As you may have heard, there is a pretty scary pet food recall in progress. Dogs and cats who have eaten the effected foods are dying of renal failure, and what's more, it looks like the food producer, Menu Foods, knew that there were potential problems with the food up to 3 months ago. (See this string of posts on The Pet Connection for sources and more details.)
There have been recalls before, but this one has bothered me much more than most. Although we feed our pups dry food (the recall only effects wet food), our dogs have eaten at least two of the brands on the recall list in this past year. I now feel like I have been living under a false sense of security. I thought that buying premium dog food would help insulate me from things like this, but apparently I thought wrong.
Which is why I've finally decided that we're going to take the plunge into home-cooked dog food.
I've thought about it before this, and I've done a fair bit of homework. I know that many people buy conventional dog food because they don't think they'll have time to cook for their dogs, but that's never been my problem. My problem is, I'm scared that I'll mess it up.
Just as in human nutrition, there are so many ideas about what the right way to feed a dog is that it's really easy to get confused. Should I go with a BARF diet? (That's "Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods".) A prey model? Or should I cook the food? Should I grind it up? Or serve it just like I would for myself? What percentage of vegetables should I use? What kinds of meats? What supplementation is needed? Do I have to follow a recipe perfectly and exactly? Or can I fudge a little as long as I use a good variety of food? And so on, and so on . . . . The problem isn't that I haven't researched these issues, it's that almost every source you go to tells you something slightly different.
But, at this point I feel like--with initial tests of the tainted dog food showing a mortality rate of up to 20%--I can't really do much worse than the pet food companies do. So, armed with my two well respected reference books (Home Prepared Dog and Cat Diets and Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats), I'm going to slowly, but surely try to make the transition. I'll report back on how it goes.
