Choosing A Good Dog or Cat Food

Making the right choice starts with reading the label's list of Ingredients. By law the ingredients must be listed according to weight of the ingredient added in descending order. In other words, by weight of raw ingredient the main ingredient is listed first, second most prominent ingredient next, and so on.  The first three ingredients are the most important. It's easy to tell if the diet is vegetable based, with corn, rice, wheat, and soybean meal listed as the main ingredients; or if the diet is meat based, with meat, lamb, fish or poultry listed as the main ingredients.

I would always pick a meat-based diet over vegetable-based foods for optimum health for dogs. Now...here's the catch! I'm going to have to pay more for the meat based diet! Responsible and caring dog owners should never let the price of the food dictate the purchase decision. In almost every situation... with dog food, you get what you pay for. The higher the price the higher the quality. I'll let you consider the converse of that. And the higher the quality of the ingredients, the greater the nutritive value for the dog. Plus, you will purchase less high quality food than cheap food since dogs must eat more low quality food to meet their nutritional needs.  Immediately you will notice that when feeding a high quality, meat-based food, the dog will need to consume fewer cups of it per day than a cheap diet; the dog will also pass noticeably less stool when consuming a high quality diet than with a grain-based diet.

Cheap dog foods - and they are widely available and wrapped in all sorts of fancy labels - will contain cheap ingredients that will be poorly digested and will lead, over varying lengths of time, to deficiencies in your dog's health. Stroll through the pet food departments of various pet food outlets and read the labels of the different products. The cheap food will almost always be vegetable based and the more costly foods will be meat, poultry or fish based. Your dog has no control over your choice; so you have an obligation to provide good quality products that will optimize your dog's quality of life! And don't forget to pay attention to the trick of "ingredient splitting." What the pet food manufacturer does, in order to make the ingredient list look better, is to break down a product such as corn into its different forms, then place each form of the ingredient into the ingredient list according to the amount of the form present. For example, they will list ground corn, yellow corn meal, corn gluten, and corn gluten meal separately and thereby split up "corn" (which really should be listed as the main ingredient) in to places further down on the ingredient list to make it appear to the consumer that there is less corn in the dog food.

What Is The Guaranteed Analysis?
This listing, required on dog food labels, is intended to instill confidence in the product's contents; however, it only gives you a percent approximation of what you are buying. It indicates maximum or minimum amounts of the substance in the food. For example, if Crude Fiber is listed as "Not less than l0%", you have no idea how much over 10% is actually in the diet; or if Crude Fat "Not less than 15%" is listed, does the diet contain 16% or 36%? So the Guaranteed Analysis helps, but not much.

Semi-Moist Foods
I never recommend semi-moist foods. You know the ones... they're wrapped in cellophane and look like meat and have names that give the impression they're meaty. I often wonder why the manufacturers, if they want to associate these foods with meat, don't put any meat in them! They do put lots of food coloring, soybean meal, sucrose and preservatives like propylene glycol in them though! Forget about the semi-moist dog foods.

Should I Feed Canned or Dry...or Both?
If dog owners had to choose one or the other, canned food or dry food, they should choose the dry. Canned food is generally 75% water, so 75% of your purchase price is going toward a non-nutritive ingredient that you can readily obtain from your own water faucet. Plus, there is an advantage to oral hygiene in the friction of the dry dog food, helping to keep the gums and teeth healthier than if the dog were eating only canned food. The only time I recommend canned food is to someone who refuses to stop buying cheap dry food; the addition of canned food to a cheap dry food will generally improve the total diet. And just like the dry food, canned food has an ingredient list you can read to help guide your purchase decision. A dog being fed a high quality dry food does not require any canned food.