Just to throw another point of view into the mix, I feed my 6 year old Mackenzie River Husky major brand kibble exclusively (Pedigree Large Breed), and she thrives on it. Strong, energetic with a beautiful silky coat. I looked it up, and the first ingredient is corn. Do I feel bad? Not a bit. She has always been healthy, she likes it, what more could I want? What’s more, she never bolts her food. I can fill her bowl, and she only eats what she needs, never emptying the bowl just because it’s there. Let’s see you do that with a bowlful of raw meat.
I’m sorry but I just don’t understand that way of thinking. That’s like saying you don’t trust your doctor to recommend a brand of vitamins or your dentist to recommend a brand of toothpastes. Vets are NOT going to recommend something just to get more money out of you. Hard as it is to believe, they will recommend what’s GOOD for your pet. Not for their wallet. You would rather get the opinions of online strangers who may or may not know what they’re talking about as opposed to an educated, licensed veterinary? 
Many veterinarians carry more than one brand of specialty dog food (Science Diet, Eukanuba/Iams, or Purina ONE/ProPlan or any of their specialty diets). Even if they recommend you a specific brand of food, nothing is preventing you from going to Petco or Petsmart and check if they have that same bag for a lower price.
I feed my dogs and cats a mix of the three companies mentioned above (perk for being a vet student), and they’re doing fine.
For general maintenance and health, I don’t think there is much variation on their food. It’s when you get into complications (health problems, food allergies, skin problems, etc.) that changing to another diet may help.
What was your pup eating prior to you acquiring it? Take it to the vet, and if the dog was doing well on that food before, then don’t change it. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
Well, I’ll beg to differ here, just to say this much: suppose the breeder had weaned the puppy onto…Purina Puppy Chow? Or some inexpensive grocery store brand? The pup might well be doing fine on it in the short run, but might not in the long run. 10 weeks (he’s only been eating puppy food for a few weeks anyway) isn’t much of a test of whether the dog will be healthy on it.
I seem to remember my aunt feeding her dogs Avo-Derm (?) for really awful hot spots and skin problems, and these seemed to clear up. I don’t know if that brand is still available, but no doubt they were touting the essential fatty acids from the avocado, for skin problems.
If the pup is doing well on a good quality name-brand food…I wouldn’t suggest changing it. But if it’s something that you know will do poorly by it over the years to come, probably just as well to switch it now (gradually though, so not to upset its digestion.)
(And for the reference, I worked for years in a small, family-run pet shop that only sold the high-end brands, so I knew a bit about them. But this was years ago.)
I thought my line of thinking was clear, apparently not.
My vet also owns the “Pet Store” which is inside the building where his practice is.
He carries “x” number of products, including food, toys, and any other item a pet owner would most likely purchase, he does not sell “every single pet food available on the market”.
Now, just because someone is an animal doctor, this does not make him a bona fide expert on animal nutrition.
Your analogy of me not trusting my doctor for which brand of vitamins to take is completely off base.
Last I checked, my family doctor doesn’t own the pharmacy which is next to his office, but for arguments sake, suppose he did…
He could theoretically prescribe me “anything” and when his pharmacy fills the prescription, he will make a profit from it.
He has no reason to prescribe vitamin x over vitamin y, because whatever I buy, he will get his cut; therefore he has no conflict of interest with the recommendation.
My vet doesn’t sell “EVERY’ pet food available, he has limited brands, and recommends what he sells, there is a compelling difference in this example.
If you still fail to understand my point of view, then, I don’t know what else to say, I tried to be as clear as I possibly could.
Furthermore, the tone of your post suggests that I’m somewhat of a dumbass for seeking opinions in this forum over asking my vets advice.
As I stated, I appreciate all the replies, I consider them all, research further what I believe is important, and make the best decision I possibly can.
Actually yes it does They’re required to take extensive courses on Animal Nutrition. Hell I’m just a vet tech and the course they gave US on animal nutrition was quite indepth. And no, I’m not calling you a dumbass, I’m merely suggesting that you shouldn’t be so paranoid about ulterior motives of the vet. Like someone else said, there is nothing keeping you from buying a recommended food from a place other than the vet’s store. And if you truly honestly don’t trust your vet not to make decisions without thinking about his own profit first, then it’s time to find a new vet.
Wow. This thread has disintegrated into a maelstrom of ignorance and misinformation. (No offense intended; everyone participating seems to be sincere about their understanding of the subject.)
Crazyfoo, talk to your vet, find a local feed store with experienced people, talk to the breeder, and decide from there.
Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and ignore most of the stuff going on in this thread. The good info and the bad info herein are way too tangled up to be worth making sense of.
Good luck. Report back.
I wish we lived in a perfect world, one where everyone always did the right thing, and put our interests first, ahead of profit.
Sadly though, this isnt the world we live in as much as we want it to be.
I’m sure my vet would recommend the best food he sells, there’s no doubt in my mind, but I’m merely trying to find the best food “out there”, not the best in his shop.
Is it not in the realm of possibility that he may be a damn fine vet, but perhaps other people might have a superior knowledge on the best feed?
As far as me trusting him with the care of my dogs, I do 100%, however I don’t think it’s foolish to look into the feed matter deeper instead of just saying “hey doc, what should I feed my puppy?”, and he answers “X brand”
If we all did that, what would we know?
I realize this is a tall order, but sifting through all the info is a good place to start.
So every vet is a bona fide expert in animal nutrition?
As soon as you come out of school, you know “exactly” the best food to feed every single animal you may treat? Sorry, I don’t believe that.
I believe a vet has a well rounded “generalized” knowledge, but I don’t believe he is a specialist in knowing “exactly” the best food, how much, what type, what brand, because if they did, and this was verifiable, we would all be feeding our animals the same thing.
CrazyFoo, in my experience (former dog trainer, worked in the pet trade off and on for almost 20 years), vets tend to recommend Science Diet, because an awful lot of them sell it. I don’t personally recommend it, but enough dogs thrive on it that it’s certainly unlikely to hurt your dog to use it.
I personally recommend against the raw thing. Primarily because it will be very difficult for you to achieve the kind of nutrient balance that a well formulated dry food will have. The formulae for those foods have been arrived at very carefully based on a great deal of research and very specific knowledge and experience; probably more knowledge and experience than you have. Secondarily, because while it’s not terribly likely, feeding bones can cause problems, feeding raw chicken can cause problems. The fact that animals eat that in the wild is no recommendation: life expectancy for almost ALL animals tends to be higher in captivity, because through human intervention animals can avoid some of the more dangerous aspects of Nature Red in Tooth and Claw.
As far as the grain, etc., mentioned in some uninformed opinions above, remember that dogs and wolves are whole-animal predators: they don’t just eat the choice cuts of meat and move on. They eat the digestive systems too, which contain grains and greens in most prey animals. THe better dog food manufacturers, being better informed, take all that into account.
If you don’t trust the profit motives of your vet (certainly understandable, if they sell just one brand of food), then find a feed store with experienced people. They sell many different kinds, and the profit is a given, so it is less likely to cloud their judgment. Speaking from experience as a dog food seller; my advice was always based on sincere opinion formed from feedback from thousands of customers, and from my own dogs. Making a few cents more on this or that bag of dog food was irrelevant compared to keeping a customer happy on a long term basis.
They couldn’t possibly be using them as cheap fillers, right? Whole grains are one thing. Wheat middlings and other leftovers are another. How much grain is in the intestines of a prey animal? If that prey animal were ground into a bag of kibble, would the grain be equal to 75% or more of the diet? Because that’s what a lot of kibbles are - filler to cut the cost of manufacturing down because meat is expensive. And we aren’t dealing with “pet food” companies anymore which I’ll get into later.
I don’t know why you’ve labled the rest of us uninformed. So you’ve been in the pet industry for awhile. I’ve had dogs for 30 years, was an animal science major which included taking animal nutrition classes, worked at a vet, shown, train, etc… I’ve done a ton of research and obviously I’ve come to a different conclusion than you. I’m not saying you are wrong, but I am not “uninformed”.
And now my rant:
In my opinion, Science Diet is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on unsuspecting pet owners who think they are buying great food. It’s nothing but a big expensive bag of crap. Hills sponsors many of the nutrition classes at vet schools around the country. Heck they even support scholarships - no bias there right? Of course, they’re going to say grain is great for dogs and anything else is bad for your mutt. They have a product to sell. And Iams, Purina, Pedigree, and Hills are all owned by huge conglomerates now - Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Mars Co., and Colgate - Palmolive respectively. They were bought to help these companies take a bite from the multi-billion dollar pet industry. Sorry if I don’t believe that the same company that makes dish detergent and toothpaste has my pets best interest at heart. And not every vet only recommends kibble anymore. The times are changing and there are many more vets open to raw and cooked diets.
There are some great kibbles out there. There are also some that are cheap filler masquerading as a premium food. Beneful is one of them that advertises real meat and veggies. The bag sure looks like it’s full of healthy stuff but look at the ingredients of their “beef” formula and you’ll see chicken by-product meal 2nd on the list. Beef doesn’t appear until #5 and it’s in the form of beef tallow, a low quality fat product (but hey, Mars must know what they are doing right? - sure. They are cashing in. CHA-CHING!) But wait, more beef appears at #7 - pretty far down on the list. It’s not beef meal either so by the time it’s processed and the water sucked out of it there is even less than before. Veggies, in the form of dried peas and carrots, finally appear at #20 and #21. They might as well have left them out since we’re talking microscopic quantities here.
In short there is no shortage of opinions and there are a ton of resources on the net including several Yahoo dog nutrition groups. Yes, some of them are full of misinformation and you learn pretty quick which ones they are. I tend to avoid the ones who think there is only one correct way.
Wow…I also used to work for a vet. If you asked for food advice, they would say ProPlan or Science Diet if you want premium, Purina DogChow if you wanted to buy at the store. We even fed a DogChow based diet in our own kennels. My cat (sorry, no dogs here) is on Iams because that is what she was fed when I got her so I stuck with it from kitten to cat to weight control to weight control with hairball care. My cat goes through less than a pound a week, so cost is not a consideration. If I were feeding 130# of dog, I would buy Dog Chow. (and I would do it 2 or more times a day) I definitely concur that you should start out with whatever the dog is currently being fed. Ask your vet, and then ask why and if you don’t like the answer…FIND A NEW VET!! A vet that is in it for the money is not worth paying.
Most table foods are not good for your pet so I would strongly encourage you to get your dog onto a pet food diet. My cat gets to lick tuna salad bowls, gets small bits of cheese and yogurt, and gets the tiniest drop of milk from cereal bowls. And lots of fruit…the cat loves her fruits.
Velveets, lissener and buckeye, et all, thanks for all the suggestions and opinions.
20 years ago when we had our first pet (cat) my wife fed him nothing but IAMS because of the vet’s recommendation.
Now I remember reading somewhere just like velvetta pointed out that Proctor & Gamble bought “IAMS” and since they owned it, they have reformulated the kibbles. (more fill and crap, and less good stuff)
The reason I was told this happened is so they could compete on grocery shelves with all the crappy brands, and people feel like they are getting a “premium brand” for the same price as a crappy brand.
So once again it all comes down to worse food for your pet at the expense of bigger profits for the corporation.
I don’t know what you guys thjink about this stuff, but this is what we’ve been feeding our new girl:
Several top breeders have recommended this to us, and this is what we decided on.
Regards
According to the label, it has more added salt than it does alfalfa sprouts. Not that is has too much salt, but that the amount of alfalfa sprouts is so negligible, the only reason it is in there at all is to give it additional “healthy” cachet.
Almost, except that they still charge more for their so-called premium food which is why I consider it a scam. Iams used to be a good quality kibble before P&G bought them. Now it’s no better than the cheaper grocery store brands but you’re still paying that premium price. I did see one of their cat formulas the other day that wasn’t too bad - better than the dog formula at least.
Take any label from Innova, Solid Gold, Canidae, Nature’s Variety, or even Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul (with it’s gag inducing name) and compare it to one of the big corporate brands. There is no comparison. And I’d rather support the little guys then shovel money to P&G for a big bag of filler. (What’s funny is that the big boys are now trying to play catch up with the real premium dog food companies now that they are losing customers. I think anything that forces them to create better quality food is a good thing.) Dogs that eat a lot of filler tend to take a lot of massive stinky poops too. No thanks. Most people don’t care and that’s fine, but for those of us that do at least there are many choices now.
And I’ve heard good things about Fromm although I’ve never tried it since they don’t have a grain-free formula.
I don’t pretend to know everything about every food, but I do know that Purina, Iams, and Hills have been in the business for years with millions of happy, healthy pets. I have been in countless food plants, including a pet food plant that shall remain nameless. I can tell you that I would rather eat the product of the pet food plant than many of the human food plants. Those beef or chicken by products that everyone gets so wound up about are organ meats, specifically hearts and lungs. Cats go for the guts first on recently dispatched animals. The grains don’t bother me…cats and dogs eat vegetation. If you don’t believe me, I have a picture of a cat enjoying corn on the cob. People buy cat grass fro their cats and cats eat it. Dogs eat grass when they go outside. Carnivores need veggies and fiber too.
What does bother me is trendy foods that don’t have important nutrients like taurine, omega-3 fatty acids, other vitamins, minerals, and coenzymes and have things that are patently bad, like high ash and grossly misbalanced nutrients. A company that was consulting with a friend of mine was making a vegan cat food. Vegan cats are blind cats, because taurine is a necessary amino acid for cat vision and is only available from animal sources.
I’ll take scientific studies, reputation, and history over feel-good theories about what my pet should be eating, ymmv
I have a really huge Malemute (125 lbs last time I weighed her, but I bet she’s a bit more now) and I’ve been feeding her NutraNuggets Lamb & Rice ever since I got her four years ago. I feed her 4 cups of kibble once a day in the evening (after most of her usual exercise), moisten the kibble with warm water and add 1/4 of a 22 oz. can of wet food for flavor and to keep it from being too boring. She thrives on it, has a very nice shiny coat and poops pretty small, but very regular–no diarrhea or constipation for her, oh no! The great thing about this food is the price–it runs about 16-18 bucks per 40 lb bag and it’s available from Fred Meyer and Costco. When you’re feeding a dog this size, cost is a definite issue! It’s interesting to note that she was being fed a supermarket corn based food when I got her, as an on demand feed (big tub kept full, and competing with two other dogs, which tends to encourage overeating) and she weighed 89 lbs the day I brought her home at just shy of two years old. She gained steadily up to the 120 lb mark over a couple of months, then slowed down a lot, and I suspect any further weight gain has been due to the neighbors, who just love giving her treats. That crappy corn based food is useless–my poor girl was undernourished yet overfed when I got her.
She supplements her diet from the compost heap and garden–she’s a total fiend for fruits and veggies. No tomato plant is safe from her, pumpkins, canteloupe and melons are favorite treats, she’ll eat raw basil leaves, cucumbers, broccoli, zucchini, apples, pears, peaches, almost anything. I’ve had to stop composting onions and grapes because I can’t keep her out of it, and I’ve heard neither are good for dogs. Once in a while she gets a giant beef knuckle bone I pick up from a local butcher and roast in a low oven for an hour or two–she can crunch those bones right down to nothing, it’s a scary sight.
I’ve had such good results with the NutraNugget dog food that I’ve started my cats on the feline equivalent–they like it pretty well but the older cat really prefers a fish flavored food but he’s coming around. Younger cat has no opinions, he just macks out on whatever’s around. They get wet food every day on the advice of the vet, who says the major reason cats get kidney problems is due to dry food. Cats don’t hydrate themselves well and rely on their food as a source of moisture. Must be working out, older cat is nine and healthy as a horse.
I don’t know what you mean by trendy (Innova has been around since 1989) unless you’re talking about people who try to make their own raw diet. None of the foods I listed above have the problems you mention. And the point about the by-products wasn’t the by-products themselves, it was that the “beef” formula had very little actual beef and was mainly corn and chicken by-product with a premium price tag. If they are going to lie to me about what’s in it - and the Beneful marketing is aimed directly at the alternative pet food market - what else are they lying about? And please explain the addition of BHA, BHT, ethoxyquin, and propylene glycol to some of those major brands - artificial preservatives that have been linked to cancer, kidney disease, pancreatic disease, liver disease, allergies, hair loss, etc… Are they really using them because they “know better” or are they doing it because it’s cheaper than the alternatives?
I do find it funny that people assume that anything other than kibble is bad for dogs. What do you think dogs ate before kibble came around? Here’s an interesting article (author has a PhD in nutrition) on the subject: The History of Dog Food and another one.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I consider most of the big grocery store brands akin to eating at McDonalds every day - certainly won’t kill you, but not great for you either.
I do agree that vegan catfood is stupid.
Once more into the fray…
I’d really like some qualification on that statement…
The ‘table food’ that I feed the dog is rice, potatoes, green beans, carrots, etc and meat (chicken, burger, steak, etc…)… more meat than the others.
Very little in the way of breads/cereals… those are treats in the truest sense.
I just read the ingrediant labels of the aformentioned
and with the exception of sweet potatoes and particular beef parts (lver, etc)… we pretty much follow that as a rule.
(I will say that thanks to reading those labels, I feel better about my choices of what she gets… .and I will even now buy things like liver and sweetpotatoes espeicailly for her)
So, with that in mind… how is table fare any ‘worse’… atleast I know exactly what I am feeding her.
Yea, the pup may not do fine in the long run, and if it has problems on it later, or if his activity level changes, or when he grows up, or if it’s a large breed being fed as if it were a chihuahua, or if it develops allergies, has a bad haircoat, has any reaction, etc. a change of diet may be good. Right now, though, if the puppy is doing fine and thriving, why change it?
CrazyFoo: Different diets work for different animals, and asking your vet could be a good starting point. The best food for a diabetic animal may not be the best food for an active puppy, a senior great dane and a dog with renal problems are not necessarily require the same nutrients, etc.
My only concern with the raw foods thing is rations and proper nutrient balance. There are big things like protein percents, carbohydrates, fats, but then you get into having the right electrolyte balance, the right phosphorus to calcium ratio, having enough calcium, having the required amino acids for certain species, etc. And then what happens if your dog or cat ages and their needs change?
It probably can work well, if the person is committed and can keep up with it, but it can also lead to nutritional diseases (and a visit to the vet).
This is… untrue. The research of pre-eminent wolf biologists, L. David Mech among them, shows that wolves, for the most part, remove the digestive tract, shake out the stomach contents, and eat the stomach itself in the large ungulates that make up the bulk of their diet. They likely don’t eat the intestines if they’re well enough fed to make a choice in the matter. I don’t blame them, stomach slurry smells friggen’ awful, I can’t imagine it tastes great. They will, for the record, eat the whole carcass of small animals like rabbits and mice, but the stomach contents don’t make up much of the total bulk.
Furthermore, the prey animals we’re talking about aren’t eating whole grain corn (Eukanuba) and rice (Canidae), or wheat (quite a few brands) or peanut hulls (Ol’ Roy and the like) they’re eating grass and shoots and leaves, and wild fruits, etc. I happily feed green tripe, which is unwashed stomach, taken straight out of grassfed animals, and am confident that this replicates closely enough the green content he needs. Nobody, including the several vets he associates with on a regular basis (dad, friends, his vet) thinks he’s suffering in the slightest. His vet gave me some pro-Science Diet rhetoric at first, but when pressed for details, and asked if she could point out something about that dog that could possibly be any healthier, she addmited that she could not.
Again, I’m not decrying all kibbles across the board, or saying everyone should feed raw, I’m just saying there are options outside of dry food if one wishes to go that rout, and also saying that knowledge of a carnivore’s biologically correct nutritional needs can help to make more informed decisions on commercial foods.
Finally, I will say that Science Diet is, as someone else said, quite a successful scam. It’s been a while since I actively participated in the pet industry, but there was a time a few years ago, that if your vet successfully talked you into the Science Diet adult maintenance, you could just go to wal-mart and purchase Iams adult formula, which had been recently revamped after being bought out by P&G to make it cheaper for sale in grocery stores and big-box chains. The new ingredients list which included large amounts of whole yellow corn and far less meat, was almost identical to the Science Diet adult formula. Again, this was a few years ago, but I can’t imagine much has changed since.
Science Diet gained a name because it was the first “premium” dog food on the market, and at the time was the forerunner of its field. Not so much, anymore, but they make a killing on the fact that they market themselves exclusively to vets and vet students, and fund nearly all the nutritional education vets get, as well as most of the research. A good portion of the rest is funded by Nestle. Cheers for velveeta 
Again, take a look at Innova, Solid Gold and the like. There are some good foods out there. Just not most of the big-name brands.
KarlGrenze–the nutritional needs aren’t too difficult to meet. I was an animal science major on a pre-vet track in school and thus took a lot of small animal nutrition courses (outside the vet school) and did a lot of independant research. Most of the targets you mention are easy to hit and, in the case of ca:P ratios, conveniently built in to the whole prey animal by mother nature. And if my dog ages and his needs change? That’s the beauty of a custom diet, it’s easy to adjust to his needs.