Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Grain Free Dog Food

Do the chickens save them any?

My Grandpa had a Border Collie that loved steaming hot cow crap.Never got sick on it.

Shît eating chickens

Those are the best eggs

Only if they get to it before the dung beetles.

My last dog never ate dog food of any kind and lived to be 15.5. She lived primarily on venison her whole life with rabbit, chicken, beef and pork thrown in occasionally. We did mix rice with the meat sometimes and she liked it fine.

They haven't spent 20,000 years adapting to eat everything humans do.

Alternatively, God intelligent designed them not to need grain.

It's a hard-knock life...

Bear left a big steaming pile in driveway a couple weeks ago, 6 month lab gobbled it all up.
About 4PM, I kept her out until 9 waiting.
She held just shy of 12 hours.......nice middle of the night barf. And being the good girl she is she came into bedroom to do it.

My dogs have been "grain free" for over 20 years. No problems. The issue has to do with faulty genes in the individual dogs/breeds, not the lack of grains in their diet. Most vets I know are also salesmen for the dog food companies for which they sell product. Our vet sells Science Diet. He is not going to say that a grain free diet is good and be a hypocrite in the eyes of his customers.

The high content of legumes in some grain free dog foods would be be the place to look long before blaming a lack of grains.

If grains were such an important part of dogs' diets, Iowa would be over run with wolves, instead of Montana and Wyoming.

Exactly. We do grain free but they still get some when "unauthorized feedings" fall from our table Our Aussies are 16 (almost) and 13 and in great health.

This^^^^^ only to add, not all grain free dog foods are created equal. Almost all of them source stuff from Asia. I had problems several years ago with Taste of the Wild. Since switching to Origen all our dogs do better, no health problems at all. If you’re serious about your dog you bite the bullet and feed it right.

Dietary regime...

First two years or so prob'ly cheapest available plus garbage.

Then prob'ly about a month of just garbage.

Then two months of Purina One.

And now a whole week of mostly cheap raw ground pork, the package says 20% fat but looks and feels like 50, about a pound and a half a day..

So far so good




Twenty years back we started out with Beneful, until we noticed the dogs would pick out all the red pieces first, and their craps were large and sloppy, perhaps from all the cornmeal filler.

Ya can spend a mint on dog food of course, settled on Purina One as a step up but not extravagant. Never had a problem.

BS flag there Jim.
They only eat steaks, chops, and burger. Everyone knows that.

Our dog's on the high end stuff from Costco. Mix it up every trip. Yellow bag, red bag, blue bag. No grain. He's pretty healthy (other than a bout with cancer 5 years ago).

He gets his 'grain' supplement from eating deer crap. Usually pukes it back up after a bit. Good times...

"Feeding" dogs is a fairly recent occurrence. In primitive cultures, even today dogs aren't "fed." They are mostly expected to get their meat from rats and such. Even when we started intentionally feeding them, till fairly recently, that meant tossing them guts, heads, feet, etc.. after the hunt or livestock slaughter. Dog food is only about a century old concept.

BEWARE bringing your dog around public fishing spots where people hang our for hours at a time. Most dogs love to eat human sh&t, almost as much as they do rolling in it

It is a complete myth that wild canines (or cats) eat a pure meat diet. When a coyote/wolf/bobcat/lion kills an animal, the very first thing they consume are the innards. THAT's where they get the grains and vegetables they need. They don't start on the parts we think of as meat until the guts are completely gone.

The diet you feed them ought to match nature. We can't buy innards, but we can buy feeds with a proportion of plant matter in the form of grains and vegetables.

The animals that canids hunt don't eat much grain at all, other than incidental amounts. Grasses and other wild greens, nuts, and such are not grains. Sure, there's some nutritional benefit to greens and such, so they are included in my dogs' diet by the inclusion of a product called Base Mix, by The Honest Kitchen. I also add a bit of raw liver to each meal.

They don't eat grass bags?

The Pig had fresh quarters on sale for 29 cents a pound last week. So $2.90 for a 10 pound package. We stocked up. Yeah, I cook it all.