Tuesday, February 18, 2014

What are you feeding your dog? ( or What is your best friend worth?)

Lately you humans seem to have been developing an ever-increasing awareness of how the quality of your food supply has devolved over the last 50 or so years.  Dad says that he used to eat a lot better when he didn’t have any money and had to grow, pick, shoot or catch much of what he ate.  In concert with this thought process, there is a parallel ever-growing movement in this country to tighten up some on the quality of the food that you put in your bodies, avoiding the highly processed fare that your body doesn’t recognize,as food, an overabundance of sugar and fat as well as some very nasty chemicals.  Now, of course you’ve got your GMO thing trying to take over agribusiness and the world at large.  While a lot of folks don’t seem overly concerned, those that have researched what these bio-engineers are actually doing, how they are doing it and how very little they know about what it is they’re actually doing, it’s downright scary.  Heck, just the word “bio-engineer” scares me!  Okay, so what’s the point of all this?
Well, your faithful companion has to eat too and most manufacturers are just a little less particular about ingredients that go into dog food than food for human consumption.  You can see why I might take umbrage at that!  The old adage “You get what you pay for” certainly works here to some degree but not entirely.  A lot of manufacturers have cashed in on your heightened awareness to present products that appear to have healthy, nutritious ingredients.  The picture shows what appears to be a healthful combination of meat, vegetable and grain when the truth of what’s in the bag is far different.  There’s also the quality of ingredients.  Did you know that they’re allowed to call ground up chicken feathers “chicken”?  I wouldn’t be totally averse to getting a chicken or maybe a duck feather in my mouth from time to time but seeing as how they are totally indigestible, I don’t think I want to rely on them as my main source of protein.  You’d be surprised,  Even the stuff you find for sale as top-shelf products at your vet’s office is mostly junk, even the stuff that sounds like it was cooked up in a nutritional expert’s lab.   As important as the ingredients are, where they come from is equally important.  Nothing personal against the Chinese who supply a great majority of the ingredients in even premium foods but they have a serious quality control if not an integrity issue ( Please see my post "Howling Mad" from May 2010 ).  Heck, they even put melamine (a toxic industrial waste) into the baby formula for their own kids just to turn a profit.  The government made them pull it off the shelves and six months later it was back on the market again putting tens of thousands of human infants at risk of renal failure.  I remember the big dog food scare we had back when I was a young.  They were putting melamine in the dog food (it fools the assay test so as to show a higher protein content) and I remember that we lost several dogs to unknown causes, normally a very rare event here, during that time period. 
Coincidentally, it was around this time that Dad began to do some research on dog food quality, not just ingredients but their sourcing as well.  This can be very daunting, particularly when sourcing is not generally made very obvious and price can be a huge factor but he did manage to wean us from the “eye candy” that we preferred and started rotating between several top quality brands.  I’ve got to be honest, we loved our eye candy, would nut up as soon as we saw the bag but I will say that since we’ve been eating better, I spend a lot less time digging myself raw.  I wonder what other good effects it’s been having.  Nowadays our palates are a little more sophisticated.  We will turn our noses up at the eye candy that we once so loved as well as anything less that the best.  I’m not here to endorse any particular product but I will say that we all love our Blue Buffalo and Merrick.  Yes, it’s pricey but not as much as you think.  As it is nutrient dense, we eat (and poop) less so the cost has to be looked at in this light.  Sure, there’s some really good food out there that we won’t touch either.  It’s all a matter of personal taste much like how a lot of humans love lobster and others wouldn’t eat it on a bet.  I’m glad Dad loves us enough to take the time to find some really good food that we like to make the most of the few short years that are given to us.
As I said, the process of ciphering through all of the information, then going back to the manufacturers website and trying to get information there can be more than daunting but fortunately there are others who, with no vested interest, have already done much of the research and are willing to share their findings.  Dog Food Advisor is one such entity that can help to make some sense of all that is out there.  Given that the results can be somewhat subjective, it is always good to compare several ratings and a quick Google will get you there without a problem.  Then it’s just a matter of figuring our what, within your budget, are the best foods that your pet enjoys.  It’s always good to have 2 or 3 to rotate through as no one food is perfect and rotating them will help balance that out.
I have always considered it a great unfairness that, as mans’ best friend, dogs only get to enjoy 10 + – years of that.  If you value your companion, wouldn’t it be best to make the most of those years, possible extending them and certainly improving their quality.  A rule of paw here, if you are feeding your pet from the grocery store or, dog forbid, the dollar store, you could do soooo much better.  What is your best friend worth?