# Dog food and cat food storage length?



## Freyadog (Jan 27, 2010)

On dog and cat food? Grains such as sweet feed for goats? I think that cat and dog food have fat? I think without going and looking at the dog chow bags(too heavy for me to lift to look). I was just wondering how everyone with pets and livestock were preparing for them.

I have Nubian dairy goats, Pyrees(dogs), cats, guineas, rabbits and chickens. 

Thinking maybe we could buy 6 months worth of cat and dog food but did not know if it would hold up. And if it would under what conditions and temperatures.


----------



## Moose33 (Jan 1, 2011)

Hi Freyadog,
I have food and treats put up for my beautiful but evil cat. I have about 11 bags of food and I use the expiration date on the bags to rotate them. She goes through about a bag a month. The ones that expire soonest are used first. I keep it in a spare bedroom closet. It's usually around sixty degrees in the closet. It does get a bit warmer for a few days during the summer. I've been doing this for about five years. It must work, the cat is still alive and feisty (evil) as ever. I keep about two weeks worth of food vacuum sealed in our emergency bag too. I rotate through that about every six months or so. I don't have any livestock so I can't speak to that. 
Take care,
Moose


----------



## OdieB (Mar 18, 2012)

FFreyadog,
I have over 100 lbs of dry dog food stored in plastic garbage cans with snap on lids. My dogs go through this before it ever goes bad and I just rotate. For longer term storage I pack it like I do grain. Five gallon buckets, with an oxygen absorber and tightly sealed lid. The canned / wet pet foods store well and just like the "human" foods discussed here - they will last years beyond the pull date. If not dented and bulged they are good.

I am ALSO trying to learn how to "extend" dog foods, by adding cooked rice, barley, cereals etc. It's not optimum nutrition, but it will keep the pets full. I have used our "seal a meal" machine to seal large bags of Chef Michaels pet food. That is the lightweight, sort of dehydrated stuff. It shrinks up and can be rehydrated to make quite a voluminous meal. Good luck to you! -OdieB


----------



## Freyadog (Jan 27, 2010)

Thanks for the replies. I have never given our dogs wet canned food but I suppose that would be an option for long term storage. They have always done so well on Purina dry that I never even thought about that. Thanks for the information.


----------



## jimLE (Feb 25, 2015)

i buy the 10 to 20LB bags, on account i have a small house dog. but yet i only buy 1 bag at a time. seeing how she already eats what we eat already, as well as the dog food.. so I'll do away with the dog food if/when need be.


----------



## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

Since the thread has come back alive...

Most dry dog foods are extremely poor in both nutrients and quality of protein sources. The worst of them have a pretty good shelf life because they are essentially corn by-products and waste products from human food production. The few that are good don't have the greatest shelf life because they are so heavily fat & protein based (with no grains). We have tried bagging up Taste of the Wild (the best we have found for the price) and removing the air via a Food Saver with reasonable success, but we also stock up on canned dog food. We also buy up meat and fat scraps in large packs that we keep in the freezer. We can use that to make our own if the need ever arises. We can even dry out the scraps if needed.

You can also "can" dog food. We have not tried it yet, but we will be this upcoming summer.

http://canninggranny.blogspot.com/search?q=dog+food


----------



## BillS (May 30, 2011)

I know it's an old thread but dog food is bad for goats. Cat food is even worse. They have trouble digesting meat. They should be eating hay and alfalfa.


----------



## BillS (May 30, 2011)

We have 5 cats. We're prepared to have a year's worth of food for them. We buy 25 lb bags of Purina Cat Chow Indoor Formula. We have 18 of them and rotate them. We probably use 12 a year. When some of them get too old we throw them out. We want to be in a position to rescue more cats when the time comes. They also split a 5.5 oz cat of wet food in the morning and one in the evening. We have 720 cans of wet food. I have 15 cases of 24 cans each plus another 360 stored in kitty litter buckets. One of my coming projects is to verify the 360 number of loose cans. 

You can't discuss pet food in a pet forum without having people going nuts over the quality or alleged non-quality of the food. Despite the cheap food, our cats have beautiful coats and they're all healthy. More importantly, we're able to afford to prep for them.


----------



## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

I have to agree with BillS on the cheap cat food, we buy the walmart brand "specialkitty" food for our barn cats (Cats are wild animals that use humans as a food source) and they are shiny and healthy, of course they supplement their diet with mice and pocket gophers, maybe slow birds. 

I have seen lots of Dogs on the expensive vet recommended dry dog food develop cancer. but as BillS pointed out pet food is more argumentative than politics vract:


----------



## Tweto (Nov 26, 2011)

We feed our dogs expensive dog food, both dry and canned. They are fed twice a day with half a can of dog food, scoop of dry dog food with a few ounces of pumpkin pie filling and then mixed with warm water added.

Our vet told us to do it this way. He also said to never store the dried dog food in a separate container. He wants us to leave the stored food in the sealed bag it comes in. He said as soon as it's exposed to the air it starts to spoil.

We store about a 3 month supply. If SHTF we would be supplementing their food with rice and other food items that we have stored in much greater quantities for us humans. So the 3 month supply would be stretched out to maybe a year.


----------



## Freyadog (Jan 27, 2010)

Think I am going to try a can or two of cheap cat food. We now have 5 cats. We tried Friskies wet for cats and had serious problems with it,

Two cats one is 10 and the other is about 5 or 6 had serious problems. The older of the two ended up at the vet with a lot of blood in her urine. The younger of those two had some a week later when we gave to her. We threw out the Friskies and went back to only dry and meat and veggies from kitchen and they both cleared up. 

So I am going to try one more time wet food but try a cheap brand and see if their systems can tolerate it. If not then back to where we were in their feeding.


----------



## Balls004 (Feb 28, 2015)

After years of seeing what our dog(s) consider fine dining, and that despite my wife's protests that the cats get special consideration in their menu, I don't worry much about them. They aren't likely to starve to death, unless they just are too lazy to work a bit. Not sure how goats got included but our goats are a bit different, because they provide both milk and meat, but they are pretty much able to provide for themselves, except in an extreme winter. 

My guess is that long after we're gone, there will still be dogs, cats and goats.


----------



## Grimm (Sep 5, 2012)

We try to store 6 months of dry dog and cat food. We also have about 3 months of canned food for both.

As for the brand of food we fed- Kirkland. We have tried expensive foods and they caused a few of the cats to get sick (vomit while eating). We switched and no more issues with any of our 6 cats.

Winter would refuse to eat the expensive dog food. I mean we could not get her to eat at all! I tried the Kirkland dog food when my mom switched her blind, deaf, overweight 15 year old brittany to it. Winter loved it so we switched.


----------



## Dakine (Sep 4, 2012)

I feed my Dog and my cats Natural Balance from Dick Van Patten.

my pets have NEVER needed a physiological problem vet visit (meaning the mutt only goes to the vet when she takes a cactus spine up the paw and needs it removed  )

never anything from date on food... never from cat or dog. 

basically, Natural Balance is the good stuff.


----------



## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

Not sure how price factors in. There are reasonably priced good foods and high cost garbage foods. The quality of a pet food is found in both it's ingredient list and trustworthiness of the company. You have to know your animals nutritional needs and find a food that aligns with it. For examples Rottweilers do not want, need, nor should have corn. So pretty much everything sold at Walmart is off limits. All cheap crap foods like Beneful, Pedigree, Science Diet, Purina Dog Chow, Ol' Roy, etc. are essentially garbage products not fit for canine consumption and are primarily made from corn and meat slurry. Dogs do need some vegetable products, but primarily they need protein and fat. If a grain shows up on the first half of the ingredients list it's probably not a good dog food. But like I said, if these companies will lie on people food's ingredient list they will definitely lie on dog food lists. So do your research. 

We chose Taste of the Wild because the ingredients were high quality, the ratio was perfect and the cost is reasonable. In fact because the food is such high quality and more nutritionally dense than say Beneful (the worst food on the market) our dogs eat much less of it and our monthly cost is not much more than it was before with what we thought was good low cost food.


----------



## Grimm (Sep 5, 2012)

Sentry18 said:


> Not sure how price factors in. There are reasonably priced good foods and high cost garbage foods. The quality of a pet food is found in both it's ingredient list and trustworthiness of the company. You have to know your animals nutritional needs and find a food that aligns with it. For examples Rottweilers do not want, need, nor should have corn. So pretty much everything sold at Walmart is off limits. All cheap crap foods like Beneful, Pedigree, Science Diet, Purina Dog Chow, Ol' Roy, etc. are essentially garbage products not fit for canine consumption and are primarily made from corn and meat slurry. Dogs do need some vegetable products, but primarily they need protein and fat. If a grain shows up on the first half of the ingredients list it's probably not a good dog food. But like I said, if these companies will lie on people food's ingredient list they will definitely lie on dog food lists. So do your research.
> 
> We chose Taste of the Wild because the ingredients were high quality, the ratio was perfect and the cost is reasonable. In fact because the food is such high quality and more nutritionally dense than say Beneful (the worst food on the market) our dogs eat much less of it and our monthly cost is not much more than it was before with what we thought was good low cost food.


Before we got Summer we fed Winter Merrick grain free duck, lamb or beef dry food. She hated it. It would take over 2 months to finish a 15lb bag. Her breakfast would sit in the bowl all day. I tried Whole Earth Farms grain free beef dry food as well (also made by Merrick). She would have none of it. If you gave her Beneful she'd lick the bowl clean! I just don't get it!

So when my mom started feeding Kirkland's Nature's Domain dog food we tried giving it to Winter when we would visit. She LOVED it. But then my mom was feeding the salmon recipe and Winter didn't get much fish except cat food. We tried a bag of the beef recipe and now Winter licks the finish off her bowl twice a day.

Price wise it is cheaper than Merrick by $10 but we are also getting an extra 5lbs per bag.

The Kirkland's cat food is the same way. The cats love it it is the same price as the Nutro we were buying but we get an extra 10lbs per bag. BTW with cat food 95% of the foods on the market have some kind of fish or fish meal in them to attract cats. The Kirkland's does not. This is good for us since one of the senior cats has a fish allergy and pukes every where when she eats fish by products.

The price and convenience are just a bonus to the quality of the foods. And yes I have tried raw meat diets, freeze dried raw diets, evolutionary meat diets etc to find something they liked and was good for them. The cats love rabbit meat but unless I raise rabbits just for them it is not very cost effective. The dogs like lamb, pork and beef.


----------



## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

Our first Rottweiler died younger than expected from pancreatitis and kidney failure. We had the vet do an autopsy and she was intrigued enough she sent the dog to a veterinary college in the area. They sent out a couple people to interview us and later advised that they were 99% certain that the pancreatitis was the direct result of a lifetime diet of Beneful. Soon thereafter we started getting calls from a law firm that was putting together a class-action lawsuit against Purina. The law suit eventually made the news, but only for a short time. We switched brands to Eukanuba. Turns out that was poor too. The Mrs. and I did the research including talking to the animal nutritionist at the vet college. They suggested Blue Buffalo, Taste of the Wild, Acana, Nature's variety, Nature's focus, Merrick, Wild Calling and others. We started out with the Taste of the Wild smoked salmon. The dogs loved it but it gave them bad gas (and I mean bad!). Then we tried Taste of the Wild roasted fowl and they went ga-ga over it. We nearly went through the first bag in a week until things calmed down. 

On a side note we never feed our dogs scraps of any kind, especially bacon or bacon grease (which is horrible for dogs). My wife will give them egg yolks if she is making something that requires only whites, but that is about it.


----------



## Grimm (Sep 5, 2012)

I share eggs with our girls too. If I have eggs that have been in the fridge a while I'll scramble them for the dogs.


----------

