Home-Cooked Food VS Raw Food Diet

Before we started home-cooking for our dog, we were seriously considering about giving our doggie raw food diet after he kept having skin flare-ups while on kibbles.

We were thinking about commercially-developed raw food but were quite sceptical if the food could have been mishandled at any point during the transportation from overseas to Singapore, or from the suppliers to the pet shops, we just feel insecure about it.  Anyway in the end, our Turbo helped us make the decision.  As a close couple friends of ours are feeding their dog with the raw food diet, they gave us a few nuggets of it to try feeding Turbo, to see if he likes it.  For your info, Turbo is not a picky dog at all and he eats almost anything.  However, when we served him the raw nuggets, he smelled it, licked it and then went away, not wanting to eat it at all.  We have never seen him reject food like this.  Actually we also didn’t like the smell, it smelled very fishy somehow.  No offence to anyone feeding your dog the raw food diet.

So then another question is whether we want to just buy raw salmon and give him, or we cook it for him.  I heard that when you feed raw salmon, they can start to smell very fishy and salmony all over their body.  Also I am not sure about bacteria in the salmon cos you know for us humans if we have salmon sashimi, it must be the really really fresh kind, so we were not so comfortable giving the raw salmon we get from supermarkets or wet markets.  Even if we are ok to give the raw salmon, it will have to be the more expensive kinds so that it is really fresh.  We then decided to cook the salmon as well as other vegetables for Turbo and see if his skin improves.  It really did and his skin condition is so much stabilised now as you can see from the pictures in the previous post.

We also took into consideration for the pricing.  Although it is not cheap to give home-cooked diet, moreover if you also take into consideration the time involved in preparing the food, it is what we feel is the best for our dog that helped us make the decision for insisting on home-cooked food.  According to this close couple friends of ours, they told us that they give their dog at least 8 nuggets of the commercial raw food a day (morning and night) and each nugget costs about $1, which makes the cost of her meal to about $8 at least in a day.  

Our home-cooked food for breakfast probably costs about $1 (oats plus sweet potatoes / apples / bananas) and for dinner about $5.50 to $6.50, depending on what type meat you choose.  This comes up to about $6.50 to $7.50 in a day.  It is cheaper than raw food diet and what is more important is that it definitely smells and tastes so much nicer.  You can imagine yourself eating your dog’s home-cooked food as they are all made from human grade ingredients but you cannot imagine yourself eating the raw nuggets right?  At least seeing that our Turbo enjoys his home-cooked food so much makes us really happy and all the hard work is definitely worth it.    ;D

Quoted from http://animals.howstuffworks.com/pets/how-to-care-for-a-dog3.htm :

Avoid Raw Foods

You'd think things like raw meat and eggs would be more "natural" for a dog's diet.  After all, his cousins, the wolves and coyote, eat their food raw.  But domestication has made our dogs' digestive systems a little more sensitive.  Raw meat, poultry, and eggs may contain bacteria -- such as salmonella -- that can make your dog very sick, so it's best to always serve these foods cooked.  In addition, raw egg whites interfere with the absorption of biotin, one of the B-vitamins.