Please can someone who raw feeds give me the low down?

[anchovies]

At the moment our lab is on fish4dogs which suits him perfectly. He has a very dodgy tum and can't tolerate cereals at all.

I have been made redundant so as part of cutting back I thought I'd have another look at dog food. What we feed him at the moment costs about £1 a day. Is it possible to raw feed for less than this?

Most definitely! If you get friendly with your butcher! This morning mine handed over 2 of those white bin liners full of chicken and rabbit carcass- enough to last my 20kg pup a month or so. I'd spent a tenner on meat for the week for us, and he now does pet mince (carcass, liver, offall, mixed raw scraps) for 50p a pound. (NE). Even if you were just feeding tesco value chicken wings for a week, 2 packs (which would easily feed my pup) come to about 3/4 quid. Bargain!

I do it for just under £1 a day per dog and, as I think I mentioned on the other thread, if you have a chest freezer and can buy in bulk it can probably be done cheaper than that.

Have a look to see if any raw suppliers deliver in your area - Landywoods, Raw to Go etc. and cost it up based on feeding around 2-3% of the dog's body weight per day. My 24kg dogs get roughly 500g per day - most suppliers seem to do 450g blocks of minced meat/bone/offal mixes, so one of those per day (60-80p depending on supplier and what mix it is) plus 1-2 chicken wings (£2.00 a kilo) is under £1 a day. That would be a nice simple introduction to the diet. Pets at Home do the Prize Choice blocks for about 80p each too.

Then you make friends with your butcher, get marrowbones for free, chicken carcasses for cheap, work out what chicken portions, offal, rabbits, ribs etc are cheapest (I don't feed anything over £3/kilo) and experiment. :)

That's just what I needed thanks :) Local butcher does free chicken carcasses and very cheap frozen chicken wings, will go and find out about everything else. Even better that my dog weighs 24kgs too so the maths has been done for me!

Would definitely endorse getting a chest freezer if possible. We stuck one in the garage, and it makes bulk buying much easier and cheaper. Also, it's useful if we see any deals in supermarket (you'd be surprised at what pops up especially if you keep your eyes peeled) and can then take it home and whack it in the freezer. A good time of year is when supermarkets buy in loads of meaty stuff for summer weekends then it p*sses down, so on Monday htey have loads of unsold meat - result!! If you can ever get access to a warehouse or costco or similar it can also be useful for topping up things like sardines, pilchards, etc as well (ours love these) and we serve them once a week or so. (or when i have forgotten to defrost the tripe!!! )

Yes, almost forgot- check out the reduced section in the supermarket! I head straight there now to see what treasures I can find also useful for DH pack up! Best to go on an evening or early morning.