Make Your Own Healthy Dog Foods

Why would you want to take the time and effort to make your dog’s food? You have to shop for the ingredients and then you have to cook the food, and God knows, you already have enough to do with the job, the kid and their activities, and keeping the house together. Why not just buy a commercial food? There are plenty of commercial healthy dog foods, aren’t there? Maybe yes and maybe no.

Have you ever read the ingredients in a can of dog food? Do you know what all of the ingredients are? For example, do you know what BHA and BHT are, what meat by-products are, what fish meal is? If you’re going to give food containing these ingredients to a member of your family – and your dog is a member of your family – you really should know what they are.

BHA and BHT are antioxidants used to preserve fats. Seems okay. However, they have been banned from human use by many countries because they may possibly be human carcinogens and have been demonstrated to be carcinogenic in animal experiments. BHA and BHT use is still permitted in the U.S.

Meat by-products are clean parts of slaughtered animals, not including meat. These include lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, liver, blood, bone, and stomach and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth, or hooves. If the source isn’t specified, it can be from “downer” animals, animals diseased, disabled, or dying before slaughter. It can also be from any animal other than a cow, and it can even be from animals euthanized at animal shelters.

Fish meal is the clean, rendered, dried ground tissue of undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings, either or both, with or without the extraction of part of the oil. If the source isn’t specified, you never know the type or quality of fish, and if the fish meal isn’t specifically stated to be of “human quality” it has probably been preserved with Ethoxyquin. It has been linked to a number of illnesses, including cancer.

You wouldn’t deliberately eat any of these things yourself. Why would you knowingly feed them to your dog? Hopefully, you wouldn’t. If you make your dog’s food, you know the quality and nutritional value of the ingredients you use. The truly 100% safest healthy dog foods are the ones you make yourself.