WiseOne wrote: ↑Sun May 31, 2020 11:38 am
vnatale wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 4:26 pm
Hal wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 3:31 pm
I might be hopelessly out of date, but is there a reason you don't feed your pets fresh food?
Or is it that canned food is much better in the US?
We used to feed the dogs fresh chicken/fish/rabbit or fish mixed in with vegetables.
Believe it or not, the dogs used to jump up and pick fruit off the trees in the orchard, and it was rather funny when they first tried out a lemon
As an aside, our collies coats improved
dramatically when we fed them some powdered kelp which is available from farm stock suppliers.
The cats have ZERO interest in the food that I eat! As do probably most people here!
Vinny
As I recall your diet is mostly plant based, right? That could certainly explain it!
Whenever I cook meat, my cats come running to the kitchen and stare right at me as in: hey, give me some of that. I end up cutting off little pieces for them. They love it. It's kind of convenient actually because they get the pieces with gristle and such that I don't much care for.
The commercial raw food ends up being ~$3/day so I guess Friskies wins in that department. However I also feed them supplemented grinds and fresh chicken giblets (get these locally) that are quite a bit cheaper, so that cuts the cost some.
I'll also admit that what I do requires planning and a bit more work than opening a can. On the other hand, I don't have to lug boxes of cans from the mail room or cart them down to the trash room, so maybe it ends up roughly comparable.
I do spend a bit more than you on litter but that's mainly because I want to avoid using clay. It's not so much for environmental as safety reasons - I am not a fan of breathing in clouds of silica dust. That stuff can damage your lungs over time.
You recollections are correct. For the food I buy I am eating vegan in my house. On the rare times when I bring home some leftover pizza (with cheese on it) all three cats are quite interested in that. Two of them have surprised me, though, by being interested in eating peanut butter. I've been a HUGE peanut butter eater my entire life and I think these two are the first ones I've ever seen eat peanut butter.
Those boxes from Amazon get delivered in front of my garage and it's a short distance from there to this room. I do spend, though, a fair amount of time washing them, putting them in bags, and then recycling them But it's been a HUGE time savings to get them delivered direct from Amazon rather than spending all that time buying them at the supermarket.
And, here is what I do with the used litter. I throw it out my front door!
I used to have this huge bush in front of my living room picture window. I removed it several years ago and have not yet replaced it. So, all that used litter goes into that spot. Eventually it breaks down into being quite dirt-like. It's been drilled in me that one is to never use used kitty litter in a food garden. But it seems like it is "free" fertilizer for either planting flowers or, someday, some replacement bush.
Vinny
