Nonetheless, he's our loveable little beastie boy and he has diabetes. He was also diagnosed with struvite stones/bladder stones in February and he was prescribed an extremely strict diet. He can only eat Royal Canin Urinary SO dog food. He's not allowed to have anything unless it's a prescribed urinary food. The company doesn't make dog treats, chewies, nothing! We originally thought that Bosco was only going to need to be on this dog food until his bladder stones cleared up, but we just recently learned that he is going to need to be on this food for the rest of his life because once a dog develops struvite stones they will always be prone to developing these stones, the only thing that breaks the stones up, is this specially formulated dog food.
Before Bosco was prescribed this dog food, he would eat chewies, that would help him with... anxiety... uhh, issues, I guess. Now that he can't have any treats, the only "treats" we could give him were a few pellets of his dry dog food, until this past week! We were picking up Bosco's dog food at the vet and chatting with other people at the vet, saying how much of a shame it was that the company doesn't make dog treats and this one lady told us that she makes her own! This lady uses the wet canned dog food, rolls it out, cuts shapes and then bakes it. I tried this out and I couldn't believe how well this worked! Bosco LOVED the dog treats. Then I started to experiment a little. So far I have 3 dog treat recipes that I'm pretty content with.
This is one of those dog treat recipes......
Crunchy Royal Canin Urinary SO Dog Treats
-Dry Royal Canin Urinary SO pellets
-Water
First you want to grind the dry dog food until the dog food has turned into a crumb texture, similar to graham cracker crumbs.
This is what your mixture will look like once all ground up
Now combine the ground up dog food with enough water to form a play-doh or cookie dough consistency, you don't want to add too much water, but you want to add enough water to make a dough consistency, remember, you can you always add, but you can't take the water out of the mixture.
This is what your mixture will look like, now you're ready to roll.... literally.
Bosco enjoys helping to clean up.
To help make less of a mess, I use my sugar cookie method to roll out the dough. I evenly sandwich the dough in-between 2 sheets of parchment paper, though next time I will definitely use freezer paper, because the wetness of the dough caused the parchment paper to curl up. You need something to prevent the dough from sticking to the counter, so this is just how I roll.
I rolled my dough out much thicker than I would for a sugar cookie, just think of the thickness of a milk bone treat, that's what I'm trying to mimic.
I used a dog bone shape cookie cutter to cut my shapes out, this dough really holds it's shape, so you can use pretty much any type of cookie cutter that you'd like, you could also just take a pizza cutter and cut strips, make life a little easier on yourself.
Told ya how well the dough holds up! This food is expensive, so you don't want to waste it! So make sure you reuse all of the dough that is leftover from all of the shapes. I add just a tiny bit of water to the mixture so the mixture is just as easy to roll out as the first batch.
Feeling fancy? You can stamp your dog's name into the uncooked dog treats, if you're a hoarder of useless, but at times extremely useful items like me and just happen to have mini letter stamps.
The stamp looks really cool on the uncooked dough, but unfortunately doesn't show once baked.
All cut out and ready to bake! I baked the treats at 375 for about an hour. You want the dog treats to be hard, but not burnt. Really, what you're doing is just drying out all of the water.
All baked! After the dog treats cool down, there's only one thing left to do.....
Treat?!?!
Dog approved!!!!
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