There is so much information on the web about pet food.  Although all dog food is supposed to be nutritionally complete, how can you tell?  Because the bags say the food is complete?  When you look at the food ingredients and analysis, you see the amount of protein, fat, etc... that the food has, but that doesn't mean it is all useable by your dog.  You should not only look at the ingredients, but at the quality of ingredients.

For instance, your dog food could contain rice, eggs, and poultry fat, and would have a decent analysis, but how much of that is useable?  You want the label to be as specific as possible, so instead of saying "poultry fat", you would rather see "chicken fat" or "turkey fat." 

The ingredients that I personally would avoid are: (this is not a complete list)

• BHA
• BHT
• ethoxyquin
• beet pulp
• egg product
• spray dried anything
• whatever - by - products
• whatever - by - product meal
• animal fat
• animal meat
• many different forms of the same ingredient (corn gluten meal, corn, etc.)
• milk product
• xxx-ose (various forms of sugar)
• a lot of additives that you can't pronounce

I would rather most of the nutritional sources be whole foods.  To get more information about pet food ingredients, visit the 5 following links.

Pet Food Ingredient Information

Here are some links to the homepages of some foods.

I also have pages about the BARF diet, and some BARF diet links.

Created: 21 Nov 2000 | Edited:

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