Committed to the improvement of the breed by breeding for health, temperament and better structure in dogs that have the ability to herd.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Raw

Just did a day trip for more raw food. I need a bigger chest freezer...and a tub!

120 pounds of chicken necks
40 pounds of chicken backs
40 pounds of beef kidney
40 pounds of beef liver
40 pounds of femur bones (for the dogs to chew on and me to step on in the middle of the night)
120 pounds ground beef (with organ meat ground in it as well)

So without the bones its 360 pounds of meat. I sometimes also get ground chicken, ground chicken necks/backs and turkey necks, but I like to 'switch it up' a bit.

My entire bill for the 400 pounds of meat/bones was around 230.00. Without gas that was approximately 57 cents a pound. I was paying nearly 2.00/pound for the Evo and my dogs liked Evo, but it wasn't so easy on their tummies! Evp, if I got the same amount in weight would have cost me over 800.00 dollars! Yikes!

yes I do have cottage cheese, veggies, fish, salmon oil, missing link etc that I use as well and that is not added to the cost, but I also don't feed all of those things all the time. And i gave a lot of that in addition to kibble anyway!

Oh and i have farm raised eggs that I collect each morning from my 'girls' and the dogs thank me for giving them something else yummy to eat!

Both my litters have been raised on raw and I have got to tell you the litter box and the pooper scooper outside are cleaned WAY less than when I was raising a single puppy on kibble. All that filler in kibble just isn't good!

I'm disappointed in the Delta Society changing their rule on raw diet. While I understand their concern, I would think that the people have a higher risk of getting pneumonia from the people who work there or visit there, than getting salmonella from dogs that eat raw. I also think that I could get struck by lightning or win the lottery (which by the way is less likely to happen then the lightning hitting me!), but those chances are pretty low. Maybe higher than the salmonella transfer between species.

3 comments:

Kady Cannon said...

What a load! Wants me to send Tom out to stock the freezer some more.

Our newest purchase is (tah dah!) a grinder so that we can grind up our chicken backs. I keep meaning to blog it.

JoAnne said...

Wow, I'm jealous! Living in suburbia makes it difficult to score like I could have when I was in Idaho - unfortunately, I wasn't feeding raw then! I lived a half mile from a meat processing plant! Makes me want to go back...no, wait, I remember those gray days!

I'm spending a bit more than that, but it's still fairly comparable to what I was spending on "premium" foods.

The thing I really like about feeding raw is that my dogs seem satisfied with their meal. I feed once a day and they still are more satisfied than when I fed twice a day and fed kibble - which just looking at the bag made them fat! Poor Megan was on such a small amount of kibble that I felt horrible when she would finish her dinner and then LOOK at me with accusing eyes (Carolyn will know what I mean)!

Rayna said...

Maybe when I'm in a bigger place and have more freezer room....