Well I have been around dogs… thousands of dogs for the past 18 years. I have seen healthy hunting dogs eating junk in a bag, where it costs more to make the bag than the dog food itself! And live to be a ripe old age…. so I know it can happen but facts are facts, that some foods are just junk whether or not the dog does alright.
From the time I was 15 years old, when I started working in my aunt’s pet food and supply store part time; I have fed a high quality dog food. For over 10 years I fed Martins Formula Kibble. This is a great food for what it is. My dogs always looked good on this food. My German Shorthaired Pointer, Jessie lived to be 16 years old and ate this food the last 11 years of her life and never had a single health issue.
In the summer of 2006, when I got Maya, I totally embraced the whole working line German Shepherd culture…. I finally found my home after working with these dogs for many years I brought one into my personal life. Well, all of these people are mega-advocates for Raw Diets for their dogs. So I jumped on the band wagon and fed Raw to my dogs for 1.5 years until my family number grew to 8 dogs and my monthly dog food bill was through the roof! I then looked for the next best thing…. these new “grain-free” dog foods. The protein amounts are very high, many of them 34-50% protein. This is way too much for most dogs. So I had my dogs on the EVO formula for (42% protein) and after 8 months of being on it I had bloodwork done on 5 of my dogs and all of their kidney values were elevated. I had previous bloodwork done to show that it was the food that was causing this. They were totally asymptomatic but their kidneys were under stress. So I continually changed the food for the past 4 months to a lower and lower “grain-free” dog food until I was down to a 26% protein food.
Still not feeling that I was doing right by my dogs I had been researching costs for raw food ingredients to see what I could do in that department. As of December 27, 2008 all of my dogs are now being transitioned back to a raw diet consisting of: chicken skin, meat, bones; sweet potatoes, eggs, fish oils, and other various veggies; along with once a week multi-vitamin. Doing this myself, despite the additional work costs roughly the same price as what my dog food bill has been.
I know that dogs can sustain life on processed dog food but I couldn’t be happy with that in itself… I need my dogs thriving and I have seen it on the raw diet. The moisture content is 65-80%, within the food so it’s metabolized totally differently then a food that only has up to 10% moisture in it, such as the kibble formulas. There’s nothing natural about that, we are making our dogs dehydrated and giving them protein amounts that they would never see in the wild. All mammals are roughly 70-80% water and that’s within their cellular composition. So when canines eat prey animals and vegetation it’s mostly water but it’s different then just drinking from the water bucket in the kitchen. These high quality kibble formulas absolutely have high quality ingredients but when you start getting above 24% protein… the percentage is no longer natural because of the amount of moisture is far less than that of the meat/vegetable in its raw form. So my dogs are woofing… Paws for Raw!!!
