What dog food actually costs per day, by weight

Bag price tells you almost nothing. A 14 oz bag is a fortnight for one dog and four days for another, so the only number worth comparing is cost per day for the dog you actually own.

Dog ownership has an arithmetic that almost nobody works through. It is not complicated, and it changes decisions.

What this costs, for a 45 lb dog

Computed from the printed panel rather than rounded for marketing:

• Complete meal: 3.2 cups a day — about $14.75, and a 14 oz bag lasts 2.4 days
• Quarter bowl: 0.8 cups a day — about $3.69, and a bag lasts 9.8 days
• Over a year at a quarter bowl: roughly $1,346

Hold that number in mind for the rest of this page, because everything below is a comparison against it.

The years you are buying are at the end

Most lifetime veterinary spend lands in the final third of a dog's life. Which means the bills you pay at eleven were substantially shaped by what happened at three, when nothing appeared to be wrong and there was no feedback telling you otherwise.

Concentration works in your favour

Freeze-drying removes water, not food, so the same nutrition arrives in a smaller serving. A dog eating a measured cup of something dense is harder to accidentally double than one free-fed something bulky, and the serving that looks stingy is usually the correct one.

Muscle is the thing worth protecting

Protein requirements hold or rise with age to preserve lean mass; it is calories that usually need to come down. Conflating the two is common and costs muscle, which is the tissue that keeps an older dog mobile.

Which bill do you want

You are going to spend the money — on food, or on the vet, or most likely both. The bill was never the question. The question is which one: the one you choose, in a bag, at a price you decided. Or the one you do not choose, at 9pm on a Sunday, when the only thing you want to hear is that it can be fixed.