The cold weather is here and nothing tastes quite as good as homemade Chicken Soup on a cold day. Your Snow Dog can benefit from eating Chicken Soup too just make sure that you make a dog safe version for them to eat.
If you have a very picky eater or a Snow Dog who is having digestion issues causing a lack of appetite then here is just the thing to add much needed nutrition to his diet. You can make this nutritious soup and then freeze it into daily portions. Then thaw, and add over food or use this as the occasional meal substitute.
Note: This soup alone is not a complete food that should be fed alone on a long term basis.
Chicken Soup For Your Snow Dog
Ingredients:
- 24 cups cold water or enough water to fill a stock pot 1/2 full.
- 3 or more pounds of chicken backs, necks, and giblets.
- 2 or 3 pieces of carrots and celery cut into big chunks.
- 1 medium piece of whole fresh ginger, peeled.
- One small handful each of dog safe dark green leafy vegetables: parsley, kale, spinach, beet tops, dried Nori etc.
* You can add other meat and bone into this soup too. It just won’t be Chicken Soup, then it will be Mixed Meat Soup. Your dog will still love it and benefit from the nutrition.
*2 whole cloves of peeled fresh garlic optional. Remove from soup before pureeing vegetables.
Directions:
- Put all ingredients in a large stockpot. You want to make sure that you have at least 4 or 5 inches of water covering all of your ingredients so top up with water if necessary after all the ingredients have been added.
- Begin with high heat and once the soup mixture is at a boil then turn the heat down to low. The key to making any good soup is bringing the water up to a boil but then immediately turning down the heat and cooking the soup at slow steady simmer for about 1 to 2 hours.
- When all the ingredients have been allowed to cook together, remove pot from heat and allow to cool in the fridge until cool enough to handle contents safely.
- Remove all chicken parts from the soup. You can remove cooked meat and re-add to soup but DO NOT ADD ANY COOKED CHICKEN BONES. Cooked chicken bones are NOT safe for your dog to eat.
- Cooked vegetables can be removed, pureed, and then re-added to soup.
- Portion cooled soup into meal sized containers or freezer bags and freeze.
This soup will give you a thick nutrition filled gravy-like broth to add to any food or to eat on its own. If your Snow Dog likes to eat or chew ice, this soup can be given to them frozen but make sure to feed on an easy to clean surface or outside to keep the mess contained.
As always, we welcome your comments and questions regarding this issue. When we share our wisdom and our stories we may well be be helping someone who is currently struggling with their Snow Dog.
Helping ALL Snow Dogs …. one owner at a time.
Do you ever purée the bones and add them into the soup?
Bone soup us so healing! Adding perhaps 1/8 cup of apple cider vinegar to this recipe will help draw the minerals out of the bones and make it even more nutritious. I do this in a crock pot and let it cook for days. The longer the cooking time, the more goodness is pulled out of the bones. I was happy to see the inclusion of the greens and the nori! Great recipe!
I have shared a recipe for bone broth before. This soup was actually intended to be able to cook up fairly quickly ( an hour or so) because in the case of a critically ill dog, there just simply enough time to cook bone broth. Also, I specifically left out the vinegar out of this recipe because in the case of a sick dog, the smell of the vinegar ( they have an acute sense of smell) may be off putting to them. But I agree with everything that you said and I agree that bone broth is a wonderful recipe too.
Yes, Tina. I can say with complete honesty that this feeding this soup has brought some incredibly sick dogs back to health. It is nutrient dense and offers calories, nutrition, and hydration to keep organs functioning while stopping the cycle of the downward spiral. I cannot recommend this soup enough to people. It also helps with picky eaters. :)
We make this type of soup for our three dogs, one of which is an abandoned husky who showed up at our door 5 months ago, extremely underweight, shaven, smelled of skunk, abrasions from being shaved, and cuts in his neck from a choke collar which bled into his fur.
I think it may have something to do with his weight gain in 5 months from 47 lbs to 80 lbs. He is a pretty big guy and the vets at Michigan State University say he is at pretty much his perfect weight right now.
We have been doing the homemade dog food to supplement dry for many years now. And find our dogs are happy, healthy and beautiful <3