Have you ever really tried feeding your pet? No, we aren’t talking about opening a can of Natural Balance or Newman’s Own and laying it out on a dish. How about a feast of natural pet food – patties made of home-ground chicken liver and vegetables and a dish of milk? It’s the latest rage among pet owners – homemade meals prepared with love by the owner.

The philosophy that pet owners like this go by is that if you believe that a healthy natural organic diet is good for you and your family, how can you deny the pet that you love the same kind of treatment – especially when good natural pet food isn’t hard to make at all once you get used to it?

Could this really be true? While we take our diet for granted, a diet something that we’ve developed and honed over generations to make sure that there is no kind of nutrition that we are left lacking in. When the settlers first moved to America centuries ago, corn seemed a perfect substitute for the wheat they were used to back in the Old World. But then came the scurvy, and all the other deficiency-related illnesses. Those were what made them realize that corn wasn’t an adequate substitute for wheat after all.

The moral of that story is that to merely give your pet a meal out of natural homemade food can’t always be enough. Those pet food makers, much-maligned for the mass-produced bags of food they sell, really have done research into everything that your pet needs. Whatever else you say about them, technically, they certainly supply your pet with everything it needs.

But pet owners who have switched to natural pet food that they make at home with their own hands find that regular mass-produced pet food often leaves animals a bit feeble, and constantly ill with something or the other. With natural pet food, they claim, these mystery problems just clear up right away. And anyway, it just makes people feel bad that they should sit down to a great home-cooked meal themselves while the poor pet should make do with something from a can that is probably a mixture of unmentionable horsemeat, bone meal and fish scales. Once you begin to look up information on what exactly needs to go into natural homemade pet food, it really can be reasonably easy.

The move to natural pet food has been especially strong ever since in the year 2008, there was all kinds of cat and dog food were recalled for melamine contamination. People just don’t trust store-bought food for their pets anymore.