Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Dog food

Yep.

Six pages.

Wowsa.

Thirteen, by my count.

Yes and no. There are as many meals as there are manufacturers. There is whole fish meal and fish carcass meal. There is chicken by-product meal, there is pork by-product meal and there is still pork meal (generally from dead animals). There's hydrolized DDG. Pea protein.

What I prefer in my formulations is

1) as many "whole" ingredients as possible. I'd rather see soybeans than isolated soy protein (but not much of either...).

2) a large variety of ingredients. Nutritionists are under an enormous amount of pressure from the operators and bean counters to reduce the number of ingredients in a formulation because it makes mixing quicker and inventory management, purchasing and logistics cheaper. But I have proven to my satisfaction that formulations with more ingredients perform better than those with four or five ingredients.

Well....you know half of 13 is.........hmmm.

Many many years ago I worked for Buitoni Foods in their IT department. We would create and generate inventory reports as one of our tasks. Powdered eggs, powdered this and that. We had an executive chef at HDqtrs. He was more a Chemist then a Chef. The good pasta they sold came from Italy . Hint.

How about this many?

This many ingredients would be optimum.



Image of dead rabbit. Seems to be some kind of new policy with Google that no images of dead game are capable of being embedded elsewhere.

I had a Golden Retriever on Iams. When I got her as a puppy her Grandfather was 18 years old(incredible) and her mom and dad were 6 years old. My Dog was diagnosed with kidney disease at 10 years old , we had to put her down a year or so later. Phugg Iams and Purina horsechitt.

We feed our 3 Shepards Costco's Kirkland Natures Domain as recommended by our dog trainer. We free feed them the dry food, but they don't eat a whole bunch of it. For breakfast they typically get scrambled eggs, a cup of oatmeal and 1/2 cup of plain yogurt. Their dinner is usually rotisserie chickens my wife picks up after work which we de-bone first.
In the fall they get lots of venison, sometimes raw but more often cooked. Always a peanut butter ball for desert. And on weekends they get sardines for snacks.
Their favorite dinner, by far, is 'Raising Cane's' chicken fingers. They can make short work of a forty pack.
But, hey, we're those crazy dog people who like our dogs more than our children. After all, the dogs are always happy to see me and never ask for money.

They need variety in their diet and just feeding them Kibble IMHO will not do it, no matter how good it is.

Goes somewhat against my premise, but the longest lived dog I ever had was the Chihuahua we bought as a puppy when I was three. She finally had to be put down when I was 21 (could finally no longer walk, and was, by that point, almost completely blind, too). She ate, almost exclusively, table scraps throughout her life.

Here is some more info on diet choices.
https://therawfeedingcommunity.com/2018/02/08/grain-free-diets-and-dcm/
https://therawfeedingcommunity.com/2017/11/19/what-kibble-should-i-feed-my-dog/

There's a lot of garbage out there marketed to the soccer mom, fur-baby crowd. Grain free this, organic that marketing BS. I raise and train performance dogs and feed what almost all of the top retriever and pointer field trial trainers feed.

If you have a working dog, feed a quality 30/20 feed from Victor, Purina or Eukanuba. My working labs get 3-4 cups a day.

If you have a couch potato house dog, feed the same thing, just less of it so Fido doesn't become obese, like most pet dogs. If you get down to 2 cups a day (for a 50-75 pound dog) and he's still fat, drop to a lower protein/fat food. But avoid the designer labels and grain-free formulas. Just feed good feed from an established company with a long track record.

It ain't rocket surgery. Don't overthink it.

I had couch potatoes and too much protein caused evil farts. So store brand Purina. Also has more bulk to prevent constipation. Very little is more pathetic than a constipated dog. My favorite vet was dead set against ANY people food. First what's nutritionally sound for people isn't necessarily sound for dogs. Secondly he saw a lot of obese dogs being killed with kindness. I disagree in part, after us big dogs ate the lesser dogs, if they didn't beg got to eat. But only a tidbit to acknowledge them as pack members in good standing.

I'm doing the raw diet from a local distributor. Frequently, I'll mix in tuna, cooked salmon and extra veggies. In a pinch, if I need dry food, it's always Orijen or Acana

I have run all age pointing dogs my whole adult life. and about 40 years ago I did the research from ground zero to see what would help them out. It came down to roughly 20% digestible protein and 15% or so fat with the rest made up in carbs. Supplement with fat and bump the supplements when the dogs work a lot. Feed an extra meal at noon on work days to get enough calories into them to keep them going. For a machine like an all age pointing dog you basically need to feed them like a Tour de France racer. Get as much calories in easy (quick) to digest carbs into them as they will take and keep the protein down to a minimum because it takes too much water through the kidneys to get rid of the nitrogen, and when the go low on water they overheat in a hurry and the consequences of that are not good on a dog carrying about zero fat. Fat and carbs are very helpful. Converting protein to energy is water intensive and getting rid of the by products of that conversion takes more water if you want to avoid damage to the dog.

Purina maintains that dog food research lab down in Iowa for a very good reason and they do some damn good work there.

This is an interesting relevant read that poses serious questions about the study.

https://medium.com/@danielschulof_18279/bad-science-and-big-business-are-behind-the-biggest-pet-food-story-in-a-decade-5cdafae7be77

Two huge takeaways.

The study was not peer reviewed, and the authors of the study have financial ties to grain containing dog food companies.

Is that for your "Husky?"















I'll show myself out....