Great Feed, House and Keep Your Pets Hunt

Slowlaner

Savings on Frontline for my cats and dog are minimal (87p/80p respectively) with Best Pet Pharmacy despite their claims, so worth checking with your local vet first.

I also feed my 7 month old terrier mutt who rejects dried food, which is expensive anyway, on a combination of offal such as chopped up ox liver, brown rice and cabbage in home made stock (no salt) cooked overnight in a crock pot on economy 7. Christened dog glop, it looks and smells disgusting but is cheaper than premium dried food. the dog's thriving and eating less sheep poo now I have introduced cabbage into his diet. I add in any leftover scraps, meat, fat, gristle, veg, potatoes, rice, pasta from our meals. Before dogs became another marketing opportunity, they were always fed on household scraps.

ineedausername_2

pet insurance,ensure it covers "for life".In other words, ure pet may b insured, an illness is diagnosed that will continue thru ure pets life.Unless u have "for life" insurance, u cannot renew ure policy as ure pet now has an existing condition.

Unfortunately, we had no pet insurance.(it wouldn't happen to us.)

After a year of illness and fantastic vet care (and huge vet bills...over £3000.) our dog took a stroke (completely unrelated to her illness) and had to be euthenised a week later.We decided to insure her daughter, not believing that bad luck could strike twice!! We pay £27. monthly and got first 2 months free. 3 months later, our other dog had a small accident, then we discovered lumps. Luckily she is ok, but again huge vet bills...which has been reimbursed. Our insurance policy has alredy paid for itself and we had only made 1 payment.

x_raphael_xx

ginny82 wrote: »

The cheapest I've found for cat/dog frontline is at petmeds.co.uk where 6 cat pouches can be bought for £16.19.

vetuk.co.uk is very cheap too, half the price that my vet charges for frontline.

Littlenel

My two kittens love chasing balls made from tin foil! If I'd known this earlier I wouldn't've spent all that money on expensive toys! Just make sure the balls aren't too small and be warned you will spend a lot of time fishing them out from under beds, sofas, doors.....

tigger_the_ferret

Not really a treat, but we found when we went away it was cheaper to get a sitter to come in than to book our two cats in a cattery. The sitters charged us £8 per day, our local catteries wanted £4.50 per cat, and our mail was picked up from the door step. We used Petpals.com, but there are several other companies in the local yellow pages.
If you have three or four cats the savings can soon build up.

shogun55

Hello wrote: »

My cats love corks. No idea why, forget the shop-bought toys, corks do it for them! (And keeping them supplied with corks is no hardship!!;) )

Big bags of catnip (I get ours from either one of those cheap sell everything places or the garden centre's pet department). Use and old rolled up sock with catnip in it and happy drugged up cat happy for weeks :drool: and can be refreshed just by keeping it in the same drawer as the catnip! I tried growing it once, but it didn't last long enough.

Ours also love boxes to sleep in, not purpose bought beds and especially a wicker 'hamper' given to us at Christmas with goodies in.

Basically, I don't bother with buying them anything from the shop except food and catnip.

I am very annoyed that supermarkets have stopped selling individual cans of food, I once counted 14 varieties (more variation than I get!) but now they only do the 6 or 12 packs and the flavours are all the same. Our cats tend to off flavours for a while and it is difficult finding alternatives. Does anyone know where I can get individual cans with a variety of flavours? Whiskas and Kitekat, they won't touch Felix since the 'new improvement'.

Cheers

Hello

As a petshop owner I can tell you that themove to multi packs has been ongoing for years its all about the higher spend & they're not intrested in the 'poverty -spend' consumer as theyre so called in the trade! i split multi packs and sell all tins & foils & pouches individually ( for a higher cover price of course for the priveledge!) but i've been asked by maufacturers reps to cease & desist from this practise on many occassions.

shogun55

robert_harper_2000 wrote: »

I disagree with how everyone thinks Supermarkets are cheap for the food (I do run a pet shop so am biased but..). Wet food is much more expensive than dry as you are mainly paying for the mositure 85% in some! Dry food you can provide the water for free! in a bowl
As someone mentions they use to have choice, when they had competition but as they cut the competition they cut the choice - Supermarkets only stock what makes them money.
You can buy better quality foods Burns or BARF at PET SHOPS the shops aren't making massive mark-ups on these they really are just better foods! Better quality chicken no salt no crap! This saves you in the loooong run as you don't have vet bills for feeding your pet crap!
False enconomy.
Although I may have gone abit far, you get the point ?

Ha
I tottally agree with you mate i've run 2 petshops quite successfully (profit wise) for 22 years, & I can assure you you're wasting your time here trying to educate the so called 'poverty-spend' customers about the cost savings of premium dried food.!!

shogun55

emily82 wrote: »

Re what has previously been mentioned on this topic.

Please do not use woodshavings to bed guinea pigs on, it is not recommended - they can contribute to skin problems (particularly fungal problems) and respiratory problems. Yes, it may be cheaper, but not worth the potential problems that could follow. It is far better to bed them down on newspaper and a layer of hay (get a bale from a local farm for a few £'s, if you only have a few pigs then this will last a while).

Guinea pigs should be fed fresh veg EVERY day, preferably twice a day. Guinea pigs are like humans - they need vitamin C to stay healthy, so are reliant from what comes from fresh vegetables.

in my humble 22 years expierience selling thousands of guinea pigs I've seen more problems caused by using bales of Farm bought Hay which by and large seem to have mites in them( pre packed petshop -dust extracted ) causing horrendous skin problems when left unchecked.

bigian1179

I have 2 spaniels that can chew through just about anything .
What we do is use old jeans, we cut the legs off them soak them in water and tie them in knots and let them dry. And there you have it tough cheap dog toys.

FAJ_2

I feed my dog on non-human grade meat from the local butchers. It's £2 for 5lb of meat and I cook this with brown rice and veg peelings. We have a big dog and she costs £2.50 a week to feed!

For cat toys I use a bamboo pole from the garden, a piece of string (OK I have to buy that), a cork from a wine bottle and pheasant feathers. Attach the string to one end of the bamboo and the cork to the other end of the string then push the feathers into the cork. You end up with what looks like a fishing rod with dangly bits on the bottom and the cats love it. I also grow cat mint and dry sprigs are stick into the cork with the feather for that extra something that cats really love. The big advantage is that I can dangle the pole from a comfortable sitting position!

For a cat scratcher we saved the tree trunk from an elder we cut down, put three shelves on it at different heights and covered them with scraps of left over carpet. We have a tall, stable structure and we can feed the cat on the top shelf so the dog doesn't steal her food!