# Story of the Dog Food



## partdeux (Aug 3, 2011)

We have two older papillon's (think little drop kick dogs)

One has had a problem with being severely obese, he tore his left ACL back in November. About the time he started doing better, he tore his right ACL. Vet wanted to do surgery, but I found a most outstanding site talking about ACL surgeries on dogs and it was highly recommended it not be done. But, everybody agreed on one thing, get the weight off.

So, we went from leaving food available all day to only putting it down for a short period of time... except now our other pap is losing weight too, and throwing up phlegm all the damn time. She got severely skinny and very uncomfortable.

About this time we're hearing all the noise about the dog food from China and the health issues it causes... and decided to try making our own.

About 7 pounds of chicken thighs made it into a pot, and they were cooked for several days. Bones picked out, meat sent through a food processor until it looked like pink slime.

2 pints of rice were cooked to an extremely wet consistency using the water from above.

5 large carrots shredded in the food processor

1 cup of peas

5 large fish oil capsules added (oil only).

1 T apple cider vinegar (it appeared as tho the 2nd dog may have had an intestinal parasite).

Pressure canned pints for 75 minutes

Mixed it all up and let the dogs have some. Holy crap, it was doggy crack, and they both inhaled it like they were stupid. The obese dog is losing wt like crazy, and becoming much more active. You can tell his leg still bothers him, but he's doing much much better. The 2nd dog is no longer having having issues and is gaining weight.

Since that first batch, we send "softened" bones through the food processor. Have to be careful to make sure none of the hard bones make it into the food. Bought liquid fish oil, as capsules are a PITA to cut open. now we nuke the carrots so their body will process it better. Also picked up some supplements to help the the obese dog's body continue to heal. Have done a beef sweet potato recipe. What goes into the canner has to be very moist as even the over cooked rice will still absorb moisture.

All in all the dogs are doing so much better. Time spent is minimal, especially considering how much better they are doing.


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## squerly (Aug 17, 2012)

Very cool! I used to make treats for our dogs but that was short lived. I like the food idea, just need to find the time. Keep up the good work!


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## RevWC (Mar 28, 2011)

We switched our dog food to "taste of the wild" Bison is the main ingredient. Our Rat Terrier has even more energy and scarfs it down and his coat is softer too. http://www.tasteofthewildpetfood.com/


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## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

We just switched to Taste of the Wild too, only we started with Bison & Duck then a month later moved to Wetlands (chicken, roast duck, roast quail & smoked turkey) because our Rotties were quite gassy on the bison! Probably because of the peas and not the buffalo. The ratings for TOTW is are off the charts and the price we pay for the quality of food our dogs get is excellent ($45 for 30lbs). They are actually eating less but seem to have more energy and shinier coats. By the way less in the mouths means smaller piles in the yard too. A high quality dog food really should have around 30-35% protein and 18-25% fat, with little or no grains and definitely no corn or corn byproducts (dogs cannot digest corn and it's bad for their health). Your recipe sounds pretty darn good too. Better than 95% or more of the commercially available food for sure. Did you calculate out the nutritional data?


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## partdeux (Aug 3, 2011)

I completely forgot, hard boiled eggs, shell and all.

I have a recipe program, if I enter the data, it will get me close to the nutritional value. Balsamic rice is about 1/3 the total volume.


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## sewserious (Mar 16, 2010)

We feed Blue Wilderness to our Aussie/whippet mix. She loses weight on anything but high-protein food as she is extremely active.


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