Back to researching dog food...
Right. I haven't done a post about my amazing new diet yet but, basically, I'm not eating any grains and it's better for me. It's going to be better for dogs. No arguments there. Didz has got fussy since not living with Floyd, due to lack of competition I think - Floyd isn't going to steal it so he can afford to be a fussbag. I'd love to go back to somehow giving him higher-protein food before he hits his senior years. He will no longer eat bones and veg and all the lovely BARFy things both boys grew up on - they'd devour whole chickens (and bunnies - fur and all) in about a minute. Now he'll only take really easy-to-eat, smelly, flavoury meat. He prefers it cooked, of course, the awkward git. He'll eat scraps of raw meat when I'm cooking me some bacon, but he can't be arsed munching a bone. Weirdo. I bought him some huge venison bones and they were just wasted. :(
When we moved here we went back to the cheapest of the cheap complete foods for cost reasons. He hasn't suffered, but it's like a human living on nothing but biscuits every day. Junk food. There's so much crap in it and he didn't eat it with as much excitement as he does with 'wet' meats. At the moment I'm giving him tins of Chappie and/or those horrible stinky Webbox sausage things, which he loves - but dog meat contains so much unnecessary bulking cereals, sugar and of course, it's mostly water. He also has an oat-based working dog food, separately, so that is a lot of carbohydrate for one collie wally. His weight and his coat are in excellent condition, but his teeth aren't as white as they were when he was on a proper BARF diet, and he proper stinks. Fishy mingarrr.
So, we need to go back to proper meat. Most dog meat suppliers charge megabucks, require one to buy bulk, and/or don't supply my area. I don't have a big freezer, so I'd have to buy it weekly, which is fine, because I buy my own food weekly, and yay for walking round the market buying local fresh food, yay, yay. I don't currently do that, because of costs. But I will be better off from March (fully booked Mutts & Mops is fully booked!) and will hopefully be able to afford to have some posh organic habits. Lol. That's assuming local butchers and farmers are much cop, which they're not. If I go in ANY butchers or farm shop, here or in Southampton (tried them all over the years) and ask for bones, chicken necks, wings and any offal-y bits for dogs, they look at me like I'm insane, or they don't have any (?!), or they charge a damn fortune, or the market ones will say, 'I'll bring some next week for you' and never do. The fruit and veg man down Salisbury market didn't know what kale was, and the farmers that did have kale/any dark leaves at all looked at me like I was mental because I wanted to buy a shedload of it.
At the moment I get all of my food from the supermarket, £20-30 a week, which includes:
- One chicken/horse (cheap as poss, but I do try not to get 'omg cruel' ones);
- One beef/horse (cheapest and most manky);
- Bacon/horse;
- Things that aren't meat but could possibly still be horse.
So I would love to just add Didz's food to this weekly shop too, maybe feed him the same beef/horse that I eat, (the one I get is under £2 for 500g) but I'd have to buy about six a week instead of one, and there isn't really enough organ meat in them to provide enough vitamins for bad-ass muscley canine bodies. And I'd end up with so many plastic trays to throw away (dog food tins are easily recycled). So, maybe we should stick to dog food...? There's Type 1 (expensive and in annoying little plastic pouches), Type 2 (contains oats, rice, is in non-recyclable plastic and also expensive) and then of course there's the absolutely disgustingly anger-inducing uber-expensive grain-free kibbles that are just a gigantic con - just found one online that was £70 for a 15kg sack, which (hilariously) contained rice and beet pulp which is just as bad as wheat. That leaves the small frozen blocks of meat you can get from pet shops but I'd have to squeeze them in the freezer because they go manky in the fridge within a few days.
And then, getting more into things, there's the issue of what the meat we eat was fed on - if I'm avoiding cheap grains, why am I eating and giving my dog meat that's been fed on cheap grains? Which leads to -> I want to buy grass-fed free-range but it's so expensive. I wish I could afford to buy a weekly grass-fed meat box for the two of us. I think I worked out that it would be £150+ a month for me to eat like that, so I stuck to weekly Sainsbury's shops... buuut, when I add 'wet' dog food costs, that's easily another £45... maybe I could go for a Riverford solution that could feed both of us? Maybe I could become a valued customer and persuade them to give me lots of cheap, old offcuts and offal for His Doodliness?
Bah. Maybe for now I need to go and chat up the market meat man...
When we moved here we went back to the cheapest of the cheap complete foods for cost reasons. He hasn't suffered, but it's like a human living on nothing but biscuits every day. Junk food. There's so much crap in it and he didn't eat it with as much excitement as he does with 'wet' meats. At the moment I'm giving him tins of Chappie and/or those horrible stinky Webbox sausage things, which he loves - but dog meat contains so much unnecessary bulking cereals, sugar and of course, it's mostly water. He also has an oat-based working dog food, separately, so that is a lot of carbohydrate for one collie wally. His weight and his coat are in excellent condition, but his teeth aren't as white as they were when he was on a proper BARF diet, and he proper stinks. Fishy mingarrr.
So, we need to go back to proper meat. Most dog meat suppliers charge megabucks, require one to buy bulk, and/or don't supply my area. I don't have a big freezer, so I'd have to buy it weekly, which is fine, because I buy my own food weekly, and yay for walking round the market buying local fresh food, yay, yay. I don't currently do that, because of costs. But I will be better off from March (fully booked Mutts & Mops is fully booked!) and will hopefully be able to afford to have some posh organic habits. Lol. That's assuming local butchers and farmers are much cop, which they're not. If I go in ANY butchers or farm shop, here or in Southampton (tried them all over the years) and ask for bones, chicken necks, wings and any offal-y bits for dogs, they look at me like I'm insane, or they don't have any (?!), or they charge a damn fortune, or the market ones will say, 'I'll bring some next week for you' and never do. The fruit and veg man down Salisbury market didn't know what kale was, and the farmers that did have kale/any dark leaves at all looked at me like I was mental because I wanted to buy a shedload of it.
At the moment I get all of my food from the supermarket, £20-30 a week, which includes:
- One chicken/horse (cheap as poss, but I do try not to get 'omg cruel' ones);
- One beef/horse (cheapest and most manky);
- Bacon/horse;
- Things that aren't meat but could possibly still be horse.
So I would love to just add Didz's food to this weekly shop too, maybe feed him the same beef/horse that I eat, (the one I get is under £2 for 500g) but I'd have to buy about six a week instead of one, and there isn't really enough organ meat in them to provide enough vitamins for bad-ass muscley canine bodies. And I'd end up with so many plastic trays to throw away (dog food tins are easily recycled). So, maybe we should stick to dog food...? There's Type 1 (expensive and in annoying little plastic pouches), Type 2 (contains oats, rice, is in non-recyclable plastic and also expensive) and then of course there's the absolutely disgustingly anger-inducing uber-expensive grain-free kibbles that are just a gigantic con - just found one online that was £70 for a 15kg sack, which (hilariously) contained rice and beet pulp which is just as bad as wheat. That leaves the small frozen blocks of meat you can get from pet shops but I'd have to squeeze them in the freezer because they go manky in the fridge within a few days.
And then, getting more into things, there's the issue of what the meat we eat was fed on - if I'm avoiding cheap grains, why am I eating and giving my dog meat that's been fed on cheap grains? Which leads to -> I want to buy grass-fed free-range but it's so expensive. I wish I could afford to buy a weekly grass-fed meat box for the two of us. I think I worked out that it would be £150+ a month for me to eat like that, so I stuck to weekly Sainsbury's shops... buuut, when I add 'wet' dog food costs, that's easily another £45... maybe I could go for a Riverford solution that could feed both of us? Maybe I could become a valued customer and persuade them to give me lots of cheap, old offcuts and offal for His Doodliness?
Bah. Maybe for now I need to go and chat up the market meat man...