Home-Prepared Dog & Cat Diets: the Healthful Alternative,   ISBN:9780813821498

Customer Rating: 

Home-Prepared Dog & Cat Diets

"Pet owners control dietary quality and wholesomeness when they prepare their animals' diets themselves. Control is maintained over nutritional adequacy". (1, 8)

Customer Rating: 

We have a three-year old yorkie who was diagnosed with a minor liver shunt and/or asymptomatic liver disease. We did not seek surgery because of her size, and so have been using dietary management to reduce the load on her liver. This book has been a very valuable source of information about hers and other conditions, and we have made home-cooked meals for her for years. She is a tiny dog, and what we usually do is make a double batch of each recipe (with some extra vitamins), freeze individual portions in muffin tins, and remove one portion and microwave before serving twice a day. We make another batch about every two weeks. Our dog loves the food, and the book recommends wholesome protein sources like tofu, cottage cheese, and black beans that are easy on her liver and still give her the protein she needs. Each recipe is formulated carefully, providing a good portion of fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins for all sorts of conditions that affect dogs and cats. The author understands that disorders affecting body function are also heavily influenced by nutrition, and that feeding your dogs and cats commercial pet food is unhealthy (and in the case of our liver-compromised pet, potentially fatal). Lacy is happy and relatively healthy, and we love this book! I just brought it into our vets office the other day so they could make copies to give to their other clients.

Customer Rating: 

My basset hound was born with an immune deficiency. To complicate matters, he ate a bunch of rocks and lost 5 of his 13 feet of small intestine to surgery when he was just over a year old. The vet prescribed a low residue diet on which he had constant diarrhea. He lost his coat and a great deal of weight before I decided to cook for him. I found Strombeck's book and have fed him the normal dog diet for the past 8 years. He is the picture of health. Skin looks great and diarrhea is controlled with the addition of Prozyme and live acidophilus capsules. The book is an indispensible part of my pet care library.

Customer Rating: 

I bought this book because my eleven-year-old cat has a gastrointestinal disease. As a result, he went from 11.5 pounds to under 7 pounds in one month and refused to eat any canned or processed food. After trying many brands and watching him leave them untouched for several months, I decided to try making his food. This book gave me good, solid, safe information to use. I did find it difficult to navigate at times--the information is spread out and the cat recipes are intermingled with the dog recipes. I also found some of the nutritional information hard to follow, especially the details on the multivitamins. I ended up bringing the book into my vet to check that I was feeding my cat a balanced diet. That said, the vet completely approved and my cat LOVES the food. He actually cleans his bowl now. Finding this book has been a huge relief after watching my cat waste away.

Customer Rating: 

If you are feeding or thinking of feeding a homemade diet (raw or otherwise), and you want to understand the scientific and nutritional basis for these diets, this is the book for you.

Having read everything I could get my hands on about canine nutrition, raw diets and homemade diets, I was thrilled to find a book that explained the nutritional side of these diets. There are plenty of books that tell you what to do, but few delve into WHY.

This is not a book of stories about animals' lives changed by a miracle diet. It is a fully referenced book about the nutritional needs of dogs and cats, including the digestability and availability of nutrients in different types of foods. The author explains how this information is used by dog food companies to formulate their foods and the shortcomings of commercial foods that result. The book has an in-depth discussion the needs of dogs and cats with various medical conditions, as well as babies and seniors.

I have to admit that I have a background that made the nutritional information in the book easy to understand. I don't know how accessible some of the material would be for some readers. But even if you were to skim the technical information, you could get a lot out of this book.

The author has his own diet that he designed using computer programs that nutritionally balance the diet. Personally, I feed a raw diet, not the diet the author recommends. But his diet makes sense. Actually, this book doesn't discuss raw feeding at all. But now I have the scientific validation that what I'm feeding is correct from a nutritional standpoint. I've also made a few changes in the diet and supplements I feed based on the information in this book. I found it very helpful, and it gave me peace of mind.