both per day. That's $2.50 per day for both pups. That's $75 a month for food. That's not a lot of money in the scheme of things, but it's more than kibble. That's also assuming that your chicken is $4.99/lb. I'm sure there are cheaper places to get chicken. I'm in NYC. Everything's expensive here.
The butcher part comes in with the organs. They don't sell kidney, heart, pancreas, lung, spleen & brains at your average Safeway. So you need to find a source for that part of the diet. I'm sure if you found a good butcher, they'd probably give those parts away to a good customer. But like I said, I haven't found a great butcher. And the farm I go to is FAR.
Sorry for the long post. Perhaps I'm making it sound more complicated that it really is. Heather has it down! She's way more confident & knowledgeable about it than I am. I'll probably do some more research on raw feeding puppies - just to try to figure out if they really do get what they need. But until I'm 100% confident that I can give my puppy what she needs from a raw diet, I'd rather trust the people at Royal Canin.