As the new line of Blue Buffalo dog food commercials say, "Pet parents are learning the truth about some of the ingredients in leading dog food brands." The fact is, if you wouldn't eat it, neither should your dog.
If you walk into your local pet store or large grocery store, you'll see tons of brands of dog food. Some people believe dog food is dog food, and the animals don't know the difference. After all, dogs are known to go out in the yard and eat poop because they're bored. What do they care?
Truth be told, most don't care. Many dogs, barring any health or digestive problems, will eat whatever you feed them. But that doesn't mean what's going in their bodies isn't hurting them. A lot of dog food, particularly the most common "grocery store brands" are filled with all sorts of biproducts, animal digest and other garbage that does your dog absolutely no good. They'll get full, sure, but they're likely to put on pounds, receive unsubstantial amounts of vitamins and work towards health issues.
It's just like when you go out and eat a Double Whopper. It'll make you feel full, but you're full of trash.
Take animal digest for example. This is a common ingredient in all sorts of low-priced, everyday dog foods like Chef Michaels, Iams and Pedigree. These brands will try and play off digest as something important, but really it's just all the little unwanted bits and pieces of animals that don't make it into real food. It could be anything - toes, ears, colons - you name it. That's just not high quality stuff.
Companies like Blue are doing a good job at drawing attention to this type of stuff. Even big box pet stores are working to eliminate the low-quality foods from their shelves and replace them with better stuff.
The first bunch of ingredients on a can of Blue Buffalo Turkey wet food: Turkey, turkey broth, turkey liver, carrots, peas, sweet potatoes, whole ground brown rice, whole ground barley, oatmeal, salt, flaxseet, blueberries, cranberries. This is followed by vitamins, supplements and natural preservatives. These are the kind of things you should be looking for in an ingredient list.
You could eat that stuff!
Sure, plenty of dogs live long, healthy lives on low-priced generic dog foods. But why risk it? A human can also live a long life eating nothing but steaks and burgers, but any living creative has a better fighting chance if they fill their bodies with natural, wholesome products. Animals shouldn't be any different.
So go take a look at your pet's food. Can you identify and understand everything on the ingredient list? Is it full of things you recognize, or a bunch of chemicals and ambiguous animal bits you can't understand?
What I'm asking is - What are YOUR dogs eating?
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