Meat Day!

I know I added an exclamation poin after that, but it's definitely not because I'm excited. I love feeding my dogs raw, but I really hate the bagging up of it. I'm seriously anal retentive about having their daily meals a certain way, AND feeding the ground stuff is more expensive, so this is the way it's gonna bit. Just be prepared that there's going to be some whining over the next few days while I'm doing this!LOL

The day started off really nice. The weather has been a LOT cooler lately. Low 70's for a high. Very weird for Aug., but I'll take it. We were having someone come over to replace the carpet in the media room because the previous carpet was still under warranty and it didn't hold up at all. Having the dogs out of the house when the guy arrived and got started was a big bonus! We had a splendid time romping around the park for a couple of hours. Then I got home and put in my order for a grand total of 510 lbs. of meat, organs, and bones! That should last us about three months. Each dog eats about 2 lbs. a day. 40 lbs. of that is the canine grind which is a mixture of beef hearts, green tripe, and gullets. I add this separately to their evening meals so that doesn't really get counted into how much they're getting. And another 40 lbs. of that is chicken feet, which I just throw in as little treats in each meal bag.

I know I talked about feeding raw before, but I'm going to be a little more detailed this time around since I'm more on top of it blog-wise and I can sort of chronicle it day-by-day. Today is Day 1 and that's pretty much just placing the order, picking it up, and getting everything set up for baggin the daily meals. I don't let everything completely thaw out, just enough so that I can pry it apart and weigh it in the individual baggies. However, just getting it that thawed can take a while. Even though I got the meat back to the house right around 3pm, I probably won't be able to start bagging anything until tomorrow morning. Here's my general process for Day 1.

1) Get the bagging and thawing area set up in the garage.

And unfortunately I'm having to do everything with Das Boot on. Even more reason for whining!!
2) Open all the boxes and get the items into their thaw buckets (I'll take more pictures of what things look like when they're not frozen solid). We bought these Rubbermaid totes specifically for this purpose. I clean them after I'm done, but still, I just don't really like the idea of using them for anything else.

The Canine Grind yummies:
Chicken Leg Quarters:
Yummy chicken feet:

Beef heart (You'll notice that there's a fair amount of fat on the heart. This is something that I try to stay away from for the dogs during the summer. They're not as active as they are in the winter and buffalo heart is better and leaner, but I didn't time things well and just went with the beef heart. During the winter I like them to have a little more fat in the diet because they burn the calories like crazy with the various activities that we do throughout the week):
Chicken necks:
Turkey tails:
And finally, the chicken backs:

3) Get the work "table" set up and ready to start weighing and bagging tomorrow and take the collapsed boxes out to the recycling bin.
4) Clean any remaining meals out of the freezer. I still have about a week's worth of food left, so I just transfered those bags to the little freezer that's over the thawing frige.
You might notice that I don't have any tilapia in my order. The dogs do get fish, but they get it outside of the meal bag. I'll talk more about how I do that in another post, but the tilapia generally didn't go over all that well.

In other news my friend Marissa has gone into the collar making business and I wanted to post some information about her collars! She's made collars for H & B!
And now I'm off to finish getting ready to head up to Seattle for the Dane Outreach's 2nd Annual Great Dane Education & Fun Day tomorrow!!