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.