Nutrition: Dog Food Vs Cooked Human Food

What do you feed your dog? Which brand? Is he a picky eater? These are some of the common questions when dog owners meet each other. Over the years we started out with dog food aka kibbles. But now we avoid dog food for our own dogs. Here's why:

My Shih Tzu and Golden Retriever develop tumors when they were about 5-8 years old.

The tumors did not happen simultaneously. And needless to say, it costs a lot to get the tumors removed. Luckily they were not cancerous so the surgeries were successful.

I started paying more attention to the dog diet. Usually we were like most dog owners. We feed a particular brand and we would see if the dog likes it and the stool do not come out smelling too bad or too liquid. Then we settle for that brand for years.

Then there were reports of dog food carrying too much preservative. Of course I did not believe that at first. I tested putting dog food in the garden where there were many ants. None of the ant would want to pick the dog food. Bad news. I did this test previously with McDonald's too and got the same results. If the ant hate it, it is too much preservatives. Preservatives are proven to cause cancer.

Another worrying report was that dog food is made of carcasses from the zoo. Yes, dead rotting animal bodies. Gross. I could not tell whether this was true or not.

Then I looked at my grandma dogs. They are so rugged and always healthy. She fed the dogs with cooked food, or sometimes straight from her plate.

Anyway, I made the decision to change from dog food to cooked food.
Was it easy? No.
There were instances where the dogs were not used to the change.
We did it gradually. 90% dog food-10% cooked food for one week, 80-20 for another week, 70-30 and so on. We added fruits such as pear and apple to help with the change and to build the enzyme system.

The fruits we feed them in the morning, for fear that if we feed the fruits at night, the fruits might ferment and make them bloated.

Is cooked food cheaper than dog food? The answer is yes. But this was never the primary reason. We want to give the best for our dogs.
Is it more troublesome? A little bit, but we got around that problem (in another post i will tell you).
Are the dogs more healthy? Definitely. I see my dogs more lively, sleep more soundly and when they are awake, their stamina is increased.

So this is what we feed the dogs:
1. Cooked rice
2. Boiled chicken and/or pork
3. Juice. We use Hurom slow juicer to juice up carrot, apple, green vegetable and other fruits. We drink up the juice, spare some juice for them and give them the fiber too. Their poo is easier.

Update Oct 2013: I did business study on feasibility to manufacture a dog food.

In conclusion, I could not make a packaged dog food without using preservatives. Breakeven is terrible if I do not resort to buying cheap unwanted meat from the zoo or from euthanized animal.

Profit is 5-10x if I resort to doing all these terrible things. Yes we are not talking 40-80% profit, we are talking in the 100s of %.

If we were driven by greed, we should have manufactured dog food for our customers. But we love dogs. We do not want to give lousy things to dogs.