How To Make Healthy Dog Food at Home

If man's best friend is your best friend, you'll want to keep him healthy to ensure his life is as long as possible. By making his dog food at home, you'll know he's getting the best nutrition possible. Like packaged people food, packaged dog food isn't really the best option for your dog's health. While commercial dog food will supply minimum requirements, it has undergone extensive processing and contains ingredients which have no place in food. Additionally, some pets cannot tolerate a commercial food due to allergies or other health maladies. Whatever your reason, if you're curious about making healthy homemade dog food for your pet, read on.

I started making dog food because our newly acquired 11 year old dog wouldn't eat anything but meat. She'd spent the previous two years squatting in our neighbor's garage. The neighbor, being fond of her but not particularly educated about dog nutrition, had fed her all the meat left over from the local naval base. She was fat and she was picky.

During her first ten days with us, I offered her every available commercial food. She refused every one of them. After reading some of the ingredient labels, I was glad she wouldn't eat them. One common but disturbing ingredient in commercial dog food is mineral oil. It's a by-product of gasoline production and is used as a laxative. I concluded that if all the dogs who regularly ate those foods needed laxatives, there was something wrong with the food.