Our dog is a Basennji just turned 7. She is very food oriented, and can hear te fridge door open at 100 metres. She will eat anything and we have to stay strong and not succumb to that piercing stare. Being old enough to remember when there was no such thing as pet food we are rather suspicious of all of it, in terms of quality and provenance, probably unfairly in many cases. She is a small dog so we can afford raw beef, the cheapest cuts, fat trimmed, and once a week a chicken wing . In the afternoon she has dry food, currently Black Hawk, in her food ball mainly to slow her eating. This is supplemented with raw egg, left overs including salad and veg, and regular cooked pumpkin. She has always strained for what seems longer than is necessary at the completion of defecating and was occasionally troubled with voiding very dry faeces. Dr Google recommended pumpkin. She has had no problems since and seems to strain less. She is very active and not overweght, despite her best efforts.
Given Big Dog stopped selling the version of their food we liked, I started ordering it Wholesale to get better prices.
That’s what we are feeding our dog ATM, the KANGA version in the box size at the back right corner of your freezer. Which version have they stopped?
I’m not sure we want quite that quantity though, as our big freezer looks similar, except that it is full of home grown rainbow trout 
Yeah I like the kanga. They have stopped selling the 2kg logs of food, and only now sell the boxes of individual patties-which are much dearer. And with our dogs given we go through 3-4kg per day, it adds up.
For us it just makes better sense to upsize our freezer and buy their minimum wholesale amount (180kg at a time).
Yep. I’m currently dogless, but when I had dogs (Great Danes to be precise), their staple was cooked brown rice, chicken mince (which included quite a bit of bone) and vegies (not cruciferous vegies) that had been put through a blender with a little water.
On top of that, they had a raw chicken wing with both meals and marrow bones weekly. They thrived - and it was a fraction of the cost of factory foods.
I would say the diet for dogs and cats would have everything to do with their health and longlivity.
I have a friend that has a large red heeler dog and it has never had dry or canned food. Just offcuts and
bones from the butcher. Healthiest looking dog I have ever seen. Garlic for worms and fleas etc is the best thing.
Dogs will eat anything as will humans if they are starving and hungry. It’s that simple.
If she will eat garlic, that’s great. It keeps all the insects off them . Like fleas , ticks and worms.
I have been giving my cat Lily, a moggie, Ultimates 85g seafood varieties (Safcol) at $1.49 per tin each evening. Today gave her John West Tuna in Springwater - just loved it - cost $1.00 per 85g. Go figure!
Lyndy
Good old Whiskas and Chum. Pretty cheap and they don’t look too skinny to me.
Cooked ox cheek sprinkled with kelp powder and some lecithin meal supplemented occasionally with Pal Meaty Bites for the dogs . Ox cheek for the Meow Meow Rabbit 
.
Where do you find Ox cheek? Butcher? Interested to get some and see if my cats like it.
Hi Justin,
I buy the ox cheek with a group of friends through Pet Foods Delivered in Melbourne who are part of the DND Pet Foods Group . Works out roughly to $5.50 KG . Quite reasonable really . Link below if you are a Melbournite .
https://www.petfoodsdelivered.com.au/pet-food-service.html
http://dndpetfoods.com.au/
Further to my earlier post on Black Hawk dried cat food. Of the 3 packets I had purchased online, two appeared to be either dog food mislabelled, or cat food created on a dog food manufacturing line, Only one of the three appeared to be cat food and I am still trying to get my cat to eat it by mixing it with other brands. Black Hawk ignored all emails that I sent them. I eventually disposed of the other packets to a dog owner.
I didn’t think to add all the wildlife around here that we feed 
4x magpies (whatever mince), pair of rainbow lorrikeets (honey & water mix), Doves (whatever scrap bread bits, maggies, willy wagtails and Peewees love that too). Occasionally we have a pair of kookaburras, so they get mince or steak too. We also have a pair of honeyeaters but we don’t feed them - they’re content with the native shrubs around.
Garlic is very much not recommended for dogs
Five cats, all fed raw meat with the occasional packet if we don’t thaw anything in time. They get chicken wing tips and whole quails to help with teeth health but otherwise it’s a mix of kangaroo, chicken, chicken hearts and livers with a treat of mackerel in oil or sardines in oil once a week.
Hi Choice. I thought your article was pretty good for a first major attempt at reviewing pet food. Give the huge numbers of pet owners, It would be really good if you could become the Aussie ‘expert’ on this area, as I’m not aware of any other organisation doing proper research and product analysis/comparison. You could do worse than to copy the analysis done by the Whole Dog Journal in the US. They have developed a very thorough methodology, that goes not just to the ingredients, but also the place of manufacture, and source of ingredients. They review foods annually. They cover a number of foods that are also sold in Australia, but not all. Perhaps you could ‘sub-licence’ their methodology and replicate their analysis here. Of course, the other big area is ‘treats’ and that’s an even more vexed area - many animal treats sold don’t even list ingredients or place of manufacture. Regards, Mum of incredibly fussy poodles with sensitive tummies.
Mostly responding so I can post adorable dog pictures!
We feed our adorable terrier mostly fresh mince or chicken, supplemented with caned food (usually My Dog, he likes that one for some reason) when we don’t have anything fresh on hand.
He also gets totally spoiled and eats cheese, deli meats and smoked salmon when we’re having drinks/snacks 
He just had his 16th birthday and is still going strong (as you can see my parents celebrated his birthday in style and I am fairly sure he is the favourite child!).
