Jennifer, what do you feed your dogs? and what breed do you have? $15/day sounds awful high.

I feed an active, 40# Border Collie raw for about $1.00 - $1.25 a day. Right now I'm buying meat from a Super Wal-mart and a local butcher shop. I keep an eye out for reduced meat, and watch the local grocery flyers for sales. For instance, this weeks "find" was semi boneless pork shoulder for .96/#. Around thanksgiving, I could get whole turkeys for .69/#. I'm currently feeding about 5 different varities of meat/bone/organs over a 2 week period.

 Quote: mara jessup

Jennifer, what do you feed your dogs? and what breed do you have? $15/day sounds awful high.

I posted my feeding schedule earlier in the thread. It's a pretty standard week that I reflected there. I have 3 ACD's, each in and around about the 45 to 50-pound range and highly active. Each gets approximately 4% to 5% of their weight in food per day to keep weight on, which was the amount of food I found necessary to accomplish this. And they aren't fat. In fact, they're still a little skinnier than I'd like to see, but they're healthy and I feel we found a nice balance.

All of the food except the green tripe and rec bones comes from the grocery store. It's about $6 CDN before tax for a chicken that feeds two dogs, so they eat 3 chickens per week... They each get two fish per "fish day" and so that's 12 fish per week (and 3 fish are about $2), and so on... The tripe and bones comes from a local store that is about an hour away, and I asked but they don't get whole carcasses. I don't feed ground.

It does add up to about $4 to $5 per day per dog. $15 was not a high estimate of the cost, unfortunately.

There are butchers and stuff but they're all about an hour or more drive from the city and you have to be there at 6:00am and you have to take at least 50lbs of EACH TYPE of food or so(since it is boxed)... I don't have a freezer in the apartment. I buy the dogs' food in 3-day to 4-day increments, just like my own shopping.

I make do...

jennifer, doing this while living in a city apartment has got to be very challenging. especially with three dogs! i'm surprised you don't go for one of the grain-free kibbles or dehydrated instead. i don't know if i could handle being that wrapped up in feeding my dog for any truly extended period of time.

though i admit i really overworked the logistics and feeding for at least the first year. and it took two years for me to quit packing up wild game scraps in subzero weather outside the processing plant.

you get to a certain age, and you just don't have it in you to allow your life to be so complicated any more...

Yuko,
you are so funny, but you're right you can't get attached to them, that would be hard for my children, my girls are pet lovers and too small to make sense of it ,but I think what you do is great, I wish I could do the same but , that might have to wait until the girls no longer live with us!AND that will be for many years.But I admire that you are able to do it

Jan your dogs look very healthy to me and are beautiful, you must be doing something right!

Jennifer, I think it's great ,the effort you put in in your dogs health and diet.That is dedication.
Molly at what age do you stop making efforts?
My mother is 75 and she feeds raw and she is always looking for deals on meat,driving from store to store and her health is not the best but she makes all the effort possible, she believes in treating others(including animals) the way you want to be treated, I think if it's important ,all the efforts are needed and appreciated

Thanks, but sometimes I think they are turning out okay in spite of me.

it was me, not molly, that wrote about making my life less complicated as i get older. has nothing to do with infirmity, but maturity. i pick and choose what i will make heroic efforts on. not everything requires heroism.

I'm moving soon, and I when I have that house that I know I need by now (with three dogs) I think I'll be getting a freezer for the basement. That will at least make things easier if I can buy food a month or so at a time. Might be able to start researching better deals as well at that time, since boxes of 30+ pounds won't be out of the question.

I was feeding kibble before (I've fed Innova EVO, Canidae, and Nutro Natural Choice in the past) and dehydrated as well. The dehydrated food I tried was NRG (Honest Kitchen needed meat supplementation, defeating the purpose LOL).

The fact is, on kibble and dehydrated, the dogs still had tartar buildup on the teeth and "baddish" breath... Okay so it wasn't as bad as if they'd been eating CANNED food, but still... And the poop volume is, while not so bad size-wise, still POOP. Whereas on raw the poop is gone in a day or two and a good rain cleans up any residue. Having a very small patch of grass to use for my dogs, it was a nice feature of raw feeding. Plus my parents let me use their yard to run my dogs, and if they're on raw they don't care so much about clean-up... If the dogs are NOT on raw, then I have to hunt down a poop my dog makes an acre away.

I make decent money for someone being fresh out of school, so with the fact that their teeth are sparkling and their breath is fresh, and clean-up is a breeze... Well, I can sort of justify the cost. That doesn't mean that if I can't find better deals I won't take them, of course, but so far I've been limited by my lack of freezer space.

One other benefit, since my dogs are ACD's they're BUILT to chew. I've been pretty lucky not to have anything in the house eaten (couch, tables, etc...) and I attribute this to the fact that I get them out of the house almost every evening, and the fact that they get raw carcass and rec bones to sort of let off some of that steam.

 Quote: Jennifer Ruzsa

..... Having a very small patch of grass to use for my dogs, it was a nice feature of raw feeding. Plus my parents let me use their yard to run my dogs, and if they're on raw they don't care so much about clean-up... If the dogs are NOT on raw, then I have to hunt down a poop my dog makes an acre away.

And another big ginormous plus that we often say -- but maybe not often enough -- is that vet bills are lower with dogs who are fed real fresh food.

I know I'm sticking my neck out here and making kind of a broad statement, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I have had and known a lot of dogs, and my experience has been that the incidence of chronic illness is slashed when dogs are switched to appropriate food.

I understand that there will still be illnesses and injuries. But overall, the biggest thing I do (with the most outstanding results) for an adopted dog is to give him/her fresh food.

As someone who has adopted several health-challenged dogs and watched them change on their new diet, it would be hard for me to express how strongly I feel about this.