what is better

[neko12]

ok thank you. I get to have fun with taking my dog to petsmart today.

[kerriebeth21]

The only decent food you'll find in a commericial pet store is Blue Buffalo. The rest of the BEST foods are carried by small privately owned petstores. Most sites have a "store locater" which will tell you who in your area carries it. Canidae and Innova both have store locaters. Innova is the best out of all the foods are were mentioned in previous posts!!

BEST FOODS LINK

[DogtorJ]

I have been counseling people concerning this issue for the past 5 years on the Internet. ::Mod Edit - Please do not post links, your welcome to post it in our "Related Links" area.:: It is amazing how opinionated people are concerning the perceived quality of one brand over another. I do not doubt that some pet foods truly are of better quality than others but there is also something VERY important to consider...the ingredients. Not just the quality of the ingredients but the ingredients themselves.

I can no longer recommend ANY foods that contain any of the following: the gluten grains (wheat, barley, rye), dairy products, soy, or corn. I have spent the last 5 years of my life (giving up golf) to do research on the food intolerances associated with these four "foods"...the big 4...or what I love to now call "the four horsemen of the apocalypse".

I am so disappointed and frustrated to see good dog food companies ruin one food after another with ONE ingredient. Many of these companies seem to know that wheat, corn, and soy are bad but they do NOT appear to know why. That is what my site is all about. These foods do physical harm to the intestine, thereby evoking the immune response that we know as food allergy. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The site goes into exhaustive detail.

I see food after food with great ingredients (and probably high quality) right up to the point they put in barley, or rye, or cottage cheese, or dried skim milk, or soy protein, or corn gluten meal. (errrh). All of these can and do cause problems in large numbers of pets and the foods that contain them could be perfect without them.

So, why do they do this? Ignorance is the best answer, I think. They don't understand the harm that they do. Many would also say "greed" is the answer...doing it because it is cheap, a "filler", or just raising the profit margin. That may be so, too, but I would still like to think (hope) it is simply a matter of not understanding celiac disease (gluten intolerance) and the related conditions of casein, soy, and corn intolerance. Humans and pets are both afflicted with these problems.

So when chosing a food, please read all labels and do not buy a food simply because it has a perceived high quality from someone you know. It may work for them because their dog simply tolerates these four trouble ingredients better than others. If you have one of the "worst of the worst" dogs that I see all day long at my practice, then you may need to eliminate ALL of these things (and all traces of these things) in order for your pet to become well.

Hope this helps,
John
::Mod Edit - Please do not post links. You are welcome to post your link in our "Related Links" area.