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Can anyone advise me on what would be a good healthy meal alternative to giving my dog actual dog food? I know about boiled rice and potatoes, but is there anything else i can give him? I'm sick of feeding him that bland dog food. I spend good money on his dog food, but I'd rather take that money and buy him some good food. You know dogs would much rather have something with a lil taste to it. Any advice is greatly appreciated
Actually I have to disagree with that. In fact, some of the more expensive brands have excessive fat making for beautiful shiny coats, but short changing the dog on other things unless over fed. It is sort of like the healthy tanned people getting skin cancer.
The stool size is an important factor. I think it is part of the reason all the service dog schools feed a meat based, concentrated chow. Imagine cleaning up after your dog if you couldn't see or were in a wheel chair?
Skin and coat is the best way to tell if the dogs food is working for that particular dog!
Do not ever use vegtable oil added to you pets foods. Better foods do not use fat to add gleam to coats. They use natural fish oils, and add Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids.
Commercial pet foods or 'expensive' comercial foods use fats after extruding to spray on the food to make it more patable. Just take a few kibbles out and place on a paper towel, check it in the am to see how much fat was there.
You may have noticed a unique, pungent odor when you open a new bag of pet food — what is the source of that delightful smell? It is most often rendered animal fat, restaurant grease, or other oils too rancid or deemed inedible for humans.
Restaurant grease has become a major component of feed grade animal fat over the last fifteen years. This grease, often held in fifty-gallon drums, may be kept outside for weeks, exposed to extreme temperatures with no regard for its future use. “Fat blenders” or rendering companies then pick up this used grease and mix the different types of fat together, stabilize them with powerful antioxidants to retard further spoilage, and then sell the blended products to pet food companies and other end users.
These fats are sprayed directly onto extruded kibbles and pellets to make an otherwise bland or distasteful product palatable. The fat also acts as a binding agent to which manufacturers add other flavor enhancers such as digests. Pet food scientists have discovered that animals love the taste of these sprayed fats. Manufacturers are masters at getting a dog or a cat to eat something she would normally turn up her nose at.
Nonsense. Corn and soybean oils contain exactly the omega 3 fatty acids dogs need. I don't argue that some of what goes into regular dog food isn't for the squeamish. However the millions of healthy dogs thriving on it puts the lie to emotional appeals like would you want to eat it. Don't judge a chow or an ingredient by its price. Look at how the dogs eating it do. I don't need to go broke feeding my dog an expensive chow to prove I love it.
I was just reading the label on my dog food and it has flax seed oil in it for the Omega-3 fatty acids. It also has vitamin supplements added to the food of Vitamins A, D3, E, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin Supplement, d-Calcium Pantothenate, Niacin Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Biotin. The analysis breakdown is Crude Protein, Minimum 26.00 % Crude Fat, Minimum 16.00 %
Crude Fiber, Maximum 4.00 % Moisture, Maximum 10.00%. It's primary ingredient is also chicken (and chicken by products, of course) Doesn't that sound like something you'd want for dinner?! LOL
Actually, I'm a big believer in Adkins (I know some people think he's crazy). But the reason why I switched to Buckeye dog food is because of their horse food. They were the first ones I saw that quit putting molases and sorghum in horse grain and started using more soluable fiber such as oats and wheat for their horse grains. I just figured if they care for their horses that much, they have to care for the dogs' foods too!
Yes, there are many people who prepare their own dogs food, but it does take some serious research...some of the more common plans are called BARF and raw - but if you are going to do those, you will need to read about them a lot.
As dog fanatics, we each have our own "hot topics" and feeding our dogs is a common one. I happen to be a very serious label reader of kibble and am relatively picky about the food my dogs get. Then again, I do rescue work and many of these dogs are in trouble nutritionally, and since they're terriers, food allergies are common.....
I think BARF and the other raw diets are absolutely stupid. They are condemned by the AVMA and now the FDA is getting into the act because so many people get food poisoning from all the raw meat they are handling. The BARF diet is based on many fallacies. Check http://www.secondchanceranch.org/rawmeat.html
i have heard of the barf diet, and i wouldnt even consider that. my vet recommended that i take him off eukanuba and put him on science diet, since he is getting older, and apparently science diet has "more natural ingredients"? i dont know, but my dog seems to enjoy it, and i weaned him off of eukanuba perfectly, so his system is now fine. what irritates me is that we're stationed in a very remote part of italy, an extremely small base, and when the store runs out of the dog food i feed him, they take forever to get it back, and that makes me have to give him some other dog food to tide him over until they get that particular brand back. what other dog food is associated with science diet? (like eukanuba is associated with iams).
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