Today, I’m going to talk about what to feed your dog. There are things you should and should not do when feeding your dog. The question of what to feed your dog is one that should always be addressed with health in mind. There are foods out there that you dog might love but that are terrible for it.
Related: High Quality Kibble: Grain Free, Gluten Free or Neither?
What to Feed Your Dog and What NOT to Feed Your Dog
There are some specific things you should know when trying to decide what to feed your dog. I recently read a question in a forum about a woman who’s eleven month old collie/lab mix was having an upset stomach from a certain brand of food she was feeding it. I won’t give names, but the food had both kibbles and bits.
There’s an easy answer to why her dog was having GI distress with this food. Food like that is garbage. Feeding your dog a food that is both cheap and designed to be extra appealing is the equivalent of us eating junk food every day. It might taste delicious, but it’s absolutely terrible for our health. The same is true for dogs. If you feed them garbage, they’ll feel like garbage.
What NOT to Feed Your Dog
Never, never, never, under any circumstances buy a bargain basement food. Those cheap-o foods are made with absolute bottom of the barrel ingredients like corn and artificial colorings as well as meat by-products, animal fat, meat and bone meal, and animal digest. These all sound relatively benign when you just read the name, but take a look at what is ingested when you feed your dog food with these ingredients.
Meat By-products
Meat by-products is just a nice way of saying the company took all the waste scraps out of the meat yard and stuffed it into your dog’s food. So you’re basically feeding your dog a mish-mosh of junk.
Animal Fat
This one doesn’t sound so bad, but if you want to know what to feed your dog, you should avoid this. Animal Fat is the term used for fat that has been rendered form pieces and parts of animals to entire animals. “What kind of animals,” you ask. Exactly. You never know, but it can include nasty sources like restaurant waste.
Meat and Bone meal
MBM is another ingredient to stay away from when deciding what to feed your dog. Meat and Bone meal is a fluffy brown substance made by drying out the solids left after rendering. Again, it can include anything from livestock that has died on the farm to outdated supermarket meat. For years, it’s been rumored that dogs and cats are used in this process, and although the FDA has never found canine or feline DNA in any samples, it has found that MBM was an ingredient most likely to contain sodium pentobartbital. That’s what vets use for euthanasia. So draw your own conclusions.
Animal Digest
Want to know what to feed your dog? Nothing with this in it, that’s for sure. Animal Digest is a flavoring sprayed on cheap dry dog food to make it more appetizing. This stuff is nasty for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s one of those “mystery” products. You never really know what was used to make it. Secondly, the process is done with enzymes or chemicals. I don’t want my dog eating chemicals.
What to Feed Your Dog
Without exception, bargain basement dog foods are going to contain at least one of the ingredients I just listed, and they’re all hideous. So when deciding what to feed your dog, go for a high quality food.
Related: Best Dog Food Choices
A high quality dog food that focuses on nutrition is the route you want to go when deciding what to feed your dog. Stay away from foods that have brightly colored kibbles or bits, as these are most likely artificially produced. Also, anything that makes gravy or sauce when water is added isn’t a great idea.
In general, you want to go for a high quality dog food like Science Diet, Natural Balance, Blue Buffalo, and the like. If finances are an issue, you can feed your dog Purina One. Make sure it’s Purina One, and not dog chow. Purina One may not be quite as great as some of the other brands, but it’s a nice compromise between excellent nutrition and financial concerns.
If you want to know what to feed your dog, it’s as simple as feeding yourself. Look at labels, and only feed your dog a high-quality food that is based around health, not taste. Let’s be honest, a dog will pretty much scarf down anything, so do a little label reading, and you’ll know exactly what to feed your dog.
