Journal

Third Entry 26/4 ~

Over the past two weeks I have been researching about how dog food is made and what goes in it. I have found out how most of the dog food is made in the factories, quite a few recipes for baking for dogs and found quite quite a few videos on raw dog food and homemade dog food. This is what I have found out about how dog food is made:

They start by putting mixing beef, chicken, lamb, fish, eggs, vegetables, carbohydrates such as barley wheat and rice, milk, and vitamins together,. Workers then weigh the ingredients, grind them in a mill, then combine everything in a mixer until they have an even and well blended powder. After that a machine called the extruder transforms the powder into bite sized pieces of pet food. It steam cooks the mixture and forces it through dies at high pressure, the die shapes it, as the continuous stream of shaped mixture exits the die a spinning knife cuts into pieces. Next a hot air dryer heats the pieces to a 149 degrees celsius for 25 minutes, to draw out the moisture, then cools them at room temperature. After that the pieces enter a revolving drum which sprays the mixture with fat and flavouring. The fat is designed to add food energy and the flavouring is to give the pieces an appetising taste and odour to dogs. They then get stored in silos for a while before they get packaged up and sent of to stores.

I have been to the library and have found one raw dog food book, and one baking for dog's book, I have read the baking book and I will read the raw dog food book but it has a lot of information that is really hard to read and understand. Next I am going to try and find out what dogs need in their diet and how much of it they need.