Saving Money on Pet Food

Commercial canned dog food has a lot of fillers in it and that can sometimes cause problems with dogs and their "poop". I used to buy the generic or "retailer's own" brand of canned dog food until my Border Collie had puppies. I discovered a little known fact. The more expensive dry dog food, is better for your pet than the generic or low cost dry food and surprisingly it ends up to be cheaper in the long run.

You can expect to pay around $90 for a 20 kg bag of dry food in Australia. That is a premium dry food usually bought from stock feed merchants. I thought the salesman was trying to push me to buy when he told me that it was cheaper to buy the more expensive brand, until my vet confirmed his story. So I decided to go back and buy it.

I needed a good food for my dog when she had the puppies and got the one for lactating dogs. The salesman told me that if I gave some to my other dog, I should cut down on other food because it was very concentrated and I should only give him a little because it would give him too much energy and that I didn't want. So I bought another bag of food similar in quality but without some of the extra vitamins. I ended up saving around $18 a week by doing this.

Also, if your dogs like bones, why not try this cheap alternative. In Australia, we have a franchise that sells everything to do with chicken meat. That means they are left with huge amounts of chicken frames. I used to buy them for soup at 20c a frame or 45 frames for $5. I have an upright freezer which I used to freeze them. When I get them home I break them up (believe me you don't want to freeze them in the bag together, we learned the hard way, they all stuck together).

Every day the dogs get a chicken frame each. That's 2 frames per day at 11c each, or 20c each if you only buy enough to last a week (22c or 40c a day is a huge saving). Cooked chicken frames are a no-no for dogs, but uncooked ones are fine. It's only when the bones are cooked that they become brittle and can cause damage to the dogs' throats.

Also, we found another "side effect" of feeding the dogs the more quality of the dry food. The dogs' poops are smaller and not messy at all. The reason for this, I was told by my vet, is because the food is better quality, there is not much left over after the food goes through the animals' systems. I love our dogs and want the best for them, so finding a quality food that is cheaper than I expected, was certainly a bonus for me.

By Ozbev from Rockingham, Western Australia