Before we had puppies, I just thought a dog treat was a dog treat. They were just dogs anyway, they wouldn't know the difference. I mean, come on. They lick their own hinter regions. Milk Bone, rawhide, whatever. Right? I couldn't have been more wrong. A dog treat is not just a dog treat. As it turns out, some dog treats give your puppy diarrhea, mess up their teeth, or even worse if they have allergies. Once we brought Mr. C and Miss B home, we started looking at dog food a little differently. If GMO corn and soy cause tumors and cancers in people, why would we want to give that to our puppies? Wouldn't you save money in the long run on vet bills for various cancers and conditions if you spent a little bit more and got the better quality food? I like to think so. Plus, if you give your dog high quality food and treats, it seems to me that their stools would be more manageable.
So then, what kind of treats do you get? We looked at Petsmart to see if Blue Buffalo made treats too and searched online to see what kind of non-GMO options we could find in that department. As it turns out, there are organic and non-GMO treats out there, but at the rate our puppies were going through treats for training, it would have been better for us to buy stock in a treat company.
With the first two, we went through quite a bit of trial and error before realizing that we shouldn't go too fancy trying to augment their food- or else they would end up with diarrhea. We started making sure that they had the recommended daily amount of dry food and then gave them a little bit of canned food every once in a while as a special treat if they were doing really well. We also found these really cool 'Happy Tummy' treats online that were supposed to settle their stomachs. Once we started evening out their diet and giving them the tummy treats, the diarrhea went away.
We were happy that we had finally figured it out... then we tried to reorder the Happy Tummy treats and discovered that the company no longer sold them! Nooooo!!!
I didn't want to switch them to unhealthy treats or give them treats that would mess up their stools. So I again turned to Google to see if there were recipes for dog treats. There were, but I wanted to include most of the ingredients listed on the Happy Tummy treats because they had worked so well. I tried a few of the recipes just to get a feel for the dry ingredient to wet ingredient ratio and then came up with my own recipe. I bake them in really small pieces so that you can give your puppy several treats without filling them up.
I will put my recipe and some picture of them in my next post. I have to make a new batch soon anyway! The puppies all love them, I like them because I know what's in them. I can even pronounce all of the ingredients. Inconceivable! ( <-- Shameless excuse to quote the Princess Bride)
With the first two, we went through quite a bit of trial and error before realizing that we shouldn't go too fancy trying to augment their food- or else they would end up with diarrhea. We started making sure that they had the recommended daily amount of dry food and then gave them a little bit of canned food every once in a while as a special treat if they were doing really well. We also found these really cool 'Happy Tummy' treats online that were supposed to settle their stomachs. Once we started evening out their diet and giving them the tummy treats, the diarrhea went away.
We were happy that we had finally figured it out... then we tried to reorder the Happy Tummy treats and discovered that the company no longer sold them! Nooooo!!!
I didn't want to switch them to unhealthy treats or give them treats that would mess up their stools. So I again turned to Google to see if there were recipes for dog treats. There were, but I wanted to include most of the ingredients listed on the Happy Tummy treats because they had worked so well. I tried a few of the recipes just to get a feel for the dry ingredient to wet ingredient ratio and then came up with my own recipe. I bake them in really small pieces so that you can give your puppy several treats without filling them up.
I will put my recipe and some picture of them in my next post. I have to make a new batch soon anyway! The puppies all love them, I like them because I know what's in them. I can even pronounce all of the ingredients. Inconceivable! ( <-- Shameless excuse to quote the Princess Bride)
Mr. M: "Curse these good looks of mine! So many kisses!!"
Miss S dreaming of more treats
Mr. C taking care of a re-purposed old belt that Mom didn't want any more
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