Make Your Own Easy, Healthy, Natural Dog Foods

Does your dog have any of the following:

• brown teeth
• bad breath
• fatty tumors
• hot spots or skin irritations / rashes
• smelly ears
• frequently infected ears
• skin or ear yeast
• hair loss
• a tubby figure
  
• a strong "dog odor" ?
  

Most dog foods on the market contain a lot of unnecessary and sometimes dangerous ingredients.  Preservatives, coloring, and hardeners along with large amounts of corn and wheat can be unhealthy and not well-tolerated by your dog.

When eaten for years, these foods can cause all of the above symptoms and more.  Dog foods have been linked to cancers, tooth decay, kidney disease, and many other problems.

Eating one dog food for long periods of time can cause deficiencies in dogs, just as eating only one kind of food would do the same in humans.

While not all dog foods are bad, most leave a lot to be desired.

• 3 cups of rice
• 1 lb. chicken livers
• 1/2 bag of frozen vegetables (no onions, no grapes, no raisins)
• plain raw meat (turkey, chicken, pork, beef, and don't worry, you can cook it if you'd like)
• Solid Gold seameal (not necessary, but an added plus)
• Bone meal or seaweed calcium for pets (both available on Amazon)

• Boil 7 cups of water in a pot.
• Add the rice, chicken livers, and vegetables
• Stir everything well, turn the heat down to low, and let the mixture cook for 25 minutes.  Stir once in a while.
• Turn off heat and remove from burner.
  
• Add 7 teaspoons of Bone Meal and mix it in.
• Let cool, stirring occasionally.
  

You can serve the meat to your dog raw, next to or mixed into the rice mixture.  Raw meat is good and healthy for dogs.  Chunks that need to be chewed can clean your dog's teeth.  Ground is good for those early morning feedings when you're only half conscious.

If you're going to cook the meat, make sure the meat is lean.  Raw fat is healthy for dogs.  Cooked fat = grease = pancreatitis = very bad.  Supplement with a good fish oil or olive oil to make up for lost fatty acids, and rinse greasy ground meats with hot water.  Mix cooked meat into food, or serve next to the rice.

While raw bones are ok for dogs for the most part (turkey bones can be dangerous, as can large beef bones), cooked bones should not be fed.

For my active 50 lb. dog, I feed him 1 cup of rice and 7 oz. of meat two times a day.  He is thin because he is very hyper and does a lot of exercise.

Generally, a dog should eat about 2-3% of his weight per day.  So, if a dog is 50 lbs., he should eat about one and a half pounds of food per day.

I try to keep my proportions at about 1/2 meat, 1/2 rice mix.  That's just what works for me.

Dogs need calcium. They need way more than humans need. Adding the bone meal to the food will help keep your dog's calcium levels normal.

You can add seameal occasionally to your dog's diet, following the directions on the container. If you mix the livers and vegetables into the rice, your dog will get a lot of vitamins from his food. He will be healthy, but an occasional supplement is good. I add seameal once or twice a week.

If your dog's coat is dry, adding a little fish oil or olive oil to his diet can help.

Do not over-supplement your dog.  Too much calcium is bad, too, so don't give a vitamin that contains calcium on top of the bone meal.

Sometimes, changing food after feeding only kibble and canned can give a dog diarrhea.  Try these tricks:

• Add a teaspoon to a tablespoon (for bigger dogs) of 100% pure canned pumpkin (not the pie filling) to the dinner.  Pumpkin helps diarrhea and constipation.
• Open a slippery elm capsule and put it in the food.  Slippery elm soothes the bowel.  You can find more at my Doggie Diarrhea link below.
• Give half a human probiotic tablet, crushed into the food.

These three together stop diarrhea fast!

• Don't be scared. Dogs lived for thousands of years without kibble. Your dog won't die of malnutrition if you remember calcium, meat, organs, and enough food.
• Your dog can eat raw meat.  No one cooked a dog's meat for him.  Dogs eat garbage, poop, and dead mammals.  Raw meat is fine.
  
• If your dog's food is not completely nutritionally balanced every day, that's ok. Neither is yours.
• It's all right to share your food with your dog. See my article on this below.
• There are many ways to feed a dog. What works for you and your dog's health is what's best.

(Note: Onions, grapes, raisins, dark chocolate, cocoa powder, and coffee are toxic to dogs. Avoid feeding these!)

Relax and have fun! Your dog will love you for it!