Homemade Dog Food Dangers

There has been a change in recent time towards homemade meals after the pet food recalls. While homemade meals will leave you with fewer worries about the ingredients that are included, they also pose a danger for dogs.

Dogs need a balanced meal that provides all the essential nutrients in the correct amount and proportions required to drive vital body processes.

Most homemade meals are unbalanced; they contain too much of some nutrients and lack in other vital nutrients. Such deficiencies in the meal are usually detrimental to health and also affect general body condition of your dog.

Nutritional requirements in dogs will vary based on the following factors

- Age

- Physiological status

- Health status

- Weather conditions

- Size

When formulating a meal, all these factors are usually taken into consideration. Homemade meals however are likely to be the same in composition for all dogs and the only thing dog owners are likely to change is the quantity they feed the dog. This is likely to result in a myriad of health problems such as retarded growth in young puppies, poor development of bones, malformed pups in mothers who are fed meals deficient in calcium or with a bad ratio of calcium to phosphorous.

Some foods are very dangerous to dogs and their inclusion in food may have fatal consequences when fed to dogs. Owners may unknowingly use some of these food in their bid to give the food taste or some flavour. Foods that are toxic to dogs and should never be added to dog meals are:

Some dogs will be sensitive to some food components. Dogs suffering from food allergies may react badly to use of some grains in which case you might need to try out some ingredients before finding something that your dog will not react to.

Sudden changes in food may cause diarrhoea, vomiting and flatulence in dogs. This applies to commercial foods as well as homemade meals though the signs may be more pronounced if you switch your dog from a commercial food to homemade food.

While some digestive upsets resolve with time, there are those that persist and cause the dog to lose weight and become predisposed to other infections in the digestive system. For this reason, if you are considering switching your dog to homemade food it is advised that you do it gradually over a period of time, and thus giving the dog’s system time to adjust.

Deficiencies of some nutrients and excesses of others that are observed in many homemade meals may cause serious health problems that will cost owners a lot to manage and treat. An excess of fat and carbohydrates in food will cause the dog to gain a lot of unnecessary weight leading to obesity. Too much fat can also cause pancreatitis.

Lastly, dogs are omnivores and not obligated carnivores as perpetuated by those who call for an all meat diet. Such a dog diet will lack in many essential nutrients and without supplementation, you will end up with a very unhealthy dog.

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