Dog Food Questions - merged

Limana68

Hello again, well this has turned out to be an interesting debate about dog food! After a good look around today we went and bought a sack of Wagg chicken & veg for £9.99! They get plenty of doggy treats too so they will be fine!!Thanks for all your advice!! Li

anna42hmr

foreign_correspondent wrote: »

LucyLoo2 wrote: »

Calm down dear!! Well my dogs have always done well on Wagg, and if you look at their website you will see that they say:

"We don’t use any artificial colours or flavours in our pet food, the meat in our pet food is human food grade and, where possible, we source our raw materials locally or nationally, within the UK."

Intestingly enough, they also list ther ingredients on both their website and feed bags which I cannot find on the JWB website. We may choose to disagree but the OP did ask for people's opinions and my dog is in fabulous condition on Wagg and has grown back her coat (which was terrible, she is a rescue dog) and is now lovely and shiney and healthy! Also there are no "red bits" or "green bits" it is all brown!

its been a while since i looked, but jwb did have the ingrediants listed online, you have to select the flavour of the food, then on ingrediants and analyis and then wether its puppy, junior adult version (listed at the top of the site)

edit, just checked it is on there for example this is one of them:

Duck & Rice Kibble
Complete dog food

INGREDIENTS AND ANALYSIS

Puppy/Performance

INGREDIENTS: Rice, duck meat meal, organic oats, duck fat, whole linseed, duck gravy, alfalfa, natural seaweed, sodium chloride, calcium carbonate, D,L-methione, lysine hydrochloride, threonine, zinc methionate.

CONTAINS: Minimum 27% Duck, min. 27% rice, min. 7.5% organic oats.

cluuuuur

We feed Burns - it's expensive, but it's low protein (with a young, hyper staffie that's a bonus!), we never have any weight problems - both dogs do extremely well off it, and it cuts down the clearing up in the garden.

That said, if we need to have a cheap month we'll go for Chappie complete dry - again, low protein, and both dogs still do well, but there's an awful lot more "waste" which we definitely notice!

t_r

Have you thought about raw don't turn your nose up at the thought. Have a look at this website ukbarfclub.co.uk and then make your mind up, guaranteed way of not giving them additives.

foreign_correspondent

I would feed raw if I had a bigger freezer and a bit more time! My dog loves a nice meaty bone. I do think it is the best way if all the options are open.

Rowan9

My 9 yr old dog gets the supadog for dogs in their prime - £25 a bag but we could see the difference in her coat and bright eyes within 2 weeks. She has arthritis so I'm happy to pay this for her food. The young one gets Wagg, sometimes Omega if the shop is out of Wagg. She is in great condition.
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pollyanna24

Our 1 year old staffie is very funny when it comes to her food.

For weeks on end, she'll eat really well and then all of a sudden, decides she doesn't want to eat her food.

We give her one tin in the morning and another in the evening.

At first she was on Puppy Eukanuba, but got bored of it, so we started adding in wet food. Started on Pedigree, but again, after a while, she stopped eating. So we played around with different tins and she is now on Butchers. Ate well for a couple of weeks, but now isn't eating. Is she just bored? Should I just buy such a variety of stuff that she doesn't get bored or is there another solution?

If she does finish her food, we give her Shapes biscuits, but if she doesn't, she gets nothing. Sounds like treating her like a child, but it seems to work sometimes. If she eats her dinner, she comes running into the front room to ask for biscuits, but doesn't bother if she hasn't eaten it. Strange.

We also have unopened bags of Bakers Complete as that was another type of food she liked for a bit and then got bored of.

We try putting doggie gravy in the Butchers and twice a month put sardines in her food, but the last time, she just picked out the fish and left the dog food! Very crafty! This morning, I plonked cheese on top of it, but she even ignored the cheese (which is very strange!).

If she doesn't eat, we take it away after about half an hour and she doesn't get anything else, so I don't think we are spoiling her or letting her think that if she doesn't eat, if she waits long enough, someone will give her toast or chocolate or something.

EDIT: As a last resort, I was thinking of putting her food in the cat bowl on the bench as she is always trying to jump up and eat that!

elsien

Are you sure it's the food she's bored with, or just not feeling that hungry at the time? It's good that you're lifting the food and not giving it back, but how long do you do it for - missing a couple of meals won't hurt.
I'm lucky in that my dog will eat anything (literally - whether edible or not), but I did have a previous dog that tried it on once in a while. I tend to work on the basis that if a dog's hungry enough it will eat (unless it's ill), so I put the food down, and took it up, and after a day and a half, he got the message and started eating. Not sure this is recommended practice, but it worked for me. The other thing is, can you mix other stuff in with the food on a regular basis - when I'm cooking tea, i do some extra veg for the dog to give her a bit of variety (no salt, obviously) and she loves it - again, depends on whether the dog eats veg or not.
Good luck, maybe others will be along with more ideas.

pollyanna24

Thanks for that. I think I'll try doing things like giving her more scraps mixed in.

I did go to Somerfield yesterday and buy two different tins and tried her on them. She ate some, so guess that's a start.

She's fine in every other way, just don't like hearing her tummy rumble when I know I've fed her!

Our cat is the complete opposite. Sits on the edge of the bench waiting for her food! I thought they were supposed to be the picky eaters!

elsien

pollyanna24 wrote: »

She's fine in every other way, just don't like hearing her tummy rumble when I know I've fed her! quote]

I know how you feel -I was advised by the vet to starve mine for 48 hours when she was ill -I've never felt so guilty (or harrassed!) in my life! But it also means that I now know she can go a couple of days without food with no ill effects, hence my hard heartedness at times.
(As well as the veg, I sometimes put a bit of extra pasta or rice in, and take out the equivalent amount of biscuits so she doesn't get any fatter.)

Do you think yours is a genuinely fussy eater, or just seeing what happens when she turns her nose up? As long as she's healthy though, that's the main thing.