Most commercially produced dog food exists, not to make your dog healthy, but to sell the left over waste products of the human food industry for a profit. Never forget this. Today a few companies have responded to the groundswell of outrage about dog food made with known contaminants, floor sweepings, diseased animals, and even rendered dogs and cats killed in shelters, by producing dog food from organic (very few) and human-grade ingredients (a few more).The problems have not been eliminated, however, and it is likely that any cheap supermarket brand of dog food is still rife with the above listed ingredients. The rest of this discussion will pertain to the problems associated with even the best quality kibbles and canned dog food. For my purposes, the rest don't deserve our consideration – just say no.
Kibble and canned food has lost nutritional value. The ingredients are either harvested or killed, transported, processed and packaged; by the time it reaches you, it is old and has been exposed to oxidation and high temperatures. Enzymes, vitamins, and anti-oxidants – the very things that give food its health value – are removed or destroyed.
All-purpose dog food is a poor product. Different dogs will have different needs during various times of their lives. Most of the food is high in carbohydrates (though now, finally, you can find grain-free) because it is less expensive to make. It makes sense that one formula will not serve a dog well for his or her whole life.
When you feed a commercial food to your dog, you lose control. Even in the high-end food market, terms have been co-opted (such as "natural", "free-range," "organic"). As the demand for these products has grown, so has the scale of production, pushing for ever cheaper and more efficient means of getting these products to us at the highest profit. The "organic" chicken or beef in dog food can easily come from animals who stood cramped into postage-stamp size spaces, eating corn and soy and never seeing a blade of grass. They are "naturally" deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, so those will have to be added artificially later (or just left out). The veggies may be organic – but fresh? I don't think so.
Most dog foods are not tested properly. The melamine contamination in 2007 demonstrates this with alarming clarity. When melamine – a residue from the production of plastic resin plates – was added to dog food to artificially boost protein content, testing did not catch this adulteration, dying cats and dogs caught the problem. I hope that companies who produce "organic" foods would never knowingly add an adulterant to the product and that high testing standards would catch it. But in purchasing and feeding their product to my canines, I would give up that control.
Eating kibble, canned food, and even freeze-dried and then reconstituted food, provides for poor dental hygiene. Dogs who crunch down bones have naturally clean smelling, fresh breath and gleaming white teeth right into old age. No diet of cereal-like food or soft food can provide this benefit.
For Nicholai, I see no substitute to the fresh veggies, the eggs plucked out of the nest that morning, and raw meat with bones. Today, fifteen months since his diagnosis with cancer, he still hikes daily, jumps on and off the bed, dances for his breakfast, and has glimmering white teeth and a shiny black coat. He did get cancer on a whole foods diet, but in our current environment, cancer is not one hundred percent avoidable.
Use high-end, organic foods for your canine companions if you must, but leave the others on the shelf. If we don't buy 'em they won't make 'em and everybody will be the better for it.
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