Hot dog alternatives - Page 2

AKC*

String Cheese !! It works great.

Trailrider- That's a good treat. To make them even better take old fashioned (not instant) oats and grind the in your blender make enough flour out of it to equal the wheat. Gets rid of wheat for dogs with allergies. Mix some coarsly chopped oats in place of the cornmeal. Add a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses to the mix and the dogs will "bug" you relentlessly for these treats. Birdy...

Although I have no problem with hot dogs and my dogs will eat pretty much anything... For obedience, I experiment with lots of different things..... cheese cubes, string cheese, cheese balls, pork roast cut into tiny cubes, my leftover steak from dinner the other night(I get the big one and we have special treats for training the next day), leftover chicken or what have you. The food has to have value to your dog.....I am a spitter so most treats are things I'm ok with in my mouth.. Lucky for me that includes almost anything on the planet For tracking, I go for the least amount of odor as possible items, freeze dried liver and chicken hearts or the rolls (Natural Balance) cut and left to dry out so the smell is hardly noticeable by me. The BilJac liver treats cut up are also pretty good. An added challenge in the south is fire ants, whihc usually make my dog hurl so we have to use stuff they don't like as much..

For obedience we use either home made treats similar to recipes here or Yummy Chummies, a dehydrated salmon treat. I cannot stand liver so use other meats instead. We recently got some Solid Gold jerky treats the dogs are nuts over and I can handle the smell of. We do use hot dogs for tracking but get the turkey dogs since they aren't as greasy.

Hot dogs recently have been on the do not eat list on healthy articles, I will give link later as I cant find in my article folder....has nitrates and nitrites..Liver cookies are the greatest, use a dehydrator and dry liver and chicken......

New ideas! Thanks ScrewedByBroker (hmm what can I call you for short :) And Birdy! Ya know its weird because my one girl is allergic to dog foods of all sorts so I feed mostly a RAW diet, and she seems to tolerate human grade grains, beef etc. fine... but I like the idea of trying the oats. Liver cookies are not the most pleasant to make, but once you see how your dogs love 'em you kinda get past it. My husband keeps bugging me to make a batch for the "boys at work" YUK!!

Well Mosemancr, if you think hotdogs are disgusting, I'll raise you one. Sardines-the treat that never fails. Easy to break into small pieces, easy to store unless opened, and if you become so inclined, easy for (some) humans to eat. A line about sardines from an old children's story "And they eats them-innards and all!" I don't remember the title or the authour, but I do remember the tale about the sardines. Bob-O

The rolled dog food like Natural Balance works pretty good. If you don't want to stink up your house making the liver cookies (or don't like to cook at all) Great Bait is very similar. They will ship it to you in dry ice so it stays frozen. Not inexpensive, but dogs really like it.

An SV Judge told us the funny story how he noticed after a track that the competitor had a piece of small fish tail sticking out of his shoe, size of a sardine. So, I tried it on a practice track just for the fun of it with absolutely no result. Eight hours hungry and even wieners work, but I agree, liver is better and darker in color too, blends in with the ground better.