Sharon January 15th, 2009
I warn y’all, this will probably be incomplete by necessity - there’s no way I could hope to discuss every single pet or critter in existence. You’ll have to research your own sustainable African Pygmy Squirrel diet, I’m afraid. Actually, I’m going, just for reasons of length, to say that we’ll stick, today, to cats and dogs.
But for those of us with traditional pets and critters, the question of storage always arises. Obviously, we want to take good care of our animals. And good care is complicated - is it better to have more, lower quality food with a longer shelf life, or higher quality food with a shorter one?
My own feeling is that it is a balancing act to find the optimal combination of nutrition and storage life. It isn’t always trade off like above, but sometimes it is. I’m assuming here that we want what it best for our animals, but also for their humans - that is, a balanced perspective that makes sure they have the healthiest possible food, that supports the best possible principles, and our longer term objectives.
So let’s start with dogs. Dogs are omnivores, and capable of more flexible diets than many animals. Dogs have been known to thrive on commercial pet foods, on raw food diets like BARF and on homemade, cooked dog foods. Originally, dogs lived mostly on human scraps and their own hunting and foraging.
Dogs do have very sensitive stomachs - which means that if you plan to have your dog live on something in a crisis, the ideal is to have them eat it now, at least as part of their diet. They do not handle abrupt shifts very well.
Most basic commercial dry dog foods come with a 1-year lifespan - this is before opening. Unlike most human foods, most Vets seem to agree that dog and cat foods should be stored IN THE ORIGINAL PACKAGING - that the packaging itself provides a measure of freshness - so if you are storing pet foods, I would recommend keeping them in airtight containers, in the original packaging - perhaps in large storage bins. This is kind of awkward, but provides a measure of reduction of rancidity and vitamin loss.
I don’t love commercial pet foods - besides the problem of industrial food production in general, they often have an awful lot of crap in them. Many of the cheaper versions are high in corn, which is tough to digest. I’ve written before about the ethical issues of the meat product sources - at this point, 1 in 7 cows in the US feedlot system doesn’t qualify for human consumption due to ill health - almost all of them go to the pet food industry, and IMHO, they make the feedlot system viable - that is, if we weren’t willing to feed the sick cows to our pets, the losses of a system that makes 1 in 7 too sick to be slaughtered by the rather appallingly low standards of the industry would be too big a cost to bear. I’m also not convinced that these sick cows are good for dogs.
The other issue that some pet food companies actually use euthanized dogs and cats as a protein form in their pet foods - besides the ethical issues for animal lovers, this seems to be a dangerous disease vector.
The pluses of these foods is that they do keep a long time, and that they probably have a reasonably balanced diet in them. These may be the single easiest storage option - they should keep a full year. Accumulating a year’s supply of food is fairly inexpensive, a non-trivial consideration for strapped households. It is always better, IMHO, to feed our animals imperfect food than to end up abandoning or euthanizing them because we cannot afford them.
I distinguish high quality, organic commercial pet foods from the general run of commercial pet foods. These usually use better, organic meats, and there is more meat and fewer and better fillers. These are generally better for your pet, and worth it if you can afford them. They should probably only be stored 6 months, however, because there are more oils that may go rancid. Again, keep the food in the original packaging.
Wet canned dog foods vary a lot in quality and nutrients - the low quality industrial ones have the same problems as the above, while if you have the money, there are some good things out there. Canned foods will store for several years and can expand your storage - even if you can’t store enough for your animal to live on, they could balance a homemade or cheap dry food diet.
Next, there’s a BARF diet, which involves feeding your animals mostly raw meats. There is some controversy about the inclusion of raw vegetables in this menu, you’ll need to do your own research on that. I’ve seen many BARF animals do extremely well - the problem is that in a crisis, a BARF diet requires you to be an adept butcher and have a large quantity of livestock on the hoof or small animals easily caught. This, to me, seems unlikely - I don’t discourage people from trying to hunt pest animals in tough times for their pets, but I don’t think relying on this as a primary diet is something we can expect.
Which brings us to homemade pet foods. There are a lot of recipes out there, and I think that most of these are probably pretty good, although I do suggest storing vitamin supplements if your vet recommends them. Generally speaking, these consist of either brown rice or rolled oats, some meat, eggs or milk and some vegetables, all cooked together. There’s some good precedent for these diets in dogs - for example, herding dogs in the Pyrenees lived in milk and oatmeal. Some dogs, at least are well adapted to them.
My own feeling is that a combination of a small amount of stored commercial dog food (the very best quality you can afford) and homemade supplements may be the best option overall for long term storage - that is, your storage of commercial dogfoods will last longer if you only need a little of it, to balance them nutritionally, and that can provide meats that may be hard to come by in storage. For example, we can store oats and dried milk, which can be made into yogurt and mixed with canned vegetables for a pretty decent fresh food, to combine with the commercial dry food. Homemade recipes that rely on inexpensive vegetables, bulk purchased grains and either home canned or raised meats and eggs, or bulk purchased dairy dry dairy products (or your own homegrown, obviously) will probably do well in both the nutritional and pocketbook department.
These two sites have recipes and nutritional information about homemade dog foods:
http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/dogfoodrecipes.htm
http://www.dog-obedience-training-review.com/dog-food-recipes.html
Ok, what about kitties? Cats differ from dogs in that they are obligate carnivores - they *have* to eat primarily meat. While dogs can get along on a vegetarian diet, cats really can’t - yes, I know some people do it, but I’ve not found any vet that recommends it.
Cat dry and wet foods have approximately the same issues as dog ones - they have some virtues and some non-virtues. I won’t rehash, because they aren’t that different. I will say that I’m somewhat persuaded by this vet who recommends against feeding any cat an exclusively dry food diet (she’s got a good cat fud recipe too, a lot of information about nutrition, and some strong opinions disagreed with by two of the vets I consulted, but ymmv): http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm. The above vet also says we shouldn’t be feeding beef at all to cats, for various reasons - I don’t know if that’s right, but she certainly has a point when she notes that cows probably were not the usual prey of small cats in the wild, and I admit, I enjoyed the image it generated.
Because meat is expensive, energy intensive and time consuming to store without a freezer, storing the components of homemade cat food without electricity gets more complex than storing the components of homemade dog food - that is, cats can’t live long on brown rice and milk. They can and should have small amounts of vegetables in their food, particularly greens, but the majority of their food should be meat based.
A homemade storable diet for cats, assuming that you don’t have a large livestock farm and lots of butchering offal to offer them, would probably involve raising a meat source - pigeons, quail or rabbits being the most accessible to apartment dwellers. This could be mixed with Vitamin E tablets, cod liver oil, the eggs of any poultry kept, kelp or iodized salt and bone meal. Canned clams (not tuna in large quantities) might supply some of the taurine, as might the hearts of butchered animals or hearts obtained from anyone who didn’t want them.
I have to say, however, that unless you are prepared to raise and butcher livestock, or unless you are committed to pressure canning a ton of cat food, it probably makes sense to store the highest quality commercial foods you can afford for your cats, both from a cost standpoint and from a cat health standpoint.
If I had no choice, my solution for my cats would be to do the best I could, to provide as much meat as possible. What I wouldn’t do if I could avoid it is turn them loose to hunt their own - feral or loose cats are a major predator for a number of threatened species of bird and small animals. Just as I don’t think it is cool to use excess kitties in cat food to keep our pets fed, I don’t think it is ok to drive other animals to extinctions. So that means being prepared.
For both species, I recommend people also store a bit of kelp (for trace minerals) and nutritional yeast (which provides B vitamins and improves their health).
Edited to add: As people are considering their steps into the informal economy, one area I think might be extremely successful is the production of local, sustainably produced, small scale pet foods. Even though people have less money to spend, many are extremely attached to their pets (me too), and if you can produce reasonably cost effective, healthy dog or cat foods, that might be a small business that was both useful now and one that might take off if the supply lines for conventional pet foods get cut or people simply want to support local economies. I recommend it as a possible job.
Sharon
Sharon
).