Yay for all the hatchlings!
Yeah, we've had good broody hatches, one in mid winter, and one in early spring. Both times the first sitter has induced broodiness in a friend too, so we've had tag team mommies raising chicks on both occasions. Now it seems Wilma is done with these chicks at 7 weeks, as she returned to the productive workforce yesterday.
On dogfood, we only feed kibble to the dachshund, she get's Virbac Dermal, due to her being chronically ill. On that food the dog does amazingly well. When she was one year old she started getting horrible allergic symptoms, she was itchy, she had horrid indigestion and a chronic infection in her stomach, basically some form of IBD or IBS. She used to pee and poop inside, she threw up quite often, and when it got really bad she stopped eating, this from a dog who can vacuum her entire serving in 3.5 seconds. Then we had to force feed her a bit until she got enough food in her so that she would start eating again, and antacids were a huge part of her medication. We were ready to put her down at 2 years of age. Nowadays she's on the Virbac food, and gets 1mg of Prednizone daily, and you wouldn't believe it's the same dog. She'll be 10 next fall.
The black ones are on a BARF diet, although we're a bit lazy so we just buy it in pre-packed 500g packages, the girls share one twice a day. Making the food ourselves could possibly be a bit cheaper, but it was way too labor intensive and complicated when we did that. Plus it's easier to alternate different meats with the store bought stuff. We would need twice the freezer space to get the same kind of variety for them with homemade food, as you need to buy bulk to get a decent price on the meat.
I was reading and cataloging the stuff you could cook for your doggies in a pinch.... Whew.
