Feeding a large dog in India when the imported bags cost more than my grocery run — what are people actually using? Regional

On cooking: it can be done well and it is not a cheap option once you cost the supplements properly. The part people get wrong is exactly what you named — calcium, and the calcium to phosphorus ratio, which is not something you eyeball. If you go this route, pay once for a consult with a veterinary nutritionist to get a formulated recipe for your dog's weight and age, then cook that recipe. Improvised home diets are where the deficiencies come from, not home cooking as such.

Two weeks of soft stools on a new food is not automatically the food. Standard transition is a week to ten days of increasing ratio, and for a dog coming off a very high-fat imported kibble onto something leaner, two to three weeks is not unusual. If you switched fast on the two domestic brands, you may have written them off unfairly.

The stock problem is the real problem and it is worth solving separately from the brand problem. Whatever you land on, find out whether the importer has a direct online store rather than relying on two local shops, because the shops are the ones running dry, not the supply chain. I switched to ordering directly in three-bag lots and the price per kilo came down as well.

Terse, from four years of the same problem in Pune: pick two acceptable foods, not one. The moment you have a fallback you have already solved the stock issue, and rotating between two similar formulas also means a supply gap is not a diet change.

₹6,000 a month for a 30 kg Lab is workable domestically but it is close. What made the maths work for me was buying the largest bag size available and storing it properly — keep it in its own bag inside a bin, out of the heat, because in a Bangalore summer an opened bag of high-fat kibble in a hot kitchen goes off faster than people expect and then everyone blames the brand.

Ask whichever manufacturer you shortlist, domestic or imported, whether they employ a qualified nutritionist and whether the formula was tested in feeding trials rather than only formulated on paper. Some Indian brands answer that clearly now, which was not true five years ago. The ones that dodge the question tell you what you need to know.