Dog food as a survival food

Cheeky revolutionary idea... You could stock human food like rice, beans, and a few flavour enhancers like salt and spices, and longer-term fat storage options like ghee (which granted don't last forever, but neither does a bag of dog food) for about the same price in the long term. I'd rather stock human food and need to feed it to my dog than dog food and have to eat it myself. If you're going to add a multivitamin as well anyway you might as well eat something that doesn't make you want to yark before you even eat it.

Almost all sources recommend that you mostly stack food that you eat regularly because otherwise you're not going to cycle your pantry through and keep it as fresh as possible. Do you plan to eat a bowl of dog food every day before SHTF to keep changing it out? Cause otherwise it WILL go bad eventually and you'd just have a storeroom full of dog food that's both gone bad AND you didn't want to eat in the first place lol.

Now don't get me wrong, if I were starving and it was all that was left and there were no other options I'd probably cringe a bit but I'd eat a handful of dog food without too much second though. BUT I'm sure as heck not stacking a barrel of $50 worth of dog food when I can fill that same barrel with $50 worth of rice and beans.

frostbite Your comment reminded me of a young lass that I used to know in Primary school who would raid the family dog's bowl every afternoon after school waiting for her mum to get home. Mum worked locally and generally got home after school was out so she was a latchkey kid (like most of us, GenX didn't have the monopoly on that no matter what they tell themselves rofl). So little miss would sit at the back door, patting the dog on one side and snaffling scooby snacks on the other.

I remember her telling us like it was some kind of amazing discovery, and she was very confused when a lot of us went mildly green. Apparently the only thing that stopped her was mum swapping over to the type of biscuits that you added hot water to to make a kind of gravy. We used to give them to our great dane, and the smell of it was what instigated my 'making you yark' comment. BLECH!
Anyway, little miss didn't like the new powdered variety and stopped eating them. Kids are the best, aren't they? Hahahaha.


This thread does bring up a good point though. Survival food for dogs is generally an afterthought for me. We don't have a dog anymore, will probably get one when we move to a new property. But stacking human food that's safe for pets as well is pretty important. I've recently done a batch of raw ox heart for our cat but she's a notoriously fussy eater. She'll eat BITS of heart, lung, whatever other offal, but she much prefers fish. It proves problematic because fish cat food generally has additives and stuff in it to keep them healthy with all-round nutrition but one food source over and over again can lead to nutritional deficiencies. Not to mention our dear old lady (geriatric jerk, is another term I use endearingly for her heh) gets food fatigue in the best of situations. I'm a little concerned about what she'll do in the worst. People say "They'll eat if they're hungry" but if she's had one food too often, she absolutely will not.

I used to get frustrated by it because we'd waste so much food until my sister pointed out that it's a common trait for cats to refuse to eat the same thing for more than a few days in a row in the wild because after that the food source is likely tainted by bacteria and would make them sick. Oh. Makes sense. Obviously the same is true for dogs, however they seem to have a far longer tolerance period for bad food risk. 

I don't even know if multivitamins exist for pets. I have to assume they do. But I also have to assume the cost is ridiculous and that a general regular diet is better. As is the case with people. I envy people with non-fussy animals. My current cat is the only cat I've ever known to be this extreme in her preference. I guess she's closer to her wild nature than the previous housecats I've had. But it does mean that I'm going to have to start prioritizing foods that we can change out frequently. I think I'm going to have to start stacking slabs of several different brands of cans with a few freezedried extras to supplement if I think her nutrition isn't keeping up. 

And I suppose worst case scenario, we have cases of cat food to turn into meatloaf or mornay if things go bad? 🤣

Good idea! Hubby loves smoked sprats, you should see the cat flip her lid when he opens a tin. She has fancy taste lmao. But the more I look at commercial foods both for cats AND dogs, the more I realise that they probably don't have as good of a shelf life as single-produce canned items like fish. Dogs you get a bit of flex with because they can and should have a variety of veg in their meals as well.
But because cats are obligate carnivores, the tinned stuff is getting more and more cereal items in them and it's not going to keep them healthy in the longer term.

We have to vary our purchases wildly for our old girl due to her fussiness but she never seems to turn her nose up at tinned salmon when I've given her some so that might be a good option if it's cheaper than the mass-produced pet food version on occasion. Even if it's the same price. We do cycle vet food into her diet as well but she even gets sick of that quickly.

Maybe when we get to the forever home and get a dog she'll go back to being less fussy if she has some competition again! Our last dog used to clear her bowl if she wasn't around so she seemed to be less finicky because she knew she'd miss out.

You’ll keep, Stealth. No walking stick required, my legs are fine, could use a new right wrist though.

I’ve never been a cat person. They remind me of Americans, self centred, arrogant, aloof. My last interaction with a cat was in May, when I was staying the night at my work wife’s retreat, and her bloody cat wouldn’t stop meowing at the bedroom door. Work wife wasn’t going to get up to let it in, so I eventually did and the bloody thing took off. It just wanted to be a pain in the butt.

You keep showering me with compliments like that and we’ll get on fine. 

Back in the day when my big brother and I had hunting camps, or when just the 2 of us were out for a day we always carried a version of an ..overnight pack.. If some how we ended up in the bush after dark..

One thing he carried and I eventually got around to taking along also was a couple giant size Milk Bone brand dog biscuits.. None of the ingredients would hurt you.. They were processed cleanly.. Granted you may not get much out of ingredients like bone meal, but on a rare occasion of consumption it would not hurt you...

I guess I kind of understood shooting roos was a local version of subsistence living, hunting ?? Left overs from that for dog food being a secondary thing.. ??

I'd put roo meat in the pet food space and boar in the people meat space if I was looking purely at macros.
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Tell me more.... In that at times some posters have said there are a number of ...wild, feral... animals seemingly readily available depending on location.. Things said like feral bulls are ...bad, bad, bad... But wild camel is quite good.. ?? Like said a mix that includes feral hog because of the fat available..

Handling at time of harvest, preserving and cooking can confidently take care of harmful germ type issues.. This as long as there are no parasites growing in the flesh issues.. I've seen ..issues.. with North American bears on rare occasions..

Like all well thought out biological solutions, rabbits are now pretty well immune to mixy, wonder what gunna happen to the cane toad ? and now veroa in our bees ?



We know what we are doing, you can trust us......