- Jul 26, 2010
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I feed my 65lb. super active, athletic, well muscled Belgian Malinois 1 slightly rounded cup of EVO twice a day. Yep-- it comes out to only 2 1/4 cups total! It cost us $51 for a 27 lb. bag and lasts about a month. She was eating 4 cups a day of Nutro when we got her and she was too lean and her coat was no where near as good as it looks when fed
My dog is the same size and weight and type, and eats less than that of his 25 dollar a bag food a day. So it may not be true that 'you feed less of it'.
I pretty much agree with the vet said in the first post.
In fact, I am very leery of vets who do different from that vet, and insist you have to buy Brand X. Normally, if a vet is pushing a specific product, rather than telling me HOW to select a product, and what is essential and what is more a matter of opinion and choice, I generally run in the other direction.
But people get very, very impassioned and strong feelings about what to feed their pets. Their pets are like their children and they want to do what they think is best. People get AWFUL mad and they are VERY sure they are right. I've found it's another one of those areas where the best thing is to let people think what they want to think. I won't insist to anyone they must feed XYZ, I'll just say what I've come up with for my own dogs.
A lot of times, people get pulled in by advertising. For me, I found it was important not to take advertiser's claims too much to heart. Sometimes they really pull on people's heart strings, like you have to feed ABC or you're a bad mommy.
It's like dog breeds. People have their opinions. A lady at the park almost beat me up when she asked what kind of dog I had, I said, 'collie', and she insisted he was not. 'you're lying! he's maybe PART collie'. She had never seen a short haired collie, I guess. There we were winding up the windows of the car and peeling out of the parking lot as she is running after us, screaming, 'he is not a purebred collie!' My boyfriend says 'don't say 'collie', say 'what kind of dog would you like him to be?''
I spent a lot of time going over pet foods and the National Research Council information, as well as what studies are available.
Based on suffering through all that very dry material, I decided corn isn't a bad thing to feed dogs. In the wild, the first thing canids do is tear open the stomach of the deer, moose, etc, and eat the contents. They do eat grain in the wild. They eat just about anything. My Samoyed would eat raspberries off a bush, LOL.
After a lot of study, I decided the stool is larger and smells more because there is more bulk left over after corn is digested. It smells because that is just how the digestion of corn is - carbohydrates. I do think dogs need some carbohydrates. It provides energy and it's normal for them to eat some. I don't think a high amount of protein in the feed, way over the NRC guidelines, is really necessary.
I don't like to go way way overboard on trying to find the food that makes the tiniest poop. I think the dog's digestive system needs some buik and some roughage. I don't mind if there is some of that in the food. I am not much trhilled by the giant bright pink dyed pile of diarrhea, I think if that's the result maybe that isn't tbe best food.
Too, I think dogs are somewhat individual and it varies from breed to breed. What I can feed my collie, I never would have tried on my sighthounds.
At the same time I found that some people were trying to cram so much rich nutrition into their sighthounds they were getting a lot of cases of joint problems and puppy lameness. With a dog that is going to grow a lot I think it's important not to try and 'make them get even bigger'. So after listening to a lot of trials and tribulations and people feeding all sorts of oils, cottage cheese, egg, and having their dogs go so lame, I decided to just feed what the breeder fed and keep it simple. More is not necessarily better. On the other hand, my friend fed all kinds of stuff to her Doberman pup and he was fine, no joint problems. Again I think one has to know the breed they have.
Same with the growthier horses...my friend 'nutritioned' and 'supplemented' her young warmblood to death - at 18 months they had to put him down. In Europe, a lot of time they feed them a very plain hay or even chopped straw, and try to keep them showing some rib at 6 months, one and two...in the US, some people have found they just can't feed warmbloods so much.
My Samoyed on the other hand was like a vacuum cleaner, could eat anything and look great.
Corn doesn't go well with some dogs. I like getting the advice of the breeder, they often know what feed their dogs seem to do best on.
I don't buy the cheapest food, but I also don't buy the most expensive. I'm also careful to read the news. If the company gets sold I watch how things go, maybe the new owner will try to cut more corners, or not.
But say, when a big local feed company changed hands, the sellers of BRand X started moving in and putting a lot of pressure on the region. They saw it as an opportunity to sell sell sell. They started saying the new manager was putting in a lot of filler in the other company's product, they were feeding more and more and getting less results. Pretty soon, all the horse people around were repeating those exact words, and believing it. They all switched over to the new competitor. I did try the product, for a while I couldn't even get the old product. It made my old horse hypervigilant and aggressive. back to the old product, we drive to where it is...LOL. If something is working, I probably won't change it, no matter what I hear in my ear.
I read the ingredients, but the package doesn't really give a good idea. The label says what is the 'leading ingredient' and some percentages, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, it depends on how it is measured.
I figure to sell a huge bag of dog food for nine bucks, they are cutting corners somewhere, maybe the processing plant is kind of a cheap one, and maybe some mistakes are made in mixing or not cleaning the machines after other foods and products are handled. Maybe some of the ingredients are not as good.
And if a dog food is the most expensive one on the shelf, I figure some of that is razzle dazzle and marketing, and not real value. I was in the marketing department too long, LOL.
So that's how I do. YMMV.
My dog is the same size and weight and type, and eats less than that of his 25 dollar a bag food a day. So it may not be true that 'you feed less of it'.
I pretty much agree with the vet said in the first post.
In fact, I am very leery of vets who do different from that vet, and insist you have to buy Brand X. Normally, if a vet is pushing a specific product, rather than telling me HOW to select a product, and what is essential and what is more a matter of opinion and choice, I generally run in the other direction.
But people get very, very impassioned and strong feelings about what to feed their pets. Their pets are like their children and they want to do what they think is best. People get AWFUL mad and they are VERY sure they are right. I've found it's another one of those areas where the best thing is to let people think what they want to think. I won't insist to anyone they must feed XYZ, I'll just say what I've come up with for my own dogs.
A lot of times, people get pulled in by advertising. For me, I found it was important not to take advertiser's claims too much to heart. Sometimes they really pull on people's heart strings, like you have to feed ABC or you're a bad mommy.
It's like dog breeds. People have their opinions. A lady at the park almost beat me up when she asked what kind of dog I had, I said, 'collie', and she insisted he was not. 'you're lying! he's maybe PART collie'. She had never seen a short haired collie, I guess. There we were winding up the windows of the car and peeling out of the parking lot as she is running after us, screaming, 'he is not a purebred collie!' My boyfriend says 'don't say 'collie', say 'what kind of dog would you like him to be?''
I spent a lot of time going over pet foods and the National Research Council information, as well as what studies are available.
Based on suffering through all that very dry material, I decided corn isn't a bad thing to feed dogs. In the wild, the first thing canids do is tear open the stomach of the deer, moose, etc, and eat the contents. They do eat grain in the wild. They eat just about anything. My Samoyed would eat raspberries off a bush, LOL.
After a lot of study, I decided the stool is larger and smells more because there is more bulk left over after corn is digested. It smells because that is just how the digestion of corn is - carbohydrates. I do think dogs need some carbohydrates. It provides energy and it's normal for them to eat some. I don't think a high amount of protein in the feed, way over the NRC guidelines, is really necessary.
I don't like to go way way overboard on trying to find the food that makes the tiniest poop. I think the dog's digestive system needs some buik and some roughage. I don't mind if there is some of that in the food. I am not much trhilled by the giant bright pink dyed pile of diarrhea, I think if that's the result maybe that isn't tbe best food.
Too, I think dogs are somewhat individual and it varies from breed to breed. What I can feed my collie, I never would have tried on my sighthounds.
At the same time I found that some people were trying to cram so much rich nutrition into their sighthounds they were getting a lot of cases of joint problems and puppy lameness. With a dog that is going to grow a lot I think it's important not to try and 'make them get even bigger'. So after listening to a lot of trials and tribulations and people feeding all sorts of oils, cottage cheese, egg, and having their dogs go so lame, I decided to just feed what the breeder fed and keep it simple. More is not necessarily better. On the other hand, my friend fed all kinds of stuff to her Doberman pup and he was fine, no joint problems. Again I think one has to know the breed they have.
Same with the growthier horses...my friend 'nutritioned' and 'supplemented' her young warmblood to death - at 18 months they had to put him down. In Europe, a lot of time they feed them a very plain hay or even chopped straw, and try to keep them showing some rib at 6 months, one and two...in the US, some people have found they just can't feed warmbloods so much.
My Samoyed on the other hand was like a vacuum cleaner, could eat anything and look great.
Corn doesn't go well with some dogs. I like getting the advice of the breeder, they often know what feed their dogs seem to do best on.
I don't buy the cheapest food, but I also don't buy the most expensive. I'm also careful to read the news. If the company gets sold I watch how things go, maybe the new owner will try to cut more corners, or not.
But say, when a big local feed company changed hands, the sellers of BRand X started moving in and putting a lot of pressure on the region. They saw it as an opportunity to sell sell sell. They started saying the new manager was putting in a lot of filler in the other company's product, they were feeding more and more and getting less results. Pretty soon, all the horse people around were repeating those exact words, and believing it. They all switched over to the new competitor. I did try the product, for a while I couldn't even get the old product. It made my old horse hypervigilant and aggressive. back to the old product, we drive to where it is...LOL. If something is working, I probably won't change it, no matter what I hear in my ear.
I read the ingredients, but the package doesn't really give a good idea. The label says what is the 'leading ingredient' and some percentages, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, it depends on how it is measured.
I figure to sell a huge bag of dog food for nine bucks, they are cutting corners somewhere, maybe the processing plant is kind of a cheap one, and maybe some mistakes are made in mixing or not cleaning the machines after other foods and products are handled. Maybe some of the ingredients are not as good.
And if a dog food is the most expensive one on the shelf, I figure some of that is razzle dazzle and marketing, and not real value. I was in the marketing department too long, LOL.
So that's how I do. YMMV.
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