What is Your Pet Really Eating

What is Your Pet Really Eating?

With a wide range of pet foods on the market it can be difficult to know exactly which one is best for your dog or cat. Supermarkets and large pet stores offer a huge choice of competing brands and consumers are bombarded with television advertisements, glossy packaging and confusing terms like 'dentalcare', 'lifecare' or 'gluten free'. Therefore, are you really choosing the best food for your pet? Are you buying good, quality ingredients, appropriate to your animal needs, or are you simply paying for clever packaging, marketing and advertising?

Before you next purchase your pet food, take a moment to examine the ingredients listed on your pet's food; you may be in for a shock.

Does your current pet food:

List vague ingredients like meat & animal derivatives or derivatives of vegetable origin?

List ingredients on the front of the bag i.e. Chicken & Rice, but when you read the percentage of ingredients on the back of the bag, are you surprised as to how little it contains of these foods?

Contain more than 10% water (listed as moisture)?

List the ingredients so small that you need a magnifying glass to read them?

Spend more money on packaging and advertising the food, than in the quality and content of the actual ingredients?

Not give you the full picture?

Products using high quality animal proteins and fats are more easily digested than foods based on large amounts of cheap cereal or poor quality protein. Some pet food can contain large amounts of indigestible matter, which just passes straight through the animal as waste, leaving you to clear it away. If you dig a little deeper you could find that you pet food contains feet, beaks and / or feathers in place of the chicken meat you were expecting. Rice can be another contentious area, does your food contain brewers' rice - a by-product of the brewing industry, perhaps rice flour, or Supreme Basmati Rice, rice as you and I know it?

Look at the quantity of meat in the food, as well as the quality - a 'chicken' dog food may contain as little as 4% chicken. Remember ingredients are listed starting with the one that the food contains most of - does the meat content appear far down the list?

There are two kinds of dogs. The first kind lives to eat. They will devour anything you put in front of them. The second kind eats to live. They pick and choose, take longer to finish meals, and sometimes won’t finish them at all.

A dog’s size, breed, and age often dictate whether he adores food or could care less. “Every Labrador who ever lived is food motivated,” Murray says. Smaller canines, such as Maltese and Yorkies, tend to be more discriminating.
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I have my labs on Nature'sVariety Raw Instinct, 25% raw frozen and 75% raw kibble. I had them on Innova and they too had issues with a dull coat and major poops but I will never feed anything but Nature's Variety Raw Instinct now. They are super shiney, no yeasty ears, teeny poops, twice a day that will totally disintergrate after 3 days if not picked up...although I generally do pick it up on a daily basis.