I have a nutcase of a puppy. Though chicken and turkey are yummy he LOVES duck meat. And of course Duck meat based treats are hard to find. Then I ran across Canyon Creek Ranch’s duck jerky treats. Puppy heaven!! Unfortunetly I missed a piece of fine print on the bottom of the bag, the one that says “Made in China.” After reading the previously posted warnings on several sites it occured to me that I’d neglected to check where the puppy’s duck jerky came from. Damn. Now I gotta find new treats.
I did a bunch of searching, and ran across the Stella and Chewy’s brand of dog food and treats, they have duck! A quick email to them resulted in the following information:
You’ll be happy to hear that all of our ingredients are US sourced and everything is manufactured in the US….USDA inspected doesn’t typically mean hormone/antibiotic free…it simply means that the products are inspected by the USDA and meets their standards for food safety. Not only do our meats meet that standard, none of our meats contain added hormones/antibiotics. The farmers don’t use them, and neither do we.
Woohoo! Cool, course, I can’t get them locally, so I’d have to order, and they’re not inexpensive. Probly worth it, but not cheap.
Hmmmm…..a local butcher shop sells whole duckling (frozen) from a farm on Long Island, WTH, I’ve never actually had duck myself, husband’s game, so I went down and bought a whole duck. Let it thaw, and today I pulled it out and decided how to do this. I’d originially thought to just roast the whole duck, but I’ve never even done a whole chicken or turkey myself, and besides, I’d already figured out the easyist way to do the puppy treats was to grind up the meat and make “cookies” out of them, and most of those dog cookie recipes tell you to start with raw meat. Well, there’s lots of instructions online for how to debone a duck, and lots of recipes for deboned duck breast, so hubby and I can have duck breast for supper, and puppy can have his cookies. Right?
Next time remind me to just roast the whole duck and go from there. At least I didn’t cut my fingers OFF, just nicked them a little, but anyone looking at the end carcass could have told you I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. But there are two duck breasts in the fridge waiting till tonight to cook, and puppy’s cookies are baking. He thinks they smell YUMMY so I don’t expect to have a problem feeding them to him!
Once everything is done I’ll let you know how they turned out.