My dogs eat better than I do

Chicken just like Momma used to make

While I was thinking of other things to post on how we save money and make our lives simpler, I thought that maybe I could tell you our adventures in feeding our "furbabies". 

Our dogs are Walker, Johnny, and Annie. They are Rhodesian Ridgebacks and are also known as African Lion Hounds. 

They are great dogs but they are big. 90,80, and 70 pounds respectively. That means they eat A LOT. 

When we first got Walker, the oldest, we were feeding kibble just like everyone else. Granted we wanted to make sure that he was getting the best possible food (not Ole' Roy) because we knew he was going to be a AKC show dog. A 40 pound bag of food ranged from around 40 bucks to well over 75 dollars. With one large dog it was manageable. Then we got 2 more and a bag of kibble lasted about 10 days. You do the math and at the upper end we were spending about $225 per month in kibble.

We weren't happy with the kibble either. We were always getting updates about this factory and that factory having recalls on dog food, You had to watch the fillers they put in, the dogs were little gas factories on the kibble, and it was expensive. 

Solution: make our own dog food. Crazy right? Well turns out it isn't that insane after all. I already hunt so we regularly have meat that is needing to be ground up and I had been eyeing a meat grinder anyway, so we did our research and came up with a plan. 

Step 1 come up with a recipe for the food. We chose Chicken carcass because we already had a source from our farmer that supplies our meats. 

Step 2 buy a grinder for the carcass'. We chose to go with the LEM 1 HP grinder like this one: 

LEM Products 1 HP Stainless Steel Electric Meat Grinder which would come in handy with meat from my hunts too. 

Step 3 MAKE THE FOOD. 

So that is what we did. We talked to our breeders at Ivorymoon Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Ben Ridge Rhodesian Ridgebacks. They have been both great resources and a sounding board to us. We got our plan together and bought our first batch of chicken carcass'. 125lbs of the stuff. 

It fills up 2 of our big coleman coolers Coleman 100-Quart Xtreme Cooler (Blue)

and away we went to a grinding. It has taken us about a year to come up with a good system but from start to finish it takes about an hour and a half to set up, do the grinding, and clean up after. 

The food winds up looking like meatloaf and is so healthy for our dogs. PLUS it actually saves us quite a bit. All in for 6 weeks of food it cost us around $125. That is a savings of $212.50 every six weeks. The grinder costs around 550 so we paid that off in savings after 12 weeks. That means the first full year we saved almost $1200 in dog food. 

And they love it of course. 

So give it a try. If you need any help or advice feel free to contact me. What things can you make for your Fur Family that would save money?