Jen Rose

I’ll post a new post instead of editing and infinitely adding to my last :p.

I point out the costs because, as op mentioned, sometimes work like threshing grains is just too much on a tiny scale.  I buy grains in bulk.  Non gmo, but not organic. I’d pay double if I could find it!  I buy whole, unprocessed 50lb bags for $4-9 each, depending on the grain, and mix custom feeds for each critter.  I fill 20 and 55 gallon metal drums with locking lids.  It’s pretty easy and depending on how many animals I have at a time, I may need grain monthly or just every 6 months. I buy hay once or twice a year, local organic.  For the minimal effort and expense, I am okay with not providing the food myself.  I’d love to!  But I’m not there yet.  So it depends on how diehard you wanna be about self sufficiency.

I haven’t explored large livestock as dog foodstuffs yet.  My goats cost me $10 per goat per month high end, during winter.  Meat goats and sheep might be viable , but larger animals needs more space, more care, cost more, and are noisy.  A dozen rabbits can live in a pen not suited to keeping a single goat in, they’re silent, produce fur and manure, are prolific. And also cheap to replace if the colony has a predator mishap...

I like small livestock, and I like diversity.  Don’t put all the eggs in one basket

I will put my vote in that dogs are carnivores.  I feed raw and have done so for years for many dogs.  In reality dogs can live on a shocking variety of foods and survive, but in my experience raw fed pooches have been the healthiest.  No stinky greasy dog odor, no eye boogers, no itching, no rashes, no ear gunk, no bad breath, pearly white teeth, trim robust healthy weight, and beautiful soft coats.  Not to mention less boredom when they get to satisfy carnal behaviors eating Whole Foods every day, and a very spunky pooch into old age to boot!  Ok, maybe some gnarly farts now and again, but it’s worth it to me!

We flourish mostly on a combination of road salvaged deer and home raised rabbits.  4 working does should provide a daily meal for a very large dog, and they are incredibly simple to raise.  I keep mine on open ground in a colony.  I usually cull the males and sell the females.  My breeding stock have names, but the offspring are dog food, I avoid attaching to the kits.  I have no problem butchering, I know the value of the whole system.  The rabbits live healthy happy lives and the dogs get food nature intended.  Plus I’m not paying $$$ for premium specialty kibble that my dogs won’t get rashes from.   I personally use cervical dislocation to dispatch.  A shovel handle over the neck, step on the handle, pull up on the back legs.  No screaming, no bleeding, no thrashing, it’s instant, and you don’t have to look.  And if for some reason you don’t get it right the first time, it’s paralyzed and can’t feel pain, unlike hacking off a chickens head only halfway :s. Oh how I hated butchering like that!  Cervical dislocation is the only way for me these days!

I also raise chickens and turkeys, which, if your dogs will eat poultry, can be a great way to supplement and diversify.  My dog is too spoiled...  she’d pick rabbit over anything any day, but otherwise she demands red meat.  The booger!  A small flock with broody hens can raise dozens of birds for you in a year, providing months of dog food.  Many folks are terrified of poultry bones.  I’m not here to debate it.  My dogs have been eating raw and cooked carcasses for almost a decade.  I’ll leave it at that.
 The only problem with bones I’ve had was a puppy swallowing a large piece of raw deer bone.  She passed it, but it was painful for her.  When she pooped it out finally, boy she sniffed that turd carefully, pinpointed the bone, and said “never again” .  From that day on she spat out any tough piece larger than 1”.  Smart girl!

I’ve also tried quail...  if you can manage to contain and protect them and want to incubate eggs manually, they’re very prolific.  I will get back into them someday, but they do need a special setup.  Quail make great meals for small dogs and cats.  I used to dehydrated skinned quail for. Hiking with th e dogs- quail cookies!  Easy, lightweight foodstuffs.  I do this with fish as well, crunchy fish cookies loaded with good oils and nourishment.

I also raise pigeons,  they’re not terribly prolific, but easy to keep, easy to feed, pleasant to have around, and they produce a surprising amount of meat with thick tasty fat, reminiscent of duck.  I use them mostly for cat food as the dogs have plenty to eat.

My philosophy with raw meat is that every part of the animal makes the whole food.  The skin, fur, tendons, blood, bones, organs, guts, brain, cartilage.  Every bit of it is fabulously nourishing.  Raw meat poos are small, odorless (usually), and break down incredibly quickly.  If You have the means and the stomach for it, I avidly encourage going raw!


Edit:
Permaculture is the focus here, and I’d like to point out that while I currently do not have a system for feeding my livestock from my own property, here’s the real expense breakdown:
10 rabbits in two breeding groups, forage in spring and summer, hay and grain in winter.  Summer costs maybe $7/mo for everyone, winter costs around $20/mo for hay and grain.  No maintenance, all salvaged or h9me made materials for nest boxes, and enrichment.  Producing well over 60 kits per month.  1 kit is one to two days of food.  My 70lb dog can take 2 days to eat a whole rabbit, the 130lb pooch can eat one a day.  That’s max $20 a month to feed 200lbs of dog.

6 pigeons, three breeding pairs, less than $1 per month in grain year round.  Living with the rabbits in an open air pen they can fly around in and breed naturally.  A pair can produce 8-12 squabs in a year.  Each dressing out to about a 6-8 ounce thick, meaty bird, easily 2 days of food for 1 cat.  That’s over 20 squabs a year in supplemental food for less than $12.

I estimate my chickens and heritage turkeys cost high end $.50 per bird per month during summer, and $1 per bird per month in winter.  I’ve had flocks of 10 and flock of 100.  I sell lots of chicks and they more than pay for themselves.  I butchered 60 cockerels last fall, so poultry has been a plentiful supplement this winter.  Between meat, eggs, and livestock sales, they are an invaluable self perpetuating asset.

Quail would cost pennies each per month in feed.  A hen might lay20-30 eggs a month.  Incubating them, you can reasonably produce 50 quail per month per laying hen.  They grow fast and don’t take half a year to fill out like chickens, butchering of cortunix  is usually around 8 weeks.   Talk about a turn around!  Just gotta have a way of containing the buggers at all ages and be willing to incubate.  They can’t be free ranged like pigeons and poultry.  A breeding trio would provide food for 2-3 cats each month for probably $3 per month in grain, considering you gotta feed all them baby quail too . Obviously power expenses come in with incubating and brooding. Someday I will try bantam hens to hatch quail eggs. I’ve heard it can work, and she replaces the incubator and brooder both!

It’s easy to perpetuate fear surrounding disease

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3309570/#!po=41.0112

Don’t settle for reading articles in a magazine or even Wikipedia. As I just dug up, even the ‘facts’ derived from published studies are presented in misleading ways. Read the publications themselves.

CWD in cervids stays amongst cervids. No point in cherry picking your meat cuts. The disease spreads through the entire body including meat. Carnivores ingest contaminated meat and miscellaneous and actually might aid in spreading the disease through inoculated matter in feces. No record or evidence suggests eating meat or body parts can transmit to non cervids.   Except!  Here’s the hullabaloo. In an isolated controlled lab attempt, a squirrel monkey was infected via oral transmission. Follow up studies on primates more closely related to humans showed a species barrier to the disease.  Thats about as scary and dangerous as it gets. It doesn’t even spread laterally to cows and goats. And deer CWD doesn’t spread to elk!

Other species have been infected, yes, but by invasive inorganic injection into the brain. Which will never happen in nature.

Don’t get spooked. CWD positive deer meat can’t infect you.

Nor can handling a dead bat give you rabies. Unless of course it’s within minutes of death and you intentionally inject the fresh saliva into your blood stream.

Nor is every ordinary puncture wound at risk of developing tetanus.  Your body isn’t magically inoculated with the bacteria.  The bacteria must be on the puncturing material itself and a host of special conditions in the wound must follow for it to flourish.

Don’t play into scare tactics. Educate yourself on the reality, transmission, and lifecycle of a disease by reading the actual case study evidence.

Gonna add more.  I would say diversity is key.  Don’t pick one crop or just a few plants.  I used to take the scythe (a sharp machete works too) to the river or a canal bank and cut bundles of mixed fodder.  There are few toxic plants out there, but being aware of which may be in your area would be good before doing this.  Don’t wanna go chopping poison hemlock in the mix  or something :s.  No grasses will hurt your rabbit though.  Taking snipping from brambles and trees can be fun.  Much of this can be dried and stored for winter too!  Especially leaves!

One mammoth sunflower would provide huge amounts of food for her.  My rabbits eat the starchy stalk down to naught.  Roots, seed head, leaves, stalk, all of it!  Any greens, grasses, and veg can be dried and put up as well.  I think sustaining a single rabbit, albeit huge, on as much forage as possible would be entirely feasible and also great fun!

Also, rabbits are induced ovulaters.  They don’t have heat cycles.  No point in spaying unless you want a buck around.  Just my opinion there!  Sorry for any weird typos.  Auto correct...

I raise colony meat rabbits, part Flemish, on open ground.  They live on pure forage as possible, and grass/alfalfa hay and oats/barley/sorghum/peas supplement when no forage is available.

I learned a couple things in the last several years

Switching a pellet raised rabbit to forage can kill it.  I think their stomachs develope a micro ecosystem of bacteria’s and enzymes that help digest forage and roughage.  Pellets are cooked, formulated, factory foodstuffs with nothing organic and live left in them.  I would switch slowly if she was raised on dry pellets.

My rabbits share a diet almost identical to my goats.  They take leaves and bark and branches over grass.  Fall and spring pruning is bunny feast time!  I always try to offer rough woody stuff, they chow it to nothing.

Good fodder crops include yellow dock, sunflowers, sunchokes, radishes and turnips (fast and easy to grow), and mustard.  They,l eat just about every inch of every plant, including rootstock.  dock root has been a bunny delicacy here, and it’s packed with minerals and nutrition!  It can be dried and saved as well.  The dock is chronically prolific and rabbits do good justice to thinning its ranks.

Spring seed pods on trees and fall leaf drop provide abundance.

Having a clean dry place to poop allows rabbits to do what their wild counterparts do; chew their pellets.  They will eat s portion of their own poop for extra nutrition.  Usually during the new moon phase.  They store more pellets in a full moon when it’s bright and safe enough to forage at night.  New moon is time to stay by the burrow and lay low in the poor visibility.

Not only supplying a solution, but empowering them to be able to create an income producing profit is a fabulous approach!  I was gonna suggest red worms.  I’ve seen them in action with rabbit poop and have a friend that used to have a worm business fueled by 30 working does.  She used simple styrofoam boxes and filled with nothing but worms and poop.  Of course she had a root cellar where they were kept at the right temp, and also it wasn’t 600 dogs.  But.  Some kind of bug based decomp to create a usable or marketable byproduct may just be a godsend for them!

Another idea that might not be good, but just a thought, is; I once watched a video about a guy who had a compost business.  He turned dual chicken farmer.  By letting the chickens turn massive compost heaps, he saved labor, the chickens fed themselves year round (the heaps burned too hot to freeze in winter) and he made cash selling eggs.  If such a thing were possible, it could also provide a food supp,y for the dogs.

I am no vet. I could be misinformed. But having faced a potential CL threat and having a vet guide me through it here’s what I retained.

I call CL “Cheesy Lump” disease.  CL and abscesses are synonymous.  The difference is CL abscesses will be filled with a cheese like gunk.  And CL abscesses happen in lymph node areas.
 I had this concern with an Angora doe I brought in as a rescue.  She had a baseball sized abcess on her belly.  I consulted my local goat vet heavily prior to home treatment. I lanced the abcess wearing disposable gloves, in a area my other goats would never be living or grazing, over a tarp I was prepared to throw away.  If I popped that thing and cheese came out, CL for certain!  No cheese, not a CL abcess.  So said my wonderful  vet.  And it wasn’t cheese. She was just neglected and hair and grime was infecting the skin.  The theory with the disposable everything and lancing in a remote place is that if it is CL, the curds won’t spread around on and infect the environment and risk infecting other livestock.

I’ve since tested my herd and everyone is indeed negative.  CL is supposed to spread via abcess drainage.  So an infected goat who is treated or culled appropriately may have posed no risk of spreading to the other goats.  It can be managed but culling I believe is best.

I put off testing for years.  But I will admit, now knowing everyone is clean sure puts my mind at rest, and makes me think differently about bringing in just any old untested goat!

As to your jaw lump.  Could be CL. Could just be cheat grass in the gum, or a jaw tumor, or any number of things,  determine if it’s in the bone or flesh,  I’ve popped goat abscesses in the cheeks from cheat grass burrowing in!  argh!

There’s a lot of info here!  I’m glad you’ve gotten a strong response, and with variety.

There’s a lot of truth in not allowing a dog to kill livestock in the first place.  It can be impossible to break some dogs, and very difficult for those that can change.  Dealing with a small variation of this right now- my partners dog is a former sheep killer.  He’s made huge strides with my pack goats.  Everyone goes on walks and hikes together and The dog in question packs his own load.  We started him on a leash but he’s now trustworthy off leash and unburdened.  I would not allow him in the goat pen though!  He may never get to that point.  The theory here is establishing with the dogs that the goats are part of the pack.  We walk and hike and live with them, they are not prey.  My two large whethers have bonked the dog a couple times and have no fear of him, in exchange the dog mostly ignores them.  However my doe is fearful and acts like prey around him, and he definitely wants to eat her sometimes.  Having livestock that do not act like food is important in a situation like this.
 My own dog raised these goats herself.  I could leave her in a barnyard of goats, bunnies,  name it and not bat an eyelid.  Part of that is her breed, part of it is her conditioning.

I will note that I have always strived to feed my dogs raw meat.  These dogs now eat raw meat.  I want to stress this.  RAW MEAT DOES NOT MAKE A DOG A KILLER.  My dog has been studiously taught and trained.  I can trust her with newborn bunnies but the second I kill a meat rabbit she knows it’s now food.  I can toss the whole thing still twitching to her for food, and tomorrow she will catch a loose rabbit for me without harming it so I can put it ban in the bunny pen.  But I’ve worked her her whole life at this sort of thing.  She’s a stellar hunter but an equally trustworthy farm dog.  Some dogs CAN make a correlation between the raw meat and killing, but it’s a shot in the dark.  Kibble fed dogs still kill rampantly.  There’s no proven link here.  Just keep that in mind.

If it were me I wouldn’t give up.  Tailor your livestock to your dogs (calm, large, quiet) and your fences to your dogs (tough, tight, and electrified).  Be diligent in discipline, and, if possible and if desired, safely introduce your livestock as family members to the dogs. There are a lot of ways of doing this.  Some dogs are truly hopeless.  But many are not.


Remember this is a valuable learning lesson.  You have power in this situation.  Many struggle with neighbor or feral dogs killing livestock.  These are your pooches, you have control on the situation.  They didn’t kill someone else’s goats, and someone else’s dogs didn’t kill your goats.  Find a fencing system that works, because even if you get your dogs cohabitable, predators lurk, and this is an opportunity to learn how to protect your critters from unseen threats!  Good luck!