Evaluating Dog Food

[Wolf-Kim]

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Took me several tries to get the keywords "just" right so I could find it.

 

[gaited horse]

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Go to the kirkland's best it is cheap and got an 110 which means a+

 

[RabbitMage]

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http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/
This is a different website, but they rank different foods and then tell you WHY they are ranked as such.

What a lot of it boils down to is that dogs are carnivores, designed to digest meat. While they do eat some vegetation and grain, it shouldn't be the main part of their diet. Especially if that grain is corn, which is mostly undigestable and used to make dogs feel full without giving any real nutritional benefit.

To contrast with your story: my dog lived most of her life on Pedigree. She had a horrible coat, allergies, at died at age 12 from cancer. Maybe if she'd been on a better food she would have lived a longer, or at least more comfortable life. But this is just anecdotal, not scientific.

 

[AngieChick]

Thank you for resurrecting this thread! I went out and switched my dogs' and cats' food today. The cats were on Iams (which isn't cheap) and I was shocked when I read the back and saw the first ingredient was corn.

I switched them to Taste of the Wild, we'll see how it works out.

 

[PurpleChicken]

Jenny has now been on a diet of Kirkland lamb and rice mixed with home grown and homemade chicken meal for 1.5 years. She came to me extremely overweight with fatty cysts covering her entire body. I expected her to be dead in a month. She had just turned 17 at the time and is now 18.5 years old, thin, with no cysts, and a good coat.

I agree with RabbitMage's statement 100% and try to feed my pups as much quality protein as possible. I'll even give them limited amounts of dairy which they seem to tolerate well.

What a lot of it boils down to is that dogs are carnivores, designed to digest meat. While they do eat some vegetation and grain, it shouldn't be the main part of their diet. Especially if that grain is corn, which is mostly undigestable and used to make dogs feel full without giving any real nutritional benefit.​

 

[arabianequine]

Alot of dog food questions out there so I am bumping this.....

 

[TurtleFeathers]

OMG!!! LOVE that rating system!

We fed Pedigree for years - then I learned to read dog food labels during a pet food recall several years ago. I was flabbergasted at what I found - in fact, the whole ordeal led me to become a dealer of Flint River Ranch pet foods (my order site is listed in my signature if you're interested!).

While I LOVE FRR foods, I don't feed them to my dogs - ONLY because my husband is from a family of old school great dane people that insist on soaking dry food in water prior to feeding (to prevent bloat). All the old timer great danes have passed on, but this feeding method continues with our current crowd - everyone eats soaked kibble, from our 13 year old English Setter, to our 90 pound basset hound/foxhound mix, right down to our little mini dachshund - and they're all fit as a fiddle. And as excellent a food as FRR is, I'm afraid it doesn't set up well in water - it turns to mush, and our dogs won't eat it. (I DO use their cat food and dog biscuits tho, which they all LOVE.)

After we discovered we couldn't feed FRR, we went thru lots of other premium foods - Merrick, Wellness, Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul, Canidae just to name a few - and we rotated foods like the Whole Dog Journal suggested. The dogs were loving life - my checkbook wasn't. We feed 8 dogs ONCE a day, so in short, we go thru 20-25 pounds of dog food a week - and at $40-$50 for a 30 lb. bag, this type of feeding was killing us.

(And yes, I know thats a surprisingly small amount of food for 8 dogs - but since premium foods are more digestible, the dogs don't need to eat so much, because their bodies are USING more of what they're eating - when we fed Pedigree, it was 40 pounds a week and a lot of it ended up as poop in the yard.)

We finally settled on Pet Valu's house brand, Performatrin Life Stages. Its a good holistic food - and I was VERY relieved to find that it scored 101 on the rating system!!! YESSSSSSSSS!!! At our Pet Valu store, its $35 for 40 lbs, not 30. One bag lasts us 2 weeks. So our monthly dog food bill went from $150 a month to $70. Once in a while, I get Chicken Soup or Canidae, and we add raw meat, pan drippings, leftover table scraps, etc... (and, of course, eggs from my chickens) to the bucket just for variety - I can't imagine eating the same thing, day in and day out, so I can't see making my dogs eat that way.

Anyway, thanks again for the rating system - I'm going to print it out and give it to my grooming clients! Maybe that will help them to convert thier dogs to better foods, too!

 

[lceh]

Here's another site that rates foods and seems to be fairly unbiased -- http://www.dogfoodscoop.com/