Confused about dog food

cambermam

Hi

My dog is a springer aged 4 and i've had her since she was a puppy.

I've always fed her on Wagg and she's fine, full of energy as you'd expect and never had any health problems.

Then i came across a website (probably hukd to be honest!) where loads of posters said feeding your dog Wagg was dog abuse and my dog will probably get liver failure and die at a young age(!).

So after reading that and looking at some other sites to find out about what ingredients i should be avoiding (or most specifically, that a meat product being first on the list is a good thing) i've got confused and some of the "best" foods are way too expensive and i don't know if i even need to change? Some of the recommended foods are £50+ a bag whereas Wagg is £10 for the same amount. I'm willing to spend a bit more but that's a bit excessive for me.

I bought a bag of Iams which costs 3x the price of Wagg and still it's full of cereals anyway so i'm not sure what to do for the best.

con1888

Can't personally reccommend a kibble as I feed my dog raw but Wagg is apparentley like feeding a child on smarties (before they took out the E numbers).

What a lot say re high end kibble is that you need to feed less so its not always less for the money, my vet recommends going for the highest quality that you can afford.

When I got Logan he was on Pro plan puppy Athletic which is £10 for the small bag at P@H, I think it's a high end but they all look the same to me.

krlyr

Bear in mind that more expensive foods are more digestible so you feed less of them. The bag may be £30-50 but if you use 1/3 of the amount you may not actually be paying more in the long run. I once worked out that it was more expensive to feed Bakers than a premium food, James Wellbeloved, because you had to feed 3 times as much Bakers but only at half the price.
I think all you can do is buy the best food within your budget, I wouldn't say feeding Wagg was animal abuse but a better quality food is likely to be better for your dog, much like a healthy diet benefits us physically and mentally.
If you're on a lower budget then maybe look into brands like CSJ, Autarky and Skinners.
Raw feeding can work out cheaply and is obviously very high in meat but often requires a chest freezer to bulkbuy and get the best prices. It takes a little initial research to ensure a balanced diet, though I've been raw feeding for years now and my dogs are doing fantastic on it.

cambermam

Thanks for the replies. I have looked at Skinners and it seems to also have a large percentage of grains that i've read should be avoided. So it's defiitely a minefield although from reading it must be better than Wagg? It does seem a good price too.

I think you're right and i need to find the best one for my budget but then i feel guilty that i'm not doing the best for my dog. She gets bones from the butchers regularly and I give her appropriate leftovers from our food.

con1888

Don't feel guilty, you didn't know any better. You feed your dog and give her a loving home, you obviously care a lot about her or you wouldn't be on here asking for advice - feeding Wagg is NOT animal abuse, jeez it's far from it.

If you do change over to another brand, best advice is to do so gradually, mixing a little of the new one in with Wagg, more and more til you have a complete changeover - this will help avoid any dodgy tummy due to changing.

ameliarate

I agree it is confusing. I read somewhere that Chappie is absolutely great and very easy to digest then somewhere else that it is carp. I have a large dog (lurcher) and can't afford £50 a bag because it doesn't last very long :eek: He is usually on Supadog for lurchers which is about £18 a bag.

mummybearx

NOT feeding your dog is abuse, feeding it a well known brand of food is fine! Some people need to get a grip!!!

I feed my dogs Bakers small dog. I've bought other food, and my 5 year old refuses to eat them. New puppy was fed on Royal Canin puppy food, but he now won't touch it.

As long as they are eating, I'm happy. I give them a few 'human' meals a week, boiled rice and white fish, pasta and chicken etc and they love it.

x

zaksmum

I switched my dogs from Hill's Science Plan after reading what a low quality food it was. I've now got them on CSJ and cannot praise this food highly enough. The variety I give them is called "That'll do!" which sounds a bit strange but evidently it's a term a farmer uses to his sheepdogs.

Anyway the food has made a tremendous difference to my dogs. No more loose poos, and their energy levels are good, and their coats glossy, and best of all, my older dog's stiff joint problem has disappeared.

This complete dry food is only £12.05 for a 15kg sack. I get two 15kg sacks delivered for £30, so works out at £1 a kilo. It's excellent quality too.

If you look at the CSJ website, they'll send you some good size samples to make sure your dog will eat the food.

krlyr

cambermam wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. I have looked at Skinners and it seems to also have a large percentage of grains that i've read should be avoided. So it's defiitely a minefield although from reading it must be better than Wagg? It does seem a good price too.

I think you're right and i need to find the best one for my budget but then i feel guilty that i'm not doing the best for my dog. She gets bones from the butchers regularly and I give her appropriate leftovers from our food.

The amount of grains in a food isn't really the only factor to consider. For example, Skinners is going to be a lot better than something like Pedigree wet food - the latter full of fats, sugars and salts to make it more appealing. It's more natural than the likes of Bakers with its artificial colours (often the cause of hyper behaviour in dogs). Check out the Field & Trial range of Skinners, I think it's a bit better than their other product (and a bit cheaper as it's advertised as working dog food so VAT-free - but perfectly fine to feed to a family/pet dog too)
The cheaper a food, the cheaper the ingredients. Grains are cheaper than meat so lower range food is high in grains, which bulk out the quantity of food but aren't digested that well by a dog's digestive system, hence the need to feed more of a cheaper food.
Not all grains are equal though - for example, if I had to pick a dry food, I'd go for one using rice or oats rather than maize (corn) or wheat (maize being one of the least digested of the lot due to being very high in fibre, and also having links to certain fungi/storage issue, and wheat being a common allergen).
I'd try to avoid foods with certain ingredients (like maize, artificial colourings, added sugar or salt, and so on) and I'd avoid food that played "tricks" with their ingredient list - for example, separating all the grains so that meat appears first in the list of ingredients - as, like food labels, they must be listed in highest quantity first. If they listed it as "Cereals, chicken meal, flavourings" it wouldn't look so high in meat as "Chicken meal, maize, wheat, oats, barley, flavourings". Being vague also raises a flag, so "Cereals, meat meal, animal fat" - what cereals? What meat? What animal fat? What are they hiding, what if my dog is allergic to lamb, or maize, or chicken? Being vague in the ingredients gives them the flexibility to change their recipe each batch without having to announce a recipe change - if they stated to use only chicken and wheat, they'd have to change their labelling if they managed to buy beef and maize cheaper the next month. If they use vague descriptions, they can chop and change according to cheapest ingredients and no need to change their packaging at all. Good for them, not so good for dogs with allergies or intolerances, or even just sensitive tummies who don't do well with change.

http://www.dogfoodproject.com/ is a good read and pretty understandable to most people, they explain the lingo of ingredients and so on.

I don't think there is really anyone who can claim to be feeding the "perfect" dog food because we don't know what that is! Experts will argue on whether dogs are carnivores or omnivores, are they opportunistic scavengers who've learnt to eat anything in their domestication, or does the near-identical digestive system to wolves show that they've maintained a carnivorous way of eating?
And even if we can identify what they should be eating, who can feed that way? If raw-feeding is best, can everyone afford to do that? Have room for a freezer? Have the time and patience to balance meals? I mean, I raw-feed but I'm still a long way off what I'd consider ideal because if I really wanted to mimic the diet of a wolf I'd be feeding whole elk, mice, birds and so on. Obviously unlikely to happen, but even feeding large whole prey is difficult - I now have someone who provides me with whole rabbit and some birds but day-to-day I'm feeding chicken carcasses or mince, beef chunks, tripe, etc. - it's just a mock diet of the real thing, but it's the best I can do. And I can only afford the quality of meat I buy now, which isn't organic or freerange, but I just couldn't afford to buy 100lb of that kind of standard meat a month!
And there's varying qualities in dry food. You have the top notch stuff like the fish and potato diets - but even they can be controversial because of the preservative ethoxyquin often found in fish flavoured foods because it is present in the fish meal. Other meats - how do you know which are pumped full of artificial hormones, which are freerange, organic, corn-fed and so on?
People could nitpick at most dog foods. I mean, we can't even decide what's healthy for us humans, one minute eggs are the cause of high cholesterol, the next they make no difference, I remember the big fuss made over tomato ketchup possibly being carcinogenic, but we still add it to loads of our meals, and so on.
Like I said, you can only go by what you read and learn and pick the best food for your budget. It may not be grain-free, it may not be organic, but if you've found the best food you can then you're doing your best.

MrsAtobe

One of the nurses at my vet's feeds Wagg, so it can't be that bad. I've just had a look at the feeding guidelines for Wagg, and the recommended amount is double what I feed of a more expensive brand. I've just worked out that it costs 87p per day to feed Orijen, which is still cheaper than a tin of food and mixer.

I found this website very useful when I was researching what to feed our springer on: www.dogfoodanalysis.com. She was being fed Dr John's Silver medal when she came to us, now that is one that you definitely wouldn't want to feed, we had to coax her to eat.

Bromley86

They don't get everything right there though. For example, their Burns chick & rice review assumes that the chicken (20%) is meat including water, which leads them to the conclusion that there is an extremely low meat content. In fact it is chicken meal (i.e. excluding water).

It's also weird how they recommend AG Lamb (30% meal) yet don't recommend AG Chicken (27% meal plus 1.5% from meat (5% meat less the 70% water content). Presumably they have a 29-30% min level?