02. Give a dog a bone.
It’s been quite a hectic week on the front, well, I say hectic but it’s been one of those weeks where on a quiet Sunday afternoon you look back and question where your time went! We’ve both been busy prepping for September plus doing odd bits and bobs around the house: it’s funny how time flies sometimes. Oh well, back to Dossy matters.
One of the decisions that I finalised in my mind this week was the rather emotive subject of food. From the bog standard Chappie, to the ‘premium’ brands such as Burns, then the cheaper (but quite decent) brands such as Skinners, CSJ was another brand thrown into question, wet food such as nature diet, high meat content and grainless Orijen, ‘green vegetarian’ food- really, there’s all sorts, and what makes matters even worse is that every single one of these brands will claim they’re the holy bone of the dog food world. Then you have to start asking yourself various questions: what type of food will she enjoy the most? What type of food will cover all the vitamins and nutrients she needs as she grows up? What would be the best food for her health and teeth? What has the least preservatives and additives? Do I go raw- in fact, what is raw? Should I make her a homemade diet, or stick to something commercial? What brand is the best for money- or am I just paying for a bag full of fillers? Do I go for a food with grains, or not? Is eating grains even natural for dogs?
Oh dear, quite frankly, making this decision has been one of my biggest headaches.
However, I do feel I have come on a long way from where my stance stood six months ago. Six months ago, if you had asked me what a decent dog food was, I would have told you to avoid brands like pedigree chum/chappie and to go for something like Burns/James Wellbeloved. My reasoning was based heavily off our rescue dog (Skye)- when we first introduced him into the family we were feeding Jack and Frazer on tins of pedigree chum, they’d both been on this for a number of years, and despite Jack’s teeth falling out in their multitudes the food was palatable, and neither of the dogs were overly hyper. It must have been rather expensive, looking back at it, as I’m sure a small tin alone equated to around a pound, and that was without the bakers dry dog food we fed alongside it. Anyway, the moment Skye started eating pedigree, he turned into a hyper maniac. He quite literally bounced off the walls, and was nearly un-controllable. I almost daren’t remember how many times myself and Mum battled over whether bringing him into our pack was the right decision or not at the time.
So, we took Skye to dog training classes, where our trainer quite rightly pointed out that we were feeding him Mc’ Donalds every night. It has been an image that has stayed with me for a long time, imagine you have a small toddler and you feed him Mc’ Donalds every day: not only will he grow fat, he will also be bouncing off the walls from the sheer amount of e-numbers, preservatives and the lack of nutrients found in his food. Dogs are exactly the same, and upon looking at the back of a pedigree chum packet, it was promptly thrown away for one of our trainers recommendations (Burns).
Now, I am not about to mock Burns, it is a decent food. It has got a short list of ingredients, it’s free from artificial colours, flavourings and preservatives, it’s hypo-allergenic (which basically means it’s been proven to cause fewer allergic reactions- I’m betting that’s from the fact it’s not filled with fillers such as corn) and of course it was developed by a vet: however you are essentially paying for a bag of around sixty five percent rice. If you look at the back of the fish and brown rice for instance, rice makes up 63% of the bulk, then you have oats as a third ingredient on the list- when you counter the fact that the fish (a mere 18%) would be inclusive of the water content, that fish and rice bag may as well be called ‘burns- brown rice with a tiny amount of fish’. That is an extremely low meat content for a carnivore, without even mentioning the problem of whether the vitamins and minerals are synthetic or not.
Are you starting to understand my problem yet?
Whilst half a year ago I would have praised brands such as Burns as the holy grail, I was slowly starting to see the error in my ways. Yet, the more I researched, the more difficult it became to find a good, solid food. Chappie and its followers were out of the question, I wasn’t overly happy with Burns due to the rice content, James Wellbeloved (despite passing the no grains test) still has a low meat content and overall the rest of the ingredients were quite low quality, Skinners proved to be quite popular on a forum I frequent- but considering the main ingredient in their food is either rice or maize/barley that wasn’t overly appealing and in the end only foods such as Orijen/Taste of the Wild/Acana started passing my tests. They were all grain free, had high meat content plus seemed to be ethical companies. From reading other people’s experiences, some dogs seemed to do very well on the high protein: however there were a few teething problems, a few dogs didn’t get on very well with the kibble. I had accepted myself that I would start Dos on a food like Orijen, and if she didn’t get along well with it- I’d try something like Skinners or Burns with lower meat content.
Yet, despite making this decision, there was a niggling voice in the back of my head. Over the months of my research I had come across a movement of people who fed their dogs ‘raw’ – either on a BARF diet, or a pray model. I almost choked on my tea the first time I read one of their pages, feeding your dogs on RAW meat- raw chicken quarters, raw beef ribs, raw slabs of meaty bones. Why, that thought was almost stupid! All sorts of thoughts started dashing through my head, what about the hygiene side, the bacteria such as salmonella found in meat, that bones would splinter when crunched, and heck I remember laughing to myself that feeding a dog a whole chicken that could feed a family for one weekend was a silly idea. Being the researcher that I am, I continued to look into raw, and the more I looked- the more it made sense. Dogs have a short intestinal tract to deal with bacteria, raw chicken bones don’t splinter when they’re raw (however, they do splinter when cooked- so NEVER give your dog a cooked chicken bone) and if Dossy is to be a member of our family: why should I bow down to feeding her anything less than what I would eat myself?
For heaven’s sake, Robyn, I told myself- give that puppy a raw meaty bone!
Before I digress into the wonderful world that is Raw, I do realise that this post is almost double that of my last. I think we’ll end this post here, and I shall carry on next time!
A few links I found VERY useful when researching food have been:
http://www.sniksnak.com/ac/petfooddefinitions.html - A list of definitions of what ingredients really mean.
http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/ - An excellent website with various reviews of dog food. However, do note that some of these reviews are out of date- so do double check when a review was written, and triple check that by the list of current ingredients on the back of a packet.
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