Fellow dog owners - what food do you feed?

[anatess]

Did raw for a while and never saw a noticeable difference. The whole food allergy thing is blown out of proportion - a good friend is actually a dog allergy specialist and he has told us that food items represent a very low percentage of canine allergies.

Ouir old staffy bull did fine on kibble (16.5 years when he died). Before that our tibetan mastiff did well on kibble (14 years).

Our current dogs do fine on grain free kibble. Again, did the raw thing, did it for a while and never noticed good or bad changes.

My take is this: dogs are not wolves, they are dogs. Dogs are carnivores, they are pack animals and they are canids - but they are not wolves. Recent genome-wide analyses of dogs and wolves revealed that dogs have more copies of a gene that allows dogs to produce amylase, which is used in the digestion of starches. Wolves have only two copies, domestic dogs have anywhere from four to thirty.

I am not against feeding raw - what I am against is people who feed raw and adopt superior attitudes because they do it.

On that amylase thing - the presence of more genes in the dog that produces amylase does not mean the dogs are efficient carb consumers. It just means they are better than wolves at it.

Yes, environmental allergies are a lot more common than food allergies. But I have 2 English Bulldogs. Food allergies are very prominent in English Bulldogs as well as environmental allergies. Yeast blooms are also common. Tons of EB owners feed kibble. But, in the EB group I belong to, you will see quite clearly how EBs on low quality kibble suffer. But even high quality kibble doesn't just work. You have to jump around different kibble formulations to find one that would work for the dog. I just got tired of that crap so I went all raw.

Now, this is very anecdotal, but one of my EBs is allergic to chicken. Or so I thought. We went through rounds of kibble formulations on an elimination process to find one that works for him and every single kibble we tried that had chicken in it fails. Oh, and about that grain-free thing... that doesn't quite work out either. I thought, grain-free=low carb. Not so. Potatoes are high carbs too. What we did find is low protein = high carb, so we went with formula that has carbs lower than 45% (they don't list that in the bag, by the way - you have to figure it out!). Carbs on my dogs = yeast infection. We finally found Earthborn Holistics Primitive Natural that worked until Earthborn changed the formulation.

So, we went raw. I figured, if I am competent enough to feed my kids, I am competent enough to feed my dogs. My kids go to a holistic pediatrician and holistic pediatricians are very particular about nutrition so I already got quite a good grasp of human nutrition. So I fed my EB raw chicken to try it out and he was just completely fine with it. That threw me off my rocker, I tell ya.

Since I rescued these EBs, I've spent too much money on vet bills. Since I put them on raw, I've only had to take them for their physicals. That's it.

I don't have a superior attitude with raw. It is not easy to feed dogs raw. Lots of research has to be put in it and you have to really know your dog very very well because you have to tweak the diet depending on your dog's response to it. So you also have to read and read and read all about nutrition.

But what having EBs did teach me... I feel so much better about my decision to take our kids to a holistic pediatrician (yes, she is an MD) even if she did not take health insurance. My sister who is a nurse accused me of child abuse when I did that because she did not prescribe antibiotics for my kid's ear infection. Instead she gave me willow/garlic ear drops and a meal plan!