 Barked: Fri Jan 18, '13 7:49pm PST |
 | |  | | Yes. Add a little vitamin E to the mix too if you feed fish oil and not real fish.
And you would buy beef ribs and oxtail, any lamb and any cheap pork bones you happen to see to vary the diet. And if you saw turkey parts on sale you might buy them. When we have a roast turkey Max gets the neck, liver and some of the wings cut off before roasting of course.
The goal is to feed 2 parts of boneless meat to 1 pound of bony chicken in time. Might be a year, might be 6 months.
Just try to feed as much red meat as possible and remember to get some liver and other organ in and enough bony stuff to firm up the poop and done. Really. All the fuss I make about magnesium and such is extra. The tripe you are hoping to get will fill a couple of those annoying gaps.
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I haven't posted how I used to have to figure out Max's diet before freezer lately. I could hold about a month's worth of meals in the freezer so I would hold out for a good enough sale on red meat. Chicken is usually not a problem and organs don't usually go on sale.
Then I figured out how much chicken Max needs for a whole month. As a 38 pound senior dog on light rations he gets an average of 10 ounces a day. He would need 30 ounces of bone for the month and a chicken is about 30% bone so 30x3=90 ounces or about 5.5-6 pounds. He needs about 30 ounces of organ, easy a pound of some sort of liver and some sort of kidney. That adds up to 8 pounds and he needs 300 ounces a month or about 19 pounds total. 19-8=11 pounds of boneless meat to buy.
My shopping list was then 1 pound liver, 1 pound kidney, 1 enormous or 2 small chickens and 11 pounds of some sort of boneless meat.
I came home, got out all the bowls and the scale and cut up the organs and chicken, put them in bags and added boneless meat to make up the 10 ounces Max gets daily. I could buy all the same boneless meat or mix it up. It doesn't matter that the chicken neck bag has more boneless meat in it than the chicken thigh bag as you measured for the month and it will all even out.
Not easy to get one chicken into that many pieces at first but I managed as I cheated and Sassy got the meaty stuff for her cooked diet and Max got the bony stuff. Now I could make up boneless meals and bony meals and alternate them and it would work out really well. At first Max got 1/2 ounce of liver and 1/2 ounce of kidney daily but I managed to loosen up and just put an ounce of just one into the bags. If I was stuck without a freezer and went back to this way of shopping I would make up 2 or 3 day bags and feed bone and organ+meat to make up his ounces one day and meat only the next. If a day seems a bit light put in an egg, I like Max to get ~2 eggs a week.
If you have more room than I did you could do this every couple weeks with different combinations of different organs and meats and bony stuff too.
It goes faster to pack up than one would think too. At the end of the year I was packing up inside an hour. Put a cutting board in the sink and get lots of large bowls out. Open up the bags before starting and try to handle the meats with one hand and the bags with the other to keep things cleaner. And the dogs get to clean the bowls for you. |  |  | |  |
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