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Food for thought.
Posted on March 19, 2010
For a while now I have been looking into dog food ingredients. Several blogs I read have encouraged me to look more critically at what I feed my dog every day. A while ago I have started a little discussion about it on facebook. I have changed my dogs food, but that is not where it ends. The whole matter is way too complex to understand and digest all at once. After researching recommended dog foods so I can make an immediate switch and make myself feel a little better I am continuing to try to understand what makes a dog food good and what makes it bad.
Food labels are scary. They are scary on one hand because of so many terms that the average dog owner, me included, does not understand. And as soon as you do understand the ingredients of many of them are scary to look at. I am long not at the end of researching this and trying to find the best diet for my dogs. But I feel the need to share some of what I have found so far, because many people just don’t know. I’d like to give some food for thought, encourage everyone to do their own research and educate about what is going on out there.
The tip of the iceberg, unfortunately, are veterinarians. Who hasn’t seen the food bags sitting in almost every waiting room. Who has not been recommended one and the same brand by multiple veterinarians. And they should be the ones to know, right? I bet they do know, but they don’t tell you! It breaks my heart to see that a part of the dog food company bought up a large number of veterinarians and makes them recommend an overpriced and crappy food. I don’t think I even have to mention the name, as we all know. And have we ever looked at the list of ingredients of this “veterinarian recommended” food? I haven’t for the longest time, because I didn’t understand anyway. Now that I am starting to do so I did look. I have to say I’m a little terrified. I think everyone know that the first few ingredients are the main ingredients with the largest amounts. This foods first is Corn. Corn is fed to cattle to make them fat, fast. Corn is the least nutritional of all grains. Plenty of animals have developed allergies to corn, bless those animals. It makes me want to throw up.
I am thinking about putting together an easy fact sheet for the adopters at our humane society. One that will give you at least a basic understanding of food without having to do much research. Rule of thumbs so to say. Once that is completed I will of course post it here. For now I want to thank some great sources that I have gained better understanding from. If you are interested I strongly encourage you to follow Darcy of SitStay.com in her blog and visit website like the Dog Food Project.
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