Beautiful dog pics-- keep em coming!
Anyone else feeding Kirkland? I was, but then actually felt bad spending only $.40/day feeding my dog. Doubling or tripling that would have zero impact on my retirement plans, but I think I'm getting better quality food with blue wilderness. Basically I considered supplementing protein with table scraps and I can't do that cheaper per day than just getting more expensive dog food to begin with. I might even buy into the raw diet concept but I don't want raw meat all over my floors/carpet. I know you can go overboard with this stuff- home cooked vegan paleo wolf diet or whatever but the Kirkland just seemed too cheap to be true. Like if you could buy human food for only $.40/day would you eat it (without further supplementation)? My dog eats the same number of calories as I do-he's an active guy and I'm trying to lose weight
If you're considering raw but don't want the mess/work, there are some commercially produced raw diets out there. Generally they come in freeze dried or frozen. We feed our cat Primal brand, but will definitely also feed it to our future dogs.
We've fed Kirkland grain-free, and it's decent as far as kibble goes. You could do waay worse. For a while we fed Earthborn Holistic kibble, which is better, but a bit over double the cost.
Raw can be expensive, messy, and/or a decent amount of work. There are a few "tiers" of work vs. $$.
Pre-made raw patties from a place like Pet Supplies Plus will set you back something like ~$6/lb, which is pretty insane, but they're super easy. You just put the patty in your dog's food bowl.
Pre-made ground mixes can be found from raw pet food suppliers for about $2-3/lb. These usually come in 2lb deli containers and you scoop it out to feed.
Making your own raw meals from scratch is by far the cheapest (we're doing it for around ~$1.50/lb) and is most ideal for the dogs, as they get real bones (not ground bones), big chunks of meat, and as much variety of meat sources as you can find. This is what I do.
In order to do that sort of thing, you ideally need a big chest freezer, be willing to deal with 50lb giant frozen blocks of pork hearts, duck necks, etc. in addition to cutting up organ meats (liver, kidney, spleen, pancreas, etc.), and be willing to put in the time to find suppliers and coordinate purchases. Getting this sort of thing up and going is a pretty big operation, but once you've figured it all out, it's not too bad. Once every month or two, I make 4lb deli containers (10% bone, 5% liver, 5% other organ, 80% meat; yes I have a spreadsheet) in bulk (usually between 10-50 x 4lb at a time depending ) and freeze them. As far as variety of meats, this way we are able to feed beef, pork, chicken, duck, turkey, venison, quail, rabbit, salmon, and goat. We've found reasonably priced suppliers for all of those in our area, which took a bit of doing.
Dehydrated is an option too that we tried once for travel, but it came out to at least double the cost of our usual raw meals. Nowadays we just bring a 5-day cooler with the 4lb containers packed with our own human food when we travel.