 Our home cooked food
Hello everyone,
We have a Shorkie and 2 Malteses. Years ago, a veterinarian friend recommended a home made diet for our doggies (at the time we were taking care of a Maltese with joint issues, and were promised the condition would resolve on the new diet... it did).
We have tweaked their diet over the years, and become increasingly efficient at making big batches - I'm now doing the final mixing in a stainless steel full-sized bucket!
The dogs are doing very well on this diet, and I thought I would share an outline of it here :
Simmered in water and made ready - fish and poultry (chicken or turkey).. one of our Malteses is allergic to red meat as tests have shown.
All cooked up and mixed together, a variable mix of the following - sweet potato, green beans, chickpeas, green peas, blueberries, bananas, brown rice, chopped up carrots, zucchini, oats, farro.
Stirred into the combined mix - nutritional yeast, flaxseed meal, chopped leafy greens. I would take a guess that aprox 20% of the calories in this mix are derived from animal protein, and the rest comes from the freshly cooked fruit and veg ingredients.
We're plant-based ourselves, so apart from the animal protein, we'd be good to eat all of this. In fact, I have to be careful sometimes that we don't accidentally eat our girl's food.
I'm keen to learn of other's experiences. The latest vet to look after our doggies is blaming this diet for their poor dental health. He may be correct, but we're not going to be feeding our dogs any of the commercial food that we have seen so far (they won't touch it anyway). We have tried the various dental chews, to tackle the plaque accumulation, and all of them are a failure so far.
If only we could get in there with a little toothbrush! But it's not going to happen....
Interested to see others thoughts on this. |