Another dog food thread

It can help to look at the ingredients and understand what's in them.
Generally, the main things to look for are:

- length of the ingredients list. Shorter is normally better, though there are exceptions

- order of the ingredients, remember they're listed from highest to lowest. Ideally you want meat to be way up there, preferably #1. One exception is with "fresh" meat, I'll explain in the next point

- fresh meat vs. meat meal. Meat meal is the dried meat, and we're told over and over that fresh is best. However, fresh can be sneaky. In an ingredients list, if a company puts a whole chicken into their food, they can list the quantity by the weight of the chicken pre-processing. A whole chicken consists of a fair amount of water - 60%, or sometimes more. So your 2kg of dog food may claim it's 20% chicken, but that doesn't mean it's 400g chicken. Allow for the 60% water that will be cooked off in processing and you may only end up with 160g chicken. But they could still list chicken before everything else if there's less than 400g wheat/vegetables/etc. used because they count the weight of the whole chicken. But if they use 400g chicken meal, you'll have 400g chicken meal in the end product too, so you know the list represents the quantities more realistically.

- how specific are the ingredients? "Chicken meal" is better than "Meat meal", "Wheat and maize" better than "Cereals". The more vague the ingredients are, the more 'wiggle room' the manufacturer has. One batch may be lamb and chicken, the next beef and pork, some with wheat, some with maize, some with rice. They benefit by being able to buy the cheapest ingredients at the time of manufacture without having to announce a new formulation. This can be a nightmare for dogs with sensitive tummies or food intolerances as you can't tell what's going to be in each tin/bag.

- colourings and flavourings. Why are these needed? Generally in cheap foods, they're filled with so many fillers that the food isn't that appealing. Companies will add sugars, salts and fats, artificial flavourings, some even spray the food with glucose syrup! Then there's the companies that colour the food to appeal to the owner. Your dog doesn't care if it has orange carrot-shaped bits in its food, it just cares if it tastes good, so it's up to us to not let manufacturers trick us with advertising gimmicks - pick a food by the quality of its ingredients, not whether it's "roast dinner flavour"

I don't feed my two dried food (both raw fed) so no personal recommendations, but a few brands I've seen recommended would be Arden Grange, James Wellbeloved, Fish4Dogs, Orijen.

Youdontseeme wrote: »

Thanks the info is actually for my Mum (well her new doggy really!) but I will pass it on.

With regards to raw feeding (I have googled but way to much info to take in while at work) what kind of things do you feed? Is it more expensive?

Thanks again
YDSM

Regular meals consist of stuff like chicken carcasses, tripe, beef chunks, various minces, chicken legs (with meat on), liver, lung, meaty bones like ribs, etc. There's a bit of research to do with feeding raw, it's not as simple as giving raw meat, you no longer have the backup of scientifically-balanced commercial foods so you have to trust yourself to get the balance right, but we do it on a daily basis with feeding ourselves, we don't eat 200g of nugget food and most of us do an OK job of getting a healthy balance
It can be cheap or expensive, depending on how you source your meat. Having a chest freezer can enable you to bulk-buy from raw food suppliers, approach butchers and abbatoirs for good deals or even freebies, and allow you to stock up on reduced meats from the supermarket. There are some pre-made raw diets out there too though, like Natural Instinct and Darling's, which take the work out of it but do cost a bit (they tend to use organic, human-quality meats though). Costs me about £40 to rawfeed my two large dogs, which is about on par with a medium-quality kibble.

Croatoan wrote: »

Orijen is almost universally considered the best if you can afford it (over £50 for 13.5kg bag).

One thing to bear in mind is that when comparing foods you should compare the cost per day. A £40 bag of dog food can work out cheaper to feed than a £20 one - some of the cheaper foods are so full of poorly digested filler ingredients that you need to feed three times as much of them. Work out how much the food costs per day to compare, more expensive foods generally have to be fed in smaller quantities (with the bonus of being less poo to pick up too!)

I recently switched from Hill's Science Plan to CSJK9 dry complete and I can't believe the difference in my dogs. They are both much livelier on this and my older dog's mobility has dramatically improved too.

They used to have really sloppy poos on Hill's but now their poos are lovely!! And it's only £12 for a 15kilo bag of CSJK9, though you do have to pay for delivery...it works out at £30 for 2 15k bags including delivery.

Personally, Skinners gluton free range (Duck & Rice, Salmon & Rice and Turkey & Rice) - hypoallergenic & totally gluton free. Very reasonably priced (RRP £22.99 for 15kg).

Wainwrights (from PAH) would be my 2nd choice as wheat free (not sure if it's totally gluten free) but more expensive @ £33.49 for 15kg)