Dogs are expensive, and a good part of that cost is optional. Food, vet care and prevention are not the places to economise. A great deal of the rest is.
Here is where the savings actually are, and the two or three places where cheap turns out to cost more.
Food and treats
- Buy kibble in larger bags if your dog does well on it, and decant it into an airtight container. Fat in kibble goes rancid once the bag is open, so storage is what makes bulk buying work rather than waste.
- Look at own-brand and value lines from established manufacturers. Plenty meet the same nutritional standards as premium brands at a lower price. Check for a complete and balanced statement for your dog’s life stage and compare the actual ingredient list rather than the packaging.
- Make your own treats. Baked sweet potato slices, dried chicken, frozen banana. Single ingredient, no additives, and a fraction of the price of anything in a bag.
- Use vegetables. Raw carrot, green beans, cucumber. Low calorie, most dogs like them, and they cost almost nothing.
Toys
- Braid old t-shirts or jeans into a tug toy. Check regularly for loose threads, because swallowed fabric strands are a serious problem.
- Cardboard boxes and empty kitchen roll tubes are free enrichment, for supervised shredding only.
- Discount shops sell perfectly good simple toys. Inspect them for anything that can come off, particularly plastic eyes and thin squeakers.
- Rotate instead of accumulating. Four toys, two out at a time, swapped fortnightly, gives you more play than twelve toys all permanently available.
One exception worth paying for: if you have a serious chewer, cheap toys fail fast and in pieces, and the vet bill from a swallowed chunk dwarfs any saving.
Beds and bedding
- Charity shops for blankets, duvets and firm cushions, washed hot before use.
- Make a bed from an old pillow or folded towels inside a cover you can take off and machine wash. Washability is what matters, and it is exactly what expensive beds often lack.
- Moving blankets and furniture pads from a hardware shop are tough, warm and cheap.
Grooming
- Buy a decent brush, proper nail clippers and a dog shampoo, then learn to do it yourself. Nails and brushing at home is the single biggest saving available to an owner of a long-coated dog.
- A soft human toothbrush works perfectly well. The toothpaste must be dog-specific, because human toothpaste contains fluoride and often xylitol.
- Old bath towels for drying and muddy paws.
Worth being honest about the limit: clipping a coated breed badly is unpleasant for the dog and hard to undo. Nails and brushing at home, clipping at a groomer, is the sensible split.
Gear
- Plain stainless steel bowls are cheap, hygienic and last forever. There is nothing a designer bowl does better.
- Bandanas from old t-shirt fabric, if you like that sort of thing.
- Webbing and hardware from a DIY shop can make a serviceable lead.
Two things not to improvise. Do not make your own collar or harness fastening, and do not trust a homemade lead clip. The failure point is a dog loose near a road, and that is the one saving that is never worth it. Buy those new, and buy them plain rather than fashionable.
Where the real money is
The largest avoidable cost in dog ownership is not gear at all. It is an emergency nobody budgeted for.
Keeping up flea, tick and worm prevention, keeping the dog at a healthy weight, and either insuring or saving deliberately will save more over a dog’s life than every swap on this list put together.
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