The chart explained

This may end up becoming multiple posts, but here goes...

Here it is; I'm told that Victor may be closer to $38/bag at our local farmer's co-op. I'm going to try to go there tomorrow to get some more info on my lunch break. The previous post shows the text that accompanied the chart on Facebook. (ETA-- just went back and saw that it's around $38 WITH TAX. All the chart prices are before tax, so the Victor price should still be about right.)

I'm asked general dog questions all the time, particularly about food. And let's be real. Feeding raw the convenient way isn't even close to being affordable for most people; and making it themselves isn't really in the cards for most others. It's still is daunting and can be time consuming-- if you're not prepping the ingredients and processing meat, you're tracking down deals. It can be costly if you can't buy in bulk or find good deals. And it's just not for the squeamish or the busy. 

Back when we used to feed kibble as their sole diet, I wanted to get the. Very best food we could afford, and we couldn't afford much. But we also had a variety of dietary needs, etc. 

And I am OCD in a very real way. I wanted to know if the better foods really were cheaper than they looked, which we could best afford... And so I did all these calculations scribbled on legal pads. I did this for the cats, too. I loaned my scribbles to people looking for new foods, I lost them. I did them over...

I've got a lot of friends recently with new dogs, so I thought now would be a great time to formalize that chart. 

The long and short is, high quality foods may cost more per bag or per pound, but that's not the whole story. 

I had to make a number of informed assumptions to create the chart

First, I used the feeding guidelines as recommended by the manufacturer. It's important to know that these are frequently inflated. But I wanted to use the conditions that the average owner would be using, and I'm not really interested in making the decision about how many calories a 25 or 50lb dog needs. 

In calculating cups per bag, I used the kcal/kg or grams/cup compared to calories per cup to determine this. So if a 30lb bag of food has 4000 calories per kg, and 400 calories per cup:

30lbs = 13.64kg (@2.2lbs/kg)

13.64kg x 4000 = 54,560 calories per bag

54,560 / 400 calories per cup = 136.4 cups per bag

Make sense?

The problem here is that you're moving from weight to volume to measure mass, so it can't be accurate. A pound of gravel takes up more volume than a pound of sand. And each measuring cup, even if it measures 8floz like every other one cup measure, the variations in shape are going to garner different mass. 

So, I cannot promise that there are exactly that many cups and it will cost exactly that much per day, etc. But I don't think it negates the overarching point: that "expensive food" isn't necessarily expensive.

These foods are representative. Remember that each of these brands has numerous flavors and varieties, and each one is not the same-- not the same caloric content, not the same price per day, not the same ingredients. But, again, they represent options.

Some are owned by big companies. When I say that they have been recalled, know that it's not necessarily that flavor, but rather that variety; I've done my best to find the correct info here-- please let me know if I'm wrong-- however, these are huge companies and some have had huge recalls.

Take the recalls with a grain of salt. Salmonella, as I think I've talked about before, isn't so scary for dogs, more so for people (so wash your hands!). I'm usually more concerned with how the company handles a issue like that. I'll let you research those yourself for now.

You get what you pay for, but not always. My choice of foods here was meant to represent some mid-range grocery brands, what we've traditionally thought of as "good, fancy" food, and an affordable range of more holistic foods (grain free and inclusive), and there's a wide spectrum of cost across the board. 

Victor is one of the cheaper foods; but it's ingredients are solid and certain varieties boast that they are GMO free with American sourced proteins. They are a family-owned company, as is Merrick; Whole Earth Farms (made by Merrick) is USA made with no Chinese-sourced products. But Blue Buffalo is one of the most expensive. It's good food, but of those three, which has the most familiar name? Blue spends a lot on advertising, whereas the others don't.

On the other hand, the 1-3 star foods have a lot of cheap fillers, but they spend even more on advertising than Blue. Who do you think is spending more on quality ingredients?

The returns go beyond your pocketbook. Dogs eating more nutritious food eat less and utilize more-- meaning smaller poops. Ingredients that they can handle better means less body odor, fewer allergies, less itching, fewer staph infections-- the potential for fewer and lower vet bills over time. 

Healthier, happier dogs.

And every dog is an individual. Each  of the 4-5 star foods are good foods, but each is different. Some may tolerate certain brands and varieties better than others, so if one doesn't work for your dog, don't give up. It doesn't mean it's bad food, and it doesn't mean holistic or natural foods are BS. 

This isn't exhaustive, it's not complete-- it will always be in flux. I will add to and adjust as new information comes in or as new foods crop up.

I hope it's a start...

Dog Food Costs

If you found your way here via my dog food chart... bear with me. I have a lot to say about it. :)

But not a lot of time right this minute...

So here it is again with my commentary from the Facebook post, and I will elaborate and update (I was off on my Victor costs per bag by a couple bucks) this evening or tomorrow, so check back then!

This list is something I will build upon over time, and that I will adjust as I get new info. Please feel free to share, tag, ask questions and send suggestions for future versions... This isn't at all to judge-- not every dog will do well on every food-- it's just to provide some info. Many people think feeding a quality dog food needs to be expensive. But if you know where to look and HOW to look, you'll see it doesn't have to be. I plan to write in much greater detail tonight when I have the time. But here are a few take-aways.

Feeding higher quality food (and the right food for YOUR individual dog) can potentially save on long term health care costs; the poop factor cannot be stressed enough (so much smaller); less gas; fewer allergies; less doggie "smell"; more *quality* energy-- a healthier, happier dog.

The last 3 columns are where the data is all culminated-- everything before it is showing my work.  You can feed a 4-5 star food for pennies more per month than what VERY popular one star foods cost, and in fact for less than some of the 2.5-3 star foods. Feeding these foods to a 25-50lb dog will cost you dollars per YEAR. It's really not much at all over time, even though the up front cost looks bad.

These are simply representative samples, and some other flavors in the same lines will cost more or less. I used grain free and grain inclusive varieties. I tried to choose foods that are easy to find locally or online with free shipping. I used the NON-SALE prices for everything, and used the kcal/kg info from each company to calculate cups per bag. So you can see, there are likely ways of getting most of these cheaper.

As for the popular brands listed, I chose popular "mid-range" grocery store brands as well as what we've traditionally thought of as the "good stuff."

I also used the recommended daily amounts provided by each company, which are frankly notoriously high as a general rule of thumb.

And a word on recalls. Salmonella is FAR more scary for people than for animals, so honestly the salmonella itself doesn't scare me. I am more concerned by the way a company handles it. And the brands owned by huge companies are hard to really report on with regards to recalls since they are so huge... 

A Kibble Conundrum

Say cheese!

I so wish I'd started this blog years ago. We've gone through so many brands and types and combinations-- I've forgotten more than I've remembered. And each food we tried, each trial, each experiment nudged us one direction or another.

When we started kibble shopping, we were on a seriously limited budget, as well as a seriously limited knowledge base.

My primary goals were as few by-products as possible, and if they were there, they needed to be named. I also wanted to have a named meat source high on the list.

(I feed my dogs parts of animals that humans generally do not eat, so by-products in a common language sort of way aren't offensive to me per se. This article, however, gives a good overview of EXACTLY what it means when a label says what it says...)

We started with the Sam's Club store brand of lamb and rice. But after Birdie's miraculous turnaround, and River (the new dog) and her dry coat... we decided to go up a step. No corn, more whole grains.

We settled on Pro Plan Sensitive Skin & Stomach. Oh my gawd. It smelled like fish food. River hated it every bit as much as I did.

River had her own ideas about what she should be on the menu.

So I did a lot more reading.

If you feed commercial foods, I highly recommend the Whole Dog Journal's list of approved foods. It's a great place to start if you have no idea what you're looking at. Not only do they give their own recommendations, they have a guide on how to read the labels for yourself. In fact, I highly recommend a subscription to the journal in general. Twenty dollars gets you one year of current issues and searchable access to the entire back catalog. It's an absolute wealth of knowledge, worth every penny.

This was all going on right around the time of the large Menu Foods recall, and Canidae's formula changes.

We settled on Nature's Variety for a long time, going back and forth between the grain-free and grain-inclusive formulas. I still quite like the company and the foods, and I've put them in our rotation (we still use kibble in Kongs) off and on over the years.

We fed Simon various low-protein foods to alleviate his "aggression" (that's a whole other blog post and discussion).

When trying to eliminate chicken, we tried Taste of the Wild Sierra for a while.

We happily chugged along on TOTW until a few things eventually tipped the scales.

We'll do whatever works...

That cute little pink nose.

It used to be black. A total black crust of snot. Birdie wheezed and sneezed and snarffled and snuffled and snotted all. the. time. Even after all the vomiting had stopped. She also had a patchy, dry, dandruffy coat. She reacted to most topical flea treatments.

At that point, I thought, "Well hell. Getting rid of corn stopped the vomiting. I wonder what losing the rest of the grains would do?"

I assumed their coats would improve. And we got that. But we got so much more.

One day, I suddenly realized that Birdie wasn't snot-filled, and lo and behold, she had a pink nose. That "chronic respiratory infection" that she would never be able to shake, according to the vet, was gone.

Since then, she's been fine. Perfect. She has so far been fine with every totally grain-free food we've tried-- Pinnacle, Merrick, Solid Gold... And she has gone back to snotty and awful within a couple of days on any other foods with grain, even the "high-quality" ones, except Wellness Salmon. The rice and barley seem to treat her fine, so I suppose it's not a totally across the board grain-related issue. We've never done a dedicated food trial with her because just finding something grain-free has always worked so well, along with this Wellness variety that we'd resorted to when she was being picky. So we're happy with that. Someday I'd like to get everyone on raw, but I'll save that for another day.

At any rate, Birdie has been the barometer for the importance of diet. Our little guinea pig of a cat.

Alice's Adventures in Pet Food

My sister-in-law called it the rabbit hole when I asked her what she recommended we feed our new dog. She gave me the option to stop right there and go no further... but I didn't listen.

Our dog Simon was elderly, to put it mildly. He had arthritis and was developing some Canine Cognitive Dysfunction. And he was extremely fearful of people.

But dogs, he loved. He communicated better with them than with people. He was happy with doggie friends. He couldn't physically handle a puppy, but an adult dog that could just be a companion in his old age seemed appropriate. The idea of having a dog that we could be more active with appealed to us. And the prospect of a silent home when it was time for Simon to call it a day was more than I could bear to think about. I picked him out of his litter when I was 15. I'd had him roughly half my life.

We'd always fed him whatever was on sale at the store-- Beneful, Kibbles n Bits, Dog Chow, you name it. And at 13 or 14 years old, it seemed to have worked for him.

But we'd recently learned it wasn't the best, thanks to our cats.

This sweet gal, Birdie, threw up daily. Multiple times a day. She was healthy, according to our vet. I'd had cats all my life, and they'd always thrown up. But this was the first time I'd had a strictly indoor cat, and I was tired of cleaning up vomit constantly.

With a little research, we learned that corn doesn't sit well with cats' stomachs. This was 6 or 7 years ago. I can't even remember where I learned this, what websites I visited, what books I read. I know I did a lot of research (catinfo.org is my current go-to site for cat nutrition information).

This was also before the big trend of pet foods without corn. It was almost impossible to find one, especially to find one we could afford. We were poor.

But Petsmart's house label made one. And sure enough, it worked. It worked. Immediately. No more vomiting. No more cleaning up piles of half digested kibbles.

It was my first clue that what we feed our animals really matters in a tangible way-- that it's not just raw fuel for energy. It is important in so many ways.

That's when I fell down the rabbit hole. It's when I started asking an awful lot of questions about what was going into the food that I gave my animals. It was when I really understood that I'm in charge of that. My animals have no choice in that. It's all up to us humans (as if we don't have enough on our plates... ;-). It's when I started looking at what I could do to extend Simon's life and what I could do for the newest member of our family, River.

Kibble detox

This. This is why I like a low carb diet.

Trust me. I love energy in a dog. We do dog sports. We like to play. But when a dog has no "off switch" it's miserable for everyone involved.

Dre's been off kibble for a few days now. After some hard wrestling with his sister this evening, he is now able to relax. When he's on kibble, this is much harder. Imagine the carb-loading you might do for a long run... Imagine that all the time. Or how you feel after that one too many cups of coffee.

Being capable of relaxation should be a human- and canine- right.

The menu

Poor Dre has changed foods more times than he's changed underwear.

Dre dog waits patiently for his turkey to boil.

We started by feeding him Nature's Variety; he never had solid stool and had a lot of gas. We even tried adjusting the amount with no luck.

We eventually started feeding him Taste of the Wild; it was better, but not perfect. But I noticed that he had a lot of excess energy-- lots of mouthing, jumping, chewing, pawing, wild eyes, and licking, licking, licking.

Luna, our shar pei /pit mix, experiences this excess energy when she eats kibble. And since it was clear that Andre was staying with us, we started switching him to raw. Plus, once you're used to cleaning up after a raw fed dog, cleaning up after a kibble fed dog is a major shock.

I'm pretty sure this was after the first surgery...

Started with raw chicken breast. Started adding in ground chicken leg quarters and he had a flare-up. We thought it was coincidental and more related to all the sticks he was eating.

Andre's flare-ups consist of lethargy, and either one or both of vomiting and/or liquid stool.

We tried again after he recovered, beginning with Bravo! frozen chicken, and he had another flare-up when we tried to add in the ground leg quarters again. He'd had so many rounds of antibiotics, anti-fungals, surgeries, was still underweight... we thought perhaps the bacterial load of raw was too much for him right now. I was hoping to get his immune system strengthened, get some weight on him, and then try again.

During each recovery period, he was given boiled chicken breast and either rice or starchy vegetables.

We went to kibble-- Wellness Core-- but, again, major case of the crazies.

Went to home cooked (chicken breast and vegetables), but it was so expensive. We tried adding in boiled leg quarters, another flare-up.

Back to kibble-- more crazies. We settled on a mix of kibble and boiled chicken breast with occasional veggies and bone meal.

He has done well on this for several weeks. However, he had several days of incontinence following dramatically increased water intake. It was likely stress of moving to a new house. But we're all keeping it in the backs of our minds.

And he never really gains any weight.

While Dre is currently healthy, I have gone to the vet and discussed a game plan. He felt like the most common thing it might be is a food intolerance-- perhaps chicken fat specifically, since that is what we've tried to increase each time he's had a flare-up.

We decided to start with a food trial. I have eased him off of kibble and onto boiled turkey. Tonight I began the switch back to raw-- Bravo! Turkey. We'll keep turkey kibble for Kongs and turkey treats. If he does well on this, we will try adding fats. If he handles other fats well, we'll try chicken fats and see if he tanks.

If he does NOT do well on the turkey, our next step is most likely round one of testing: the pancreas.

Fingers crossed.