Captain Rawles,
I wanted to add my two cents to the award-winning December, 2011 SurvivalBlog post How to Make Homemade Dog Food. This post was great to educate people on the fact that it wasn’t that long ago that dog food wasn’t purchased at the store and that the store bought “dog food” really isn’t that great for “man’s best friend”. I learned this after getting my third dog. The other two did great on store bought dog food, and in fact, my Lab lived for almost 15 years on the cheapest dog food from Wally World.
When I bought my current dog I did the research on the breed and everything said that Great Danes, had digestive problems. Starting out, everything went great. Purchasing the middle to upper expensive dog foods did the trick, until she grew to full size. That’s when it went south, and by south I mean she had uncontrollable diarrhea. Upping the ante I went for the most expensive food I could. Even with the lamb and rice formulas designed for sensitive stomachs, nothing worked. After about two months I was ready to give up. Back to the research phase. What I came up with was that the commercial dog food is full of grains and “filler” that, even though most dogs are able to adapt to this diet, isn’t a natural food source. So now what?
If you notice what a dog’s teeth look like, they are nothing like a cow or even like a humans. They do not have the teeth to grind up grains and grasses. They have teeth that cut their food. That is why our sharpest teeth are called canines! They may be able to eat both meat and some veggies like D.M.D. stated but since they are descendents from wolves, think of what a wolf eats. The only veggies/grains/grasses that wolves eat come from the stomachs of the latest kill.
I began feeding my beast raw chicken, eggs, and any other meat I could get my hands on for cheap. I have never seen such a turn around from a dog that didn’t tolerate “dog food”. She gained about 20 lbs within a couple months and was very healthy. The diet I started, and am still doing to this day four years later, is mainly chicken quarters. Raw and whole, with the bone and everything. I add eggs, raw, shell and all. Elk when there is scraps from the hunt, deer, fish, pork, really anything she will eat, which is almost any meat I have tried. The main ingredient for me though is ten pound bags of chicken quarters from Wal-Mart. When I started this diet, three years ago it was about $0.49/lb, now (no such thing as inflation right?) it is still about $0.67/lb which, when compared to any dog food from the store, it is very competitive.
I do not cook the meat and I do not take out the bone. From a young age everyone is told, “don’t give dogs chicken because the bones will splinter and isn’t good for them” well when chicken isn’t cooked the bones are very soft and spongy, not dry. They don’t splinter when they aren’t cooked and aren’t dried out. They go down with the rest and actually milk the anal gland when coming out the other end (a lot of pups have to have this done manually when they go to the vet/groomer, or they do it themselves by dragging their behinds on the ground). Again, think of what a wolf eats in the wild. They don’t strip the meat of bones and cook it do they? Wolves and dogs have a higher acid level in there stomachs that take care of the bacteria that make humans spend the day in the bathroom.
Until that post I didn’t know there was a debate about whether dogs were carnivores or omnivores. I do believe that dogs have adapted to their surroundings and can survive eating both, but, I do believe and have proved with my current dogs that they not only can eat an almost strictly meat diet but actually thrive on it. Try it yourself. Get your dog a raw piece of chicken and some rice with green beans and carrots. You’ll see that your pooch, while able to handle all of it, has carnivorous tendencies.
SHTF scenario, Cujo will do just fine if he is eating the scraps from your table. Be it all meat or meat with veggies. I would guess that they could revert to their ancestral state easier than most would think. I think there are post’s on feral dogs on here so you can educate yourself on that some other time. Keep your powder dry. – C.A.