More Dog Food Recalls

[gaystoryman]

Being a pet owner, this is getting scarier as now some dry dog food is being recalled as another round of recalls hits.

FDA List of Links to Recalled Foods

Right now it seems just the one brand, Natural Balance dry venison and rice is on the list, but like Menu Foods stuff, you just never know when it is going to end. Supposedly this is about melamine and not the wheat gluten that affected most wet pet foods.

Anyone got a good recipe to make their own dog food? Seems that might be the only solution.

Latest Story on CNN

[JamesXR]

My family used to feed our dog a mix of brown rice, ground beef, carrots, and maybe something else when we lived in Pakistan.

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to throw a chicken in a pressure cooker with some brown rice and cook it till the bones turned crumbly. That would be quick, easy, and aren't whole chickens only about 50 cents a pound or less.
That might be even cheaper than using store bought food.

[gaybucks_chip]

My family used to feed our dog a mix of brown rice, ground beef, carrots, and maybe something else when we lived in Pakistan.

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to throw a chicken in a pressure cooker with some brown rice and cook it till the bones turned crumbly. That would be quick, easy, and aren't whole chickens only about 50 cents a pound or less.
That might be even cheaper than using store bought food.

Dogs and cats both have very specific dietary needs. Making homemade food will work in a pinch, but all of the commercial foods are formulated to have the right amounts of all the nutrients a dog needs. I believe there are dogfood "cookbooks" out there, and I'd advise using one of those if you're going to make your own food to ensure that your dog gets a balanced diet.

Also... Michael offered up the name of a small family-owned company that makes all of their own foods in-house, and Natura Pet, which I use for my kitties, produces most of its foods in its own plants and has its own staff overseeing the production of canned foods (which don't use fillers like wheat gluten, the subject of the recall) so there are definitely commercial options that are safe.

[JamesXR]

Long ago, before domestication, dogs hunted in packs, following the massive kibble herds across the plains. The only exception being pugs, which traveled in thousands consuming whole villages in China and Mongolia, their snuffling like thunder over the steppes, but more recently they've adapted to the feed upon the common kibble. Any dog will surely die a slow and painful death if fed anything other than the kibbles that they've consumed over millions of years of evolution, just like pandas only eat certain kinds of bamboo.
Dogs will eat just about anything. They aren't high performance engines that consume only a precise blend of fuel. It just seems like the kind of thing where the dog food industry has brainwashed us into thinking that dogs are delicate and only factory-made and laboratory tested blend of synthetically extracted ingredients will provide the nutrition they need. Dogs eat just about anything that people eat with the exception of vegetables, unless you cook them with oil or salt. We can't grow strawberries in the back yard because the dog will eat them.
Because we've bought into this whole "dogs have precise nutritional needs" thing we'd rather trust dried chunks of food related paste made of ingredients provided by the lowest bidder than food we'd eat ourselves. Does it strike anyone else that the pet food industry might have trained us to be their perfect consumers?