Optimizing home food preparation for dogs

Nowadays, people raising pet animals in Turkey is increasing daily. The feeding of dogs, which are members of the houses as valuable assets, is at least as necessary as family members. Calculation of dogs' daily nutrient requirements, maintenance, growth, pregnancy, lactating, working, etc. are very variable and require an sensitive estimate. Feeding home dogs only with commercial foods can affect the economy of the family and the health of dogs negatively. Mainly, it is continuously questioned by the animal owners whether foods and additives that may harm health are used in commercial foods. Desktop, web, and mobile-based software are used in the animal feeding area. Nevertheless, according to the conducted researches, there is no web-based dog food preparation software that can accurately calculate the daily nutritional needs of dogs and meet these requirements with the available ingredients so far. The data used in this study were taken from Selcuk University, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Animal Nutrition and Nutritional Diseases. In this study, user-friendly web-based dog diet preparation software with a linear programming model is proposed that both can meet the nutrient requirements of dogs and can perform cost optimization.