Overview

We cook for our dogs. Not because of any nutritional ideology, or because we think our dogs are too good for kibble. No, we cook for them because we didn’t have any other option, and once we saw the effect, we couldn’t morally stop.

Why We Do It

That’s Ben. Ben was a Springer-Spaniel Border Collie mix. He’d been through some traumatizing stuff before Wifey got him, but with enough years of love and affection, he grew into a sweet lovable semi-neurotic doofus. He also grew old. Eventually, food stopped being interesting to him. We tried everything we could get our hands on. Cheap filler laden crap. Stupidly expensive freeze-dried organic whatever. At best we’d get two days worth of interest from him, and then he’d go back to not eating.

But then Wifey found Feed Your Best Friend Better: Easy, Nutritious Meals and Treats for Dogs

Everything changed after that. He was interested in food again. Admittedly, sometimes Wifey would have to hand-feed him to convince him to keep eating, but he would keep eating. Once he started eating, his quality of life didn’t just reset to where it was before he stopped eating. It was like the clock got rolled back by years. He started running, and rolling, and playing with our other dog. He had energy and enthusiasm.

The effects on our younger dog weren’t nearly as pronounced because she was already young and spry, but we knew that under the covers it was making a huge difference in keeping her vibrant and alive, and would do so for the rest of her life. When Ben finally passed, we couldn’t - in good conscience - stop cooking for Lita, or our latest dog Maui.

What We Do

We always have a different breakfast and dinner meal in the fridge. When choosing the next ones we’ll cook we try to make sure to rotate through different proteins and starches. For example, breakfast might be a tub of “Chicken Thighs and Tabbouleh” while dinner is “Beef and Sweet Potato”.

This book, and another one we use, has a lot of recipes for treats. We ignore all of those. We make the “meals”. One of our dogs is 30lbs (13kg), and the other is 40lbs (18kg), so we typically double the recipes and end up making about 2.5 US Gallons worth of food in each batch. We divide it into two Tupperware tubs. One goes into the freezer, and the other is probably going to be their next meal.

The recipes are really simple, and many of them can be simplified even more. For example, dogs don’t really care if you chop the parsley leaves, so I’ve stopped bothering. I just rinse them to get rid of the grit, then rip off the leaves, and put half the pile into each batch.

Most of the meals involve chopping a bunch of chicken or tubers which end up in two big pots on the stove. The only notable changes we make to the recipes is never using garlic powder because garlic is toxic to dogs, and frequently replacing water with low or no sodium broth.

Slow cooker meals can’t be doubled, but are generally very easy to make and give us another option for getting different proteins and starches into their systems.

How Often?

A tub usually lasts us about four days. So, we end up cooking roughly two meals a week. Remember, each one is doubled so there’s a frozen half waiting when the first tub runs out. That being said, we try and cook ahead a little bit extra, so that when the time comes to grab something from the freezer we don’t have to just repeat what they just ate. We can rotate to a meal with a different protein and starch.

What Are They Like?

Generally, pretty bland and uninteresting to a humans. We need salt. They don’t. They’re generally 1 part meat, 1 part starch, and a handful or two of veggies. After getting familiar with what ingredients are safe for dogs, and the ratios it’s pretty easy to just make up a recipe on the fly from whatever meat you have available + random pantry things.

A couple of them are pretty tasty though. I always steal a couple bites of the “Chicken Thighs and Tabouleh” when its fresh, and when we’re feeding them “Overnight Oats” (yogurt, honey, lemon, oats, apples) I always steal a bite or four while filling their bowls.

Treats

There’s only one treat we make for our dogs, and I don’t remember where we found it. Take one large tub of plain yogurt. One jar of all natural¹ smooth peanut butter. Mix with a stiff spoon, pour into massive silicone ice-cube molds, let freeze for about 24 hours.

We have found literally no treat that is higher value than this. Well, none that’s healthy to give to them with any regularity. One dog bites off pieces and devours his in under two minutes. The other dog slowly licks hers until it gradually disappears many minutes later.

Is This Really Healthy / Safe?

We’re not vets, but what I can tell you is that we’ve been doing this with three dogs now for over a decade. They get blood-work and a checkup every year, and every year our vet pronounces them healthy, .

New vets, and new vet-techs will be skeptical because most people who cook for their dogs do some weird ass things that don’t actually correspond to what a dog needs to be healthy. For example, they’re not vegetarians, so trying to give them a meat free diet is not great. Similarly, there are problems with raw diets too.

Additionally, you have to be vigilant about constantly rotating the things their eating. No meal you make will have all the nutrients they need. It’s just like feeding humans. Dog diets aren’t that different from ours, they just have a couple more things that are toxic, and - proportionally - need a lot more meat than we do.

Side note: every year they ask us how much we feed them at each meal, and every year we have to explain to them that whatever number we give them is meaningless because it doesn’t correspond to the caloric density of kibble which they’ve been trained on, and the calories, and nutrients they get from the same volume changes with literally every meal.

Downsides

There are two pretty obvious downsides.

Cooking two or three more meals every week sucks if you don’t have a House Spouse. Most people I know are too drained at the end of the day to cook their own meals, never-mind cook for the dogs.

Meat isn’t cheap. Veggies aren’t cheap. Dog meals use a lot of meat, and a good amount of veggies. We can only afford to cook for our dogs because we have tech-money coming into our household.

Less obvious is dialing in the proportions. Guidance for kibble volume does not apply. The caloric density is not only completely different, but it varies from meal to meal. Because we’re rotating constantly I’ve found a volume that works for each dog, and I always give them that volume. For some meals this means they’re getting less calories, for some meals they get more, but the constant rotation and the fact that we have two different meals every day evens this out in the end.

The only way to know how much to give you dog is to just watch their body weight very carefully. I don’t mean weighing them. I mean just looking down and making sure their ribs are just barely visible, and that their abdomens curve in behind them. If one of our dogs wasn’t a short-hair we’d probably have to weigh them every couple weeks.

Checking the shape of our black dog as I’m putting together their bowls has just become part of my routine.

Warning

Many people into healthy dog diet things swear by garlic powder for allergies and stuff like that. There is zero research to support this, and plenty of research showing that small amounts of garlic or onion can lead to kidney failure. Do Not feed your dogs any member of the Allium family: onion, garlic, scallions, shallots, leeks, or chives. The same goes for grapes and raisins.

If your dog consumes any of these you should induce vomiting immediately. You should know how, and have the things you’ll need to do so on hand. We have 60ml Irrigation Piston Syringes in our first-aid kits, and use that to get the appropriate amount of Hydrogen Peroxide down their throats.

Unfortunately the cookbook referenced above seems to want to add garlic powder to almost every meal.

Should You Do It?

If you can afford to buy extra meat and veggies every week, then yes. You absolutely should. Even when Wifey and I were both working and really really didn’t want to cook a dog meal in addition to our own, we knew what a huge difference it made to their quality of life, and continued to do it.