Raw Feeders…are You Paying More?
Posted by
editor in
Question & Answer on
Feb 9th, 2010 |
17 responses
I have always been very interested in starting my dog on a raw diet.
But, I was concerned about the price..
I feed Merrick dry dog food (5Ib bag- 16$ every other week)
Would you say I would be spending more or less money raw feeding?
(Keep in mind this change wouldn’t be for a couple of months, I need to do my research if you couldn’t tell.)
Thank you,
Happy Monday to you all.
Similar Posts:
- I Feed My Dogs Raw Food, Should I Worm More Often And I Have An Additional Question?
- How Much Is Enough When Feeding Raw?
- How Much Raw Food Should I Be Feeding My 12 Week Old American Bulldog Puppy?
- When Feeding The Raw Diet…….?
- B.a.r.f. Diet Raw Feeding Great Dane?
I went from a rotation of EVO and Wellness core to frankenprey.
So it really has been a wash.
BUT…as I am getting more into it, I am finding new sources, and already the prices have gone down.
We have quite a few hunters in our area, and sometimes they will clean out their freezers and give stuff away on Freecycle (score). Another thing I watch is our local shopper, found some geese and rabbit carcass. Watch for sales for our grocery stores.
I don’t have a large freezer, I usually just go a couple/few weeks out. Take a Sunday night, cut, wiegh and bag the portions and freeze. Ready to go, easy.
Before I started raw, I figured out what it was costing me to feed Kip every day – I weighed the amount of kibble (Innova) he was getting (which he was actually losing weight on), used that to determine the # of days a bag would last, then the price of the bag, etc.
I then figured out that at 2.5% of his body weight daily for raw, if I stayed at $2.00/pound or under, the costs would be the same (and this doesn’t take into account the 30 minute drive to get the kibble). I recently stocked up on liver, pork and chicken at $1/pound, and my running tally is significantly under $2/pound.
So for me, raw is *cheaper* than kibble.
I am spending about the same as i was spending per week when i was feeding Canidae over a year ago before they changed the formula and increased the priced and decreased the bag size. I am spending less then what i was spending when i went from Canidea to Evo.
What you will spend will depend on the size of the dog and the quality of food you are currently buy. My guess would be your initial cost will be slightly higher to buy all the things and then the next time you shop you be looking at a lower cost.
a friend of mine who is a fellow dog breeder feeds on tripe and mixer. if you cant afford to do this then why ask.
pet dogs are good on dry complete food and some wet food mixed in if they dont like it.
You can contact local slaughter houses for deals on offall. also jewish slaughter houses generally dont sell the offall to their business contacts so will sell cheaply to you.
you need storage depending on the amount your dog needs. but i would say that unless you have lots of dogs or are breeding then you will pay more for the small amount of raw you need than your regular food.
It depends on where you live, how many dogs you have, what breeds they are, their weight, age, activity level, and exactly what kind of meat you want for your dog- If you want the absolute best(free range and organic) or if you’re happy with just run of the mill meat.
It’s not as expensive as it sounds, really. When you buy in mass bulk and freeze the meat, you can be set for a while. For me, it varies month to month how much I buy, because some months I’ll find a great sale on and go ballistic and buy half the shop worth, and other months meat prices will be through the roof so I’ll only buy what I need, if anything. I’m going to be investigating a place where I can get Roo carcasses for real cheap- It’s pretty much all bone, but it’s only about AUD$5 for 10kg or something ridiculous.
Shop around your local area, and see if you can find somewhere you can by entire carcasses, or cheap cuts.
Best of luck,
and Merry Tuesday from Down Under!!
It totally depends on what type of raw you are planning to feed. If you go for the prepackaged commercial raw then you may easily be spending the exorbitant amount of $200 a month that another poster quoted. If you go BARF then all the (unnecessary) supplements, fruit and vegetables add up too. Not to mention the wasted time grinding and pureeing.
I feed ‘frankenprey’ (2/3 meat including heart and the remainder a combination of meaty bones and organs) to two dogs and three cats and can honestly say that it costs me less than when I fed commercial diets. I tend to average about Au$3-5 kg and from what US members on raw feeding forums say they feed for about US$1 lb.
You will need to invest in a freezer so that you can take advantage of sales or even scores of free meat (freecycle and other lists of this sort can be a great resource). Buy in bulk and when on sale – I often hit the local butcher about 30 minutes before closing to take advantage of the markdowns.
It really depends on the prices where you live and how good at shopping for bargains you can get.
I try to stick to a budget of around $1 per pound for dogs food. Of course that’s an average some is less some is more.
I feed about 150 pounds of dog for around $60 a month. My mom who just switched her own dog to raw can do it for about $10 a month.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29035692@N0…
He is 17 months almost and I feed him
Orijen 28.9lbs is $65.00. ( I buy on ebay when my Mom and Pop store doesn’t have the dry).
He eats about 15lbs per week of dry.
70% meat
30% veggies, fruits, and veggies.
Plus 1000 miligram of fish oil daily.
At night he gets generally 3 patties about 2 lbs raw of Stella and Chewy’s raw frozen patties a night.
The dog is worth it!
A nurse at the hospital said she was stopping this after feeding raw and costing her $200 amonth for 2 Westies..I would think with the prices soaring today it would be more costly than what you spend now
ADD– Guy from the UK this is the USA and prices are;nt cheap here and their are’nt farmers around every corner like you may have there.They don’t give away free food as there is always paying for whatever is left over..
Exactly as EssJay.
Some butchers give raw chicken carcass out for free, and as for spending $200 dollars a month for 2 westies well………. she must have been buying prime rump steak for that, never heard of anything so silly.
I am UK — I buy organic raw chicken plus other meats and I feed 4 rottweilers for about £20 a week.
Those of us that do feed raw would rarely go back to kibble. We have done our homework and know what goes into it — and we say — No thanks.
Best of luck with all the raw feeding and and if you are only feeding a 5lb bag every two weeks then raw feed will be really cheap for you. Source butchers and supermarkets selling cheap.
It depends where you live. I have fed raw for 14 years and now have 6 dogs, all raw fed. I buy in bulk and it is cheaper to feed this way. But you need a very large freezer and initially need to shop around for a good supply source. I buy direct from the meat preparation places/ chicken farms, abbatoirs and wholesale rawfood places and not directly from big stores which are more expensive.
Good luck. #
I feed 7 dogs raw and it costs me about $32 – $40 per month. 4 big/med. size and three terriers. I get tripe and pig heads from the abattoir, chicken backs and ox heart from the butcher. I catch rabbits and pick up road kill venison.
I do keep a special freezer for the dog food and am not at all squeamish!
I pay less; getting most of my meat free from fellow raw feeders.
How much it costs to raw feed depends on a couple of things:
1) What type of raw feeding – BARF, Whole Prey Model, Frankenprey
2) Where you source your meats from
I feed a Frankenprey model and have keep a general rough tally of what I’ve fed (types of meat, offal, bone, fish etc) to make sure I’m balancing things out well enough. I find this to be the least expensive way for *me* to raw feed. If I lived in the country I’d feed a modified whole prey model and would have rabbits/chickens/ etc to feed my dogs.
I source my meat from a variety of places – grocery store sales, hunters leftovers (venison, elk, bear, pheasants etc), my FIL fishing, spring culling (lambs, emu, llama), the wharf (fish heads/entrails), the local ethnic grocery (chicken feet, more fish heads, pig heads/feet) and the local restaurant meat wholesale supplier (40lb boxes of nearly any kind of meat). My goal is to have my overall feeding for 6 months to be less than $1 a lb. So far I’ve had no issues doing that – but I have a BIG freezer and will at times buy pork at 30 cents a lb or whole chickens at 69 cents a lb (breasts are stripped for human consumption – a free meal for the people!).
At present I’m feeding 6 big dogs (including 2 growing large/giant breed pups) at about $220 a month. (That’s 505 lbs of dogs to feed daily and I feed about 9-10 lbs of meat on a daily basis) so I’m averaging a bit under $1 a lb. My amounts and cost will drop as the young ones become adults and need less food.
To feed these dogs a high quality brand of kibble would cost me at least $300 a month if not more – and I’d have to still supplement it with extra fat to keep the dog’s coats in the condition I like.
But – beyond cost of the food… where I find it REALLY saves me money is on decreased vet bills. No teeth cleaning. No skin issues. No anal gland issues. (and no yard cleaning as it all melts away in the Seattle rain).
Whether I could save money raw feeding a single dog – I don’t know. For me, 2 whole chickens feeds 6 dogs. If I had one dog I’d have to portion it out. For me, a 40 lb box of whatever I buy at the wholesale meat place (pork necks or turkey necks) thaws at about the same rate I feed it — so if I feed it two days and then bag up the last 20 lbs I’m doing good — I don’t have to bag 1 lb bags of meat.
I also don’t have to worry about meat getting old. I can fill and completely empty my freezer in about 20-30 days – so things get rotated pretty fast. (worst buy EVER for me was 6 turkeys at 23 cents a lb — the dogs ate the first one… gave me the skank eye with the second… I had to WAIT to portion the rest of them out over several months – WASTED SPACE even if it was cheap).
Edit: Addicted to Agility makes a good point – I’ve been gifted with free meat that other people’s dogs wouldn’t eat. I’ve also been gifted with meat that someone needs to get out of their freezer (fall butchering time). During hunting season my butcher tosses a box of bones etc out beside his garbage container on Saturday (when he butchers prey meat) for raw feeders to grab (he can’t *give* it to us due to some USDA rule but he calls me before he sets it out so I can come get it!!!)
When I lived in northern MN I would get venison as road kill. The DNR had a list of mushers (dog sled) who were available to take roadkill and we were rotated according to area. We paid $15 for each time we rotated through the list. $15 for 70+ lbs of meat is a good deal!
your dog is getting all he needs from kibble maybe you should go to Petco (not Petsmart) the only store that has so much natural food options and get Dick Van Patton Natural Balance (what I feed) Blue Buffalo,Wellness,or Halo they come in bigger bags the website has all the ingredients and prices don’t get Nutro even though in the natural section always has recalls they have one now in fact I also cook turkey or chicken and some carrots or sweet potato and put in on my dogs kibble every meal so he gets the best of both worlds I would look further into feeding anything raw when I did research I learned they should’nt eat anything not cooked raw meat has bacteria and or disease and they can’t digest raw vegetables.good luck!
its not good to feed raw meat it usually cases worms i believe dry dog food is best because it helps keeps there teeth clean too
Anyone who says that Raw Food is NOT good for a classified Canis Lupus Familiaris (Domestic Wolf – Dog) is absolutely off their head and needs it testing with the local nut house because you are self deluded IDIOTS!
ALL DOGS ARE CARNIVORES!
DOGS SHOULD EAT PURE RAW MEAT.
NOT COOKED COMMERCIAL SHIT IN A BAG!
Do your research cock!