Frugal Friday: Homemade Pet Food
October 30th, 2008 | 
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Frugal Friday is back! One of the ways we’re trying to be frugal is with our pet food. With a herd of cats, a large dog, and 3 puppies, we’ve tried to figure out how to cut the pet food bill a little bit.
It’s easy to cut a people food bill – coupons, growing own produce, raising livestock or participating in a co-op. But pets are a little more challenging.
A couple of months ago, I received a free subscription to Rachael Ray’s cooking magazine. Besides yummy people food recipes, the magazine always has a pet food recipe in the back.
Right now, my goal is to make one meal for the dogs each week – I’m still learning! While it sounds simple, the challenge is knowing how much to make for them and also keeping the meal nutritionally balanced for dogs.
Just giving them leftovers of people food is not a good choice; however, the basic components of a pet food meal are similar to people food meals – meat, veggie, grain, seasonings, liquid.
Once we master how to make the food, I’d like to feed a real food meal every other night and eventually every night.
So how could that be a frugal choice? For us, it is logical as well as frugal especially with the rising cost of commercial pet food. Since we live on a farm, we have access to a variety of meats and vegetables. In the future, I envision us planting a portion of our garden strictly for pet consumption.
As far as the extra time involved in making the food, a lot of the meals could be coordinated with our people food meals. Instead of cooking 1 lb of chicken, we can cook 2 lbs. And some meals could be prepared ahead and frozen for future use.
Do you have any experience making pet food? I’d love to hear from you about the pros and cons!
(Jump over to Crystal’s blog for more Frugal Friday ideas.)
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My mother made it a lot. She would take a whole chicken and cook it up. She added carrots while it was cooking. She would then take it off the bone when she made dog food she would leave the gristle and stuff that humans would not like in there. After that she cooked it with whole grain rice and more veggies then she severed it to the dogs. Often people would joke and say they would eat the dog food she made. The dogs loved it.
You might want to look into feeding your dogs raw meat. I have been doing this for a couple of years. Cooking destroys the enzymes that help them to digest food. I generally give my dogs raw ground meat with bone or bonemeal, oatmeal, veggies, yogurt or kefir, cod liver oil, and sometimes egg.
I don’t think this is cheaper for me, but I do think it is better for their health and will save on vet bills in the long run.
Linda, that’s a good idea about the raw meat. I’ll definitely look into doing something like that too. In the past we’ve lightly cooked (restaurant version of ‘rare’) some meat with seasonings for them. We do our own butchering twice a year and my husband is an avid hunter which makes the meat cost extremely affordable. In fact this year, we’re planning to reserve a whole deer just for pet food.
Like you, I think it will save on vet bills in the long run. Earlier this year, a man came to pick up one of our free kittens and said that he started feeding their pets regular food about 6 months before. In that short time, he and his wife noticed a huge (good) difference in their cats’ and dogs’ fur quality. One of the cats that was doing poorly at the time started thriving once they changed the diet away from commercial pet food. Makes a person wonder…
Great idea regarding handmade food for pets…