Week of Raw Dog Food

Every Friday, we go to our local farmer’s market to pick up our order of raw ground chicken & bone from Mainely Poultry.  We typically get 15lbs of this, plus another 5lbs of wings, necks and hearts.  This costs $16.10, and then we pick up a couple more pounds of veggies, such as sweet potato, peas, kale, carrots – whatever is in season or on sale…this generally only costs us another $2-4.  Then Chris spends about an hour on Saturday morning combining the meat & veggies, and portioning them out for a week of meals for Baxter & Sabine.  We keep the portioned meals in the freezer, taking one out about 24 hours before serving in order to thaw.

This has worked out to be a great solution for us, and affordable considering how much we were spending on high-quality, dry kibble each month…  We used to feed Canidae, but liked to rotate brands every couple months, but the raw diet is much healthier for the dogs, plus it is a LOCAL diet, which we are also big supporters of.  We know the dogs love this diet so much more because they devour the food in just a minute, whereas with the dry kibble, it would often sit there for hours before they would finish it all.  We actually just got Sabine a Brakefast bowl so that she would stop eating so quickly – she would literally inhale her meals in under 30 seconds.  This new bowls makes her slow down a little.

We wish everyone had the ability to feed their dogs a raw diet, but we understand it can be extremely expensive if you don’t have access to fresh poultry from a farm.  There have been a couple of occasions where Mainely Poultry was not able to make it to the farmer’s market and we were stuck buying our chicken at the grocery store – how expensive for meat that is not even local or free-range!  The pre-packaged raw diets are also very expensive too – we once figured out it would cost us about $70 per dog/month to feed a diet like Honest Kitchen (which technically isn’t even raw, though they say it is).  So we are fortunate & thankful to have a great source of raw chicken & bone to feed our dogs.