Yeast allergy foods - advice please?

[BoyMeetsWorld]

If anybody has any advice I'd be really grateful...

We have a boxer with severe yeast allergy, bless him. We manage it with carefully selected food (absolutely no cereals, grains, yeast products like brewers yeast or pea starch etc) and bathing every other day in Malaseb.

At the moment the feed we use is Fish4Dogs with Natures Diet. However it is costing us a small fortune - think £65 per month for the two. Then of course we have his regular hefty vets bills.

We have a baby due Nov & are really trying to make cutbacks as without my salary we're going to be very stretched. We love our dog but it's looking increasingly unlikely we can afford that much on food every month for him.

Does anybody have any suggestions for a cheaper food alternative that works really well for yeast allergy?

Thanks!

Raw feeding?

Wouldn't that be even more expensive?

I would ordinarily have said try switching to a raw diet, but you do need a friendly local butcher with whom you can build up a good relationship if you want to keep costs down.

You also need plenty of freezer space (although we manage without, as we're lucky enough to live in a village with a great butcher that lets us buy in bulk and keep it in his).

Where are you buying your food from? How much are you paying for each item ie how much for the Fish4Dogs and how much for the Nature Diet? Is there any chance you can source it cheaper online.

I know Nature Diet can work out expensive and am sure I saw someone recommending a good alternative the other day, but can't think what it was called.

My dog is admittedly smaller than yours but with careful shopping in the supermarket raw feeding is no dearer than then Arden Grange he was on. And I don't just feed cheap bits either. I do my 7kg dog for an average of approx 45p a day.

If you have the freezer space to really bulk buy from on line BARF suppliers it is cheaper still.

Little beggar is currently testing me by being picky with bones. I'll be gutted if we have to stop as his guts have much improved.

I am not sure about price comparisons, from my own experience , but on here people seem to be able, with careful shopping, be able to buy for cheaper than commercial food.

We did a google comparison & I think we get it as cheap as poss - £38 from chemist direct and £15 for 18 natures diet. The problem is he goes through 2 bags of fish4dogs and 30 natures diet every 1.5 months...

That does sound like a lot of food for one dog to get through.

When mine were on James Wellbeloved kibble, one 25 kg lurcher and 18/19 kg crossbreed used to get through just shy of 2 x 15 kg bags a month between them (roughly 800g of kibble a day).

So between my two, they ate just a bit more than the amount of dried food your boy eats - without the natures diet on top.

Had a chat with dh (who does the raw food buying) last night and he reckons we actually save money now with the raw food diet, purely because we only fed them high end kibble before. So whereas it might work out more expensive for dogs fed on cheaper kibble, he thinks there is a saving to be made by going raw and being canny with your buying. If you can buy in bulk as well it can make a big difference to the price.

The only other thing I can think of, if you have the storage space, is to look for somewhere that's willing to sell the Fish4Food in bulk and give you a discount.

They offer discounts on their own website for bulk orders, but we found we could get JW significantly cheaper from our small, local independent pet shop by ordering it via them on a regular basis, as they were keen to keep the custom and gave us a good price, as well as throwing in the odd extra here and there.