I make my dog food fresh in the kitchen every evening. This means when I go out of town, there is no dog chef! 🙂 Here is what I do, either for when my husband has to feed the dogs while I’m out of town, or when someone is house-sitting for us when we both leave.
At the same time as making one dinner, I pre-make a whole assembly line of them. Including a set for the day I get back, so I don’t have to scramble on that day. I use those inexpensive disposable save-it containers, and I stick a post-it note on the top of each one with the appropriate dog’s initial. All the dogs get supplements (C, yeast, lecithin, kelp, alfalfa, oil, AC vinegar), and some of the dogs get unique supplements (glucosamine, grape seed extract, arthritis pain meds, digestive enzymes), and each one eats a different portion size. So thus their containers are all individualized and have to be labeled. I stack them in the fridge; and then all someone has to do is dump out the contents into their stainless bowls.
I make life easy for myself sometimes when I do this by buying some some pre-made ingredients, which I wouldn’t use on normal days. In this case, it was a huge bag of generic brand Cheerios in place of the whole grain I’d normally cook. I didn’t have time to cook it before I left. There are steamed vegetables in the bottom of these, a fresh egg, and their normal raw meat rotation- ground turkey for most days, and liver, beef hamburger, and canned fish each one day a week. Their sitter would also feed them each a raw chicken leg in the mornings.
Thus far, I’m still feeding the LGDs some commercial kibble, just because they eat so dang much, it’s hard for me to cook that much volume in the kitchen (I’m kind of slowly working up to it). So, when I’m gone, those two dogs are reverted to all kibble, poor things, for convenience. I figure it’s too much to ask for someone to carry their goopy dinners down to the field every day like I do, and that would be a lot of big bowls in the fridge. But I don’t leave very often, so this is a minor thing- most days, they get chef food. 🙂
When we go camping with dogs, I just bring along the ingredients and make their dinners the normal way in our trailer. Only I might leave out some things, like all but their key supplements, for simplicity. On the rare occasions I might travel for a week or more with dogs, I’d stop at a grocery store midweek to pick up some basics, like cereal, raw meat, and canned veggies, to tide them over. They are really flexible eaters, their taste buds reject almost nothing, so planning for travel is pretty easy!
September 8, 2011 at 3:01 pm
This is excellent, I’m just starting out on the whole foods, home-made dog food diet and I planned on freezing the foods in bulk. I’m unsure on supplements, any suggestions on finding out/knowing which are right for my dog?
September 9, 2011 at 3:33 am
Hi Christina
I think there are tons of supplements on the market, some especially targeted towards homemade feeders. Our local health food stores seem to highly recommend things made by Udo’s. I would imagine any that offered broad-spectrum vitamins and trace minerals targeted for dogs and had a good reputation for quality and digestibility would be good. But expensive… There is also the supplement mix advised by Dr. Pitcairn’s book, which is a mix of alfalfa, kelp, lecithin and brewer’s yeast-that is a little cheaper to put together. I have experimented with different things, but now have just pared down to vitamin C and a joint supplement. I buy both in “human” form from discount stores that sell in bulk, to keep it more affordable. I think maybe if you feed good quality ingredients and a wide variety, it’s possible that dogs get everything they need already. But who knows?
Michelle
October 22, 2012 at 8:55 pm
I have read in canine nutrition books that you should not feed a Border Collie vitamin C (ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate or ascorbal palmitate) because of the kidney and liver damage it can do. Thoughts on this, other sources of information, etc? Thanks.
October 23, 2012 at 2:19 am
Leigh Anne, I’ve never run across such an assertion, I’d be curious to hear the source and their rationale- especially something that says it’s breed specific. From everything I’ve read, vitamin C is very low risk for all dogs (and people), since the body merely discards what it doesn’t use. The worst that can happen is diarrhea from getting to much, and you can adjust accordingly.
February 2, 2013 at 10:37 pm
I have also read about too much vitamin C and the other vitamins & minerals Leigh Ann mentioned, as well as others, and it also mentioned kidney and liver damage. Even certain types of calcium.
February 2, 2013 at 11:28 pm
Brandon, if you can point me to a source, I’d be really interested to read more about it. Did you also read that it was breed-specific, or general to all dogs? The four forms that Leigh Anne mentions are all variations of vitamin C, as far as I’m aware. I’ve tried searching the web for “dog vitamin C overdose”, “dog vitamin C toxicity” and “dog vitamin C kidney failure.” I can find a few references to the thought that since dogs produce their own vitamin C, they don’t need extra supplement, and possibly long-term use of the supplement could make it so the dog can no longer produce his own, or could cause urinary crystals. But many others assert that dogs under stress can indeed benefit from extra vitamin C, especially dogs with kidney damage. I haven’t been able to find any strong references that are “anti” vitamin C though, so if you know if one, I’d be interested to read what they have to say.