Home cooking for your pet dog

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Pete Wedderburn qualified as a vet twenty-five years ago, and now spends half his working life writing newspaper columns. He lives in Ireland with his wife, two daughters and a menagerie of dogs, cats, poultry and other furry and feathered companions. Pete answers readers' queries about their pets' health in his video Q&A The basic dietary needs of pets are well known, in terms of requirements for protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals. All products labelled as "complete pet food" are legally obliged to supply these essential nutritional needs. Owners can feed off-the-shelf pet food to their dogs with confidence that they're going to get all the necessary nutrients.

But there are a number of reasons why some owners are now choosing to home cook for their dogs.

Firstly, there are those who believe that commercial pet food is just wrong. They look to dog's ancestors in the wild, and they question the use of highly processed, cooked ingredients. They believe that a raw diet of meat and bones is closer to the natural nutrition of dogs, and that modern commercial pet food may actually cause illness in pets. They believe that a raw diet results in a healthier coat, cleaner teeth and breath, reduced stool volume and odor, and better overall health. This is a controversial subject, deserving a full blog post on its own, and I'll try to do that in the coming weeks.

Other owners may have fed commercial food in the past, but they've heard the stories of pet food recall in the USA over the past few years, due to the accidental inclusion of toxic ingredients, and their faith in pet food manufacturers has been shaken.

Many owners feed home cooked diets because their pet has specific nutritional needs; for example, a dog may have skin disease because of a food allergy, and the commercial hypoallergenic diets may not be sufficiently low in allergens. These pets may need to be fed a diet with the most minimal number of ingredients, prepared in the home kitchen. Another example would be a dog with renal failure. There are commercial diets designed to provide optimal nutrition for these cases, but some dogs don't like them: a home cooked diet, designed to a specific recipe so that it provides the correct balance of nutrients for kidneys under stress, can be more palatable.

Finally, and most commonly, some dogs are fed home cooking simply because their owners want to feed them like this. Dogs are increasingly treated like "little people" in the house, and it can give some owners great satisfaction to include them in the daily cooking routine. Dogs may prefer the taste of home cooked food, and it can be rewarding to watch your small friend gobbling down the plateful that you've prepared.

Most vets are wary about recommending home cooking for pets. It can be difficult to design a diet that's uniformly appropriate for all dogs, which can lead to nutrient deficiencies or excesses. Such problems won't be obvious to owners at first: errors in formulation may take months or years to show up, with subtle signs of disease that progress over a longer period.

The consensus view of the veterinary profession is that if you're going to home cook for your pet, you need to do it correctly. This means consulting with a professional animal nutritionist so that you can be sure that you're supplying the correct nutrients, in adequate quantities, for an animal the age, gender, breed and size of your pet. The internet has made it easier to get this type of advice: there are websites where you pay a small fee to obtain a personalised consultation for diet design.

For most owners, it's safer, and more convenient, to stick to a high quality commercial diet. If you want to spoil your dog with a bit of home cooking, then go ahead and do so. But make sure that the staple part of the daily diet - let's say 70% of the food intake - is off-the-shelf pet food, made using recipes and safety checks that have been proven to work.

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