best dog diet

marketing is bullshit exclamation point

dogs can't digest vegetables.
if you want them to get the nutrients. get a juicer

shishkab wrote: [quote=quijibo]
dogs can't digest vegetables.

um.... what?
oh no... i'm gonna get grilled. shait :oops:

i thought dogs are carnivores and their short digestive tract doesn't allow for full absorption of nutrients from vegetables
that better absorption of nutrients would be achieved by juicing them..

am i wrong?

Didn't Wellness get bought by a larger company awhile back?
so many of them have, I've lost track - but maybe I'm lumping them in with Science Diet and Eukanuba et al
Shish?

at the moment, I'm sticking with Eagle Natural - they say they don't import ingredients

I think dogs ate scraps and raw bones from the butcher before the Pet Food Industry.

cythren, the biggest problem with home-cooked meals is the fact that most of them are NOT nutritionally complete. dogs have complex nutritional needs, and many folks are under the false assumption that they are obligate carnivores. they are, in fact, omnivores (which surprises many people when they hear that).

your best bet, in my opinion, would be to continue with the Wellness menu of foods. like Eagle Foods (see above post), Wellness does not use wheat gluten in its foods. They do use rice protein concentrate in a few of their products, but the company insists it tested the concentrates after the melamine scandal and passed with flying colors.

quijibo wrote:
shishkab, what do you think about the barf diet?

i, like many veterinary professionals, am against it. it's a touchy subject for some people, and i know there are members of Brooklynian who feed a raw diet. i don't wish to incite any bad feelings, so i'm going to be very careful and say that it is a personal decision made by owners who usually have the absolute best intentions for their companion animals (i say "usually" because sometimes people blunder into raw feeding without doing any serious nutritional research and end up doing more harm than good with an unbalanced diet). i commend them for their devotion.

there are a number of reasons why i am against the diet. i'll just cite one of them off the top of my head: raw bones.

the notion of feeding raw bones because that's what wild canids do has a serious potential problem: it's generally safer for wild canids because they eat the fur as well as bones. all that fur wraps around the bone fragments in the digestive tract and provides some protection to the
stomach and intestines from punctures. folks who feed Fido raw bones don't normally throw fur into the mix. i have seen first hand the damage that GI foreign bodies in the form of bones can cause Fido, and it ain't pretty.

from a strictly nutritional standpoint, raw bones provide high amounts of calcium and phosphorus. one would think that this is a good idea, but too much calcium impedes the absorption of other nutrients like zinc and over long periods of time will cause reduced digestibility in general. secondly, veterinarians generally agree that prolonged increased levels of phosphorus contributes to decreased kidney function. if an owner is feeding a raw diet and is careful to make certain that the diet is well-balanced, the addition of the extra calcium & phosphorus from the raw bones will cause an imbalance.

the issue of Salmonella is a verrrrrrry touchy one. i can cite multiple examples of why Salmonella is a real danger in raw feeding and a BARF advocate can cite an equal number of examples as to why mine are a load of hooey. on this we will never agree. so, in the spirit of good neighborly interaction, and again, stating that i have no intention of baiting raw advocates in this forum, i will merely offer up the following simple point which i'm hoping everyone can agree on. most bacteria do not like the cold. they don't grow on cold things, or at the very least grow very slowly (this is Microbiology 101 stuff). if an owner wants to feed raw bones, it would make sense to give the dog bones straight from the fridge, as the number of pathogenic microbes would be greatly reduced. however, many do not, and even more give them from the fridge and then let them sit out at room temp. hence, an increase in bacteria, and an increase in the potential contamination to man or animal from pathogens.


okay, Q, how's that for a start? (phew)

hmmm.
well, professionally speaking i have seen bone splinters from both cooked and raw bones. generally speaking, cooked bones splinter more.

professionally speaking, chicken bones are a perforated stomach just waiting to happen. generally speaking, the larger the bone the better -- it's difficult to get jaws completely around a big beef femur therefore harder to fracture into itty bitty shards.