Homemade Dog Food is More Than Your Dinner Left-Overs

Homemade dog food is more than table scraps. Use homemade dog food recipes to provide a balanced, nutritious diet and healthy life for your pet. Healthy dog food recipes include high value protein and low fat complex carbohydrates such as brown rice and vegetables.

If your idea of making dog food is to pitch a few morsels from the dinner table, think again. Or if your idea is to scrape the plates at the end of supper, think again. Whether you realize it or not, a lot of the foods we eat can be harmful to our dogs.

Our table food contains too much spice, salt and other ingredients that our furry pets would be better off not eating. A well balanced diet for a pet would probably be a bit on the bland side to us humans.

It's important to recognize that dogs have different digestive systems than humans; their digestive tract is much shorter than ours and cannot process all the same types of foods we can.

Dogs can have obesity issues just like we can. It can be greatly magnified if we feed them table scraps. Dogs have a different metabolism than we do and they don't need as much food. We tend to want to give them portions that we eat. Most dogs are much smaller than we are. If we continue to feed table scraps there’s a very good chance that they will become unhealthy and overweight.

This especially holds true if your dog will eat anything (and many dogs will eat anything you give them). A lot of people feel that throwing out the table scraps is a waste of money and if their dog will eat it they feel that they save money by giving the dog the scraps and in not having to either make the right type of dog food or buying dog food. This could do your dog a lot more harm. It's safer to just throw the scraps down the garbage disposal than into your dog's dish.

Some dangerous table scraps are: chicken bones - which can break apart and cause internal bleeding (although some people dispute this - we still would rather be safe, than sorry); popcorn - which is hard for them to digest; and chocolates and grapes can cause severe health problems that can be fatal.

You can get a good picture of how your dog's food affects your dog by looking at his output. If his feces are runny, mushy, and too much you can blame that on his diet. Feces that are firm and dark brown are normal. A dog on a normal healthy diet will have about two bowel movements a day. Which is one movement per meal time if you feed them twice a day.

Homemade dog food is good for your dog, as long as you use healthy dog food recipes to make the most nutritient-rich foods that are well-digested by dogs. Check with your veterinarian about safe foods for your canine. Then when you cook supper for yourself; use homemade dog food recipes to cook the proper foods for your pet.

If your dog is a picky eater, or has food allergy and/or digestive problems, then make sure that you manage your pet's diet carefully. When adding new foods to your dog's diet, start small and don't mix with other new foods. Watch carefully for at least two to three weeks to see if there is any reaction (sometimes there is an immediate reaction to the food, other times it can take a number of weeks before you see a bad reaction.)

Provide your dog with a herbal supplement that will help balance stomach or digestion issues, we recommend PetAlive Digestive Support which is a herbal remedy developed to treat digestive system problems in pets and is FDA approved.

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