Does anyone else feed Abady?

I don't feed Abady. It's not available locally, and it's not a food I've really looked into.
 
That said, everyone feeds what their dogs do best on. If they want to pay the price and their dogs do well on it, what is the harm? Yes, the company's tactics are a little odd, but my not liking someone's advertising doesn't mean I should verbally throttle someone else who doesn't mind it.  It just means I won't buy that food[]  There are just as many people on the forum who recommend Innova/Natural Balance/Orijen/etc to most everyone, I don't see them being accused of working for the company when they recommend it or say their dogs do well  on it[]
 
However, it also applies to the flip side..Abady feeders..don't continuously insist that yours is the only food of value and all others must be vastly inferior. 
 
Everyone wants what is best for their own pets, and must make the decision of what to feed for themselves.

ORIGINAL: Cally01
I am a bit tired right now, so I apologize if I made an assumption that isn't true.  Forgive me.

Apology accepted, and I'll let you know I've have never even been to Poughkeepsie, NY. (that is where the company is located).  I've never even spoke with R. Abady, however did speak to a staff member once and she was very polite and courteous on the phone.

I enjoy the discussion and debate.  I would say I am very well versed in the Abady articles, and I read them enough times, but when if I do a direct quote off the articles, I give credit where credit is due.  I may paraphrase sometimes, but I wouldn't plagiarize intentionally.  If I did and forgot the give credit it was an honest mistake. 

I have helped a few people along the way overcome some issues and peopled have thanked me for taking the time to mention the feed and it is working great for their dogs.  I recall a girl with a Great Dane a few years back wanted to give it a try because her breeder was using the products.  She contacted me and said it all went well.  She did comment once in the beginning a lot a shedding but she didn't panic and was told it can be normal with a lot of dead hair falling out and being replaced with new growth.  Turned out her dog did fantastic on it cleared up some issues (I think with skin and coat).
So then comes the rise in transportation costs and fuel charges and then the cost had gone up and she got discouraged and said R. Abady can kiss my you know what charging that much.  About a year goes by and she emails me saying I'm going back on the Abady again...

Why do I do this....talk about it?  I don't know why.  Maybe it is an indication I got nothing better to do I guess.

Folks, I'd really rather not have to step in here.  Lets remember that nice matters.

I do not work for Abady, and I have never logged into this forum before under another name. I live in between Philadelphia and Reading Pa. I don't know how to prove this to you.
I don't believe all the claims Abady makes. I'm a RN and I know it can't be true that "dogs aren't allergic to my food." Some dog some where can be allergic to anything. I do believe that less dogs are allergic to this food. I believe that dogs are less likely to develop hip dysplagia on this food. I believe this food helps reduce the chance of bloat.
Abady overstates their claims, but I do believe they are closer than any other company to an ideal feed.
THAT IS JUST MY OPINION.
Everyone is allowed an opinion without being bashed aren't they? I don't claim you are all killing your dogs with the high level of plant fiber you are feeding. RELAX!

ORIGINAL: Cally01

 I think louiereck and cc431 are the same person.  Wouldn't that be hilarious the same person making conversation with themself[]  I wonder if you can tell if they are in the same area or using the same computer????

Personally from what I've heard about Abady I would never feed nor recommend it.  I like my NRG dehydrated just fine thank you[]

I'll join the rest of the crowd, sit back and watch the show...lol

[sm=giantpopcorn.gif]

I think this thread and a thread a couple of weeks ago about this product  started as a marketing ploy, that backfired, because people didn't buy into it.  I may be wrong, but I doubt it.....

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

Here is what the dog food project has to say about chicken by-products as an ingredient in dog food.
""
Chicken Byproduct Meal AAFCO: Consists of the dry, ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, and intestines -- exclusive of feathers except in such amounts as might occur unavoidably in good processing practices. Chicken byproducts are much less expensive and less digestible than the chicken muscle meat.The ingredients of each batch can vary drastically in ingredients (heads, feet, bones etc.) as well as quality, thus the nutritional value is also not consistent. Don't forget that byproducts consist of any parts of the animal OTHER than meat. If there is any use for any part of the animal that brings more profit than selling it as "byproduct", rest assured it will appear in such a product rather than in the "byproduct" dumpster.

I would expect this from a bottom of the line supermarket dog food, not a pricey dog food.  And if you run a company today, and can't afford to have someone design a couple of web pages about your product, I doubt if you are going to buy top of the line ingredients and put them in your products either. 

 
Here is what R. Abady (an actual feed maker, not a website owner) has to say about Chicken By-Product meal:
 
 
...
When ingredients are selected for the production of dog food, there are many different factors that enter into the equation. An ingredient's nutritional yield versus its cost is central to sound dietary construction.
For example -- If ingredient A is nutritionally equivalent to ingredient B, but B costs 3 times as much for the same quantity of A, then the manufacturer who uses ingredient A can include 3 times more of it in his ration than the manufacturer using ingredient B and therefore can offer three times more nutrition at no greater cost.
Ultimately, what a manufacturer spends on ingredients is a major determinant of the selling price of nutritional products, therefore the manufacturer who uses ingredient A can offer a significantly better product than the manufacturer who uses ingredient B, for the same cost to the consumer if all other factors are equal.
...
Clear examples of the public being drawn in by slick advertising are exemplified by the rush toward fresh chicken and turkey-based products, lamb and rice diets and chicken meal-based diets. These diets are claimed to be more nutritious and better for dogs because they do not contain by-products and are more digestible, along with a host of other equally mythical claims. Since the appeal of these products rests entirely on the claims that are made for the specific ingredients that are supposed to characterize the ration, a close examination of the nutritional values relative to the costs of those ingredients will shed light on the nutritional merits (or the absence thereof) of the ration as a whole.
...

The fresh chicken, turkey or lamb diets have a few interesting twists to them.
First, as there is no firm standard as to what actually constitutes chicken or turkey, they can be derived from skin, genitals etc. or even reconstituted meals.
Second, these ingredients are included in the listing of ingredients with their moisture content intact even though in the final dry product the moisture has been cooked out! Listing the moisture laden solids can give the impression that three or more times the amounts of solids are in the product than are actually present.
For years the public has been conditioned to believe that ingredients are listed in the order of the amounts included in the formula on an equal basis - each one being at least 90% solids.
This new twist allows large quantities of moisture which does not end up in the finished product to be listed on the label as something other than what it is!
...

Fresh Chicken, Turkey or Lamb Based Diets
By-Products (internal organs) play a central role in the feeding of carnivores, as do muscle meat, fat and bone.
Poultry by-products meal is an economical and nutritious source of high quality animal protein.
It is composed of lungs, heads, gizzards, necks, feet, intestines (without their contents) and other clean parts of the carcass.
Nutritionally it is equal to superior to the ingredients discussed earlier and it costs many multiples less.

It is not true that heads or even feet (which represent only a small component of poultry by-products meal) are undesirable as components of dog food.
While they have little aesthetic appeal to humans, heads contain valuable brain, tongue and ocular tissue, and feet are 20% protein & 16% fat.
Both are rich in various amino acids and fatty acids of the most important varieties.
Among these can be found Arginine (essential for fertility and immune system support) Glycine (a potent free-radical scavenger and a component of glucose tolerance factor which regulates insulin metabolism) and Aspartic acid (which helps with the synthesis of glycoprotein and with the detoxification of ammonia).
Feathers are NOT a component of poultry by-products meal, unless it is of very low quality.
---
 
I hope you find equally as informative as the Dog Foods Project assesment of Chicken By-Product meal.

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

I think this thread and a thread a couple of weeks ago about this product  started as a marketing ploy, that backfired, because people didn't buy into it.  I may be wrong, but I doubt it.....

 
You mean some sort of a conspiracy?  [sm=party.gif]
 
 

ORIGINAL: louiereck
I do not work for Abady, and I have never logged into this forum before under another name. I live in between Philadelphia and Reading Pa. I don't know how to prove this to you.

 
No proof needed, they register IP addresses here, they know we are not from the same locale, however we do have something in common besides Abady....I am from PA, born in Norristown and lived there about 22 years.
 
And the Eagles will be beating up on the Pack later on today!
 
 

Here is what R. Abady (an actual feed maker, not a website owner) has to say about Chicken By-Product meal:

of course we all know that a company wouldnt write things to paint their products in the best light.

i wouldnt base my decisions solely on what one web site says either. but i do think using unbiased opinions to help make my decisions are better than using corporate marketing. i'm sure the pedigree site has nothing but good things to say about their feeds, but i wouldnt feed them either.

one question i have been wondering about though... it has been said here that abady is gearing his feeds to best benefit a carnivorous diet. wouldnt i do better by my dogs to just skip the commercial foods altogether and feed a raw diet instead? abady isnt available to me locally, but for the prices that have been posted on the threads here, i could feed pretty good quality meat from my local butcher.

A well ballanced raw diet is an excellent choice! I've thought about doing this myself, but it seems like to much work.[]

ORIGINAL: cc431

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

Here is what the dog food project has to say about chicken by-products as an ingredient in dog food.
""
Chicken Byproduct Meal AAFCO: Consists of the dry, ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, and intestines -- exclusive of feathers except in such amounts as might occur unavoidably in good processing practices. Chicken byproducts are much less expensive and less digestible than the chicken muscle meat.The ingredients of each batch can vary drastically in ingredients (heads, feet, bones etc.) as well as quality, thus the nutritional value is also not consistent. Don't forget that byproducts consist of any parts of the animal OTHER than meat. If there is any use for any part of the animal that brings more profit than selling it as "byproduct", rest assured it will appear in such a product rather than in the "byproduct" dumpster.

I would expect this from a bottom of the line supermarket dog food, not a pricey dog food.  And if you run a company today, and can't afford to have someone design a couple of web pages about your product, I doubt if you are going to buy top of the line ingredients and put them in your products either. 

Here is what R. Abady (an actual feed maker, not a website owner) has to say about Chicken By-Product meal:


...
When ingredients are selected for the production of dog food, there are many different factors that enter into the equation. An ingredient's nutritional yield versus its cost is central to sound dietary construction.
For example -- If ingredient A is nutritionally equivalent to ingredient B, but B costs 3 times as much for the same quantity of A, then the manufacturer who uses ingredient A can include 3 times more of it in his ration than the manufacturer using ingredient B and therefore can offer three times more nutrition at no greater cost.
Ultimately, what a manufacturer spends on ingredients is a major determinant of the selling price of nutritional products, therefore the manufacturer who uses ingredient A can offer a significantly better product than the manufacturer who uses ingredient B, for the same cost to the consumer if all other factors are equal.
...
Clear examples of the public being drawn in by slick advertising are exemplified by the rush toward fresh chicken and turkey-based products, lamb and rice diets and chicken meal-based diets. These diets are claimed to be more nutritious and better for dogs because they do not contain by-products and are more digestible, along with a host of other equally mythical claims. Since the appeal of these products rests entirely on the claims that are made for the specific ingredients that are supposed to characterize the ration, a close examination of the nutritional values relative to the costs of those ingredients will shed light on the nutritional merits (or the absence thereof) of the ration as a whole.
...

The fresh chicken, turkey or lamb diets have a few interesting twists to them.
First, as there is no firm standard as to what actually constitutes chicken or turkey, they can be derived from skin, genitals etc. or even reconstituted meals.
Second, these ingredients are included in the listing of ingredients with their moisture content intact even though in the final dry product the moisture has been cooked out! Listing the moisture laden solids can give the impression that three or more times the amounts of solids are in the product than are actually present.
For years the public has been conditioned to believe that ingredients are listed in the order of the amounts included in the formula on an equal basis - each one being at least 90% solids.
This new twist allows large quantities of moisture which does not end up in the finished product to be listed on the label as something other than what it is!
...

Fresh Chicken, Turkey or Lamb Based Diets
By-Products (internal organs) play a central role in the feeding of carnivores, as do muscle meat, fat and bone.
Poultry by-products meal is an economical and nutritious source of high quality animal protein.
It is composed of lungs, heads, gizzards, necks, feet, intestines (without their contents) and other clean parts of the carcass.
Nutritionally it is equal to superior to the ingredients discussed earlier and it costs many multiples less.

It is not true that heads or even feet (which represent only a small component of poultry by-products meal) are undesirable as components of dog food.
While they have little aesthetic appeal to humans, heads contain valuable brain, tongue and ocular tissue, and feet are 20% protein & 16% fat.
Both are rich in various amino acids and fatty acids of the most important varieties.
Among these can be found Arginine (essential for fertility and immune system support) Glycine (a potent free-radical scavenger and a component of glucose tolerance factor which regulates insulin metabolism) and Aspartic acid (which helps with the synthesis of glycoprotein and with the detoxification of ammonia).
Feathers are NOT a component of poultry by-products meal, unless it is of very low quality.
---

I hope you find equally as informative as the Dog Foods Project assesment of Chicken By-Product meal.

I am convinced, you have to be working for  Abady. [] I guess you didn't read the quote from the dogfood project that I posted, but the person that has that web site has no axe to grind, and is pretty accurate when discussing dog food ingredients. If the cheapest, poorest, dogfood products , contain byproducts, are you trying to tell us that these byproducts  are  better ingredients, than using the actual muscle meat, and expecting us to believe that?  

The argument used by the Abady folks is that he is not computer savvy,. and therefore doesn't post his ingredients on the internet because he can't figure out how to construct a web page.  Meanwhile, the Dog Food Project asked him to provide them with a list of the updated ingredients for his current products and he refused to do that. The bottom line is that this person apparently doesn't want people to find out what is in the very expensive product that he is selling, period.
[linkhttp://forums.dogfoodproject.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=dogfood&Number=33142&Searchpage=1&Main=33141&Words=old+roy&topic=&Search=true#Post33142]http://forums.dogfoodproject.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=dogfood&Number=33142&Searchpage=1&Main=33141&Words=old+roy&topic=&Search=true#Post33142[/link]

That practice of not telling people what was in the stuff that was being sold ,  was used by the snake oil salesman at the county fairs years ago, and enough people were  duped into buying some fairly worthless stuff, that many of these sellers made a decent living at it.

ORIGINAL: cc431

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

I think this thread and a thread a couple of weeks ago about this product  started as a marketing ploy, that backfired, because people didn't buy into it.  I may be wrong, but I doubt it.....

You mean some sort of a conspiracy?  [sm=party.gif]

No, just a marketing ploy used in so many methods of advertising...i.e A discussion is started  asking what everyone thought about a certain product. This gives the person asking asking the question a chance to talk about the product and how good it is, without it appearing that they are doing a commercial for the product. The key to this, in my opinion, is when the discussion turns into long an detailed statements on the product that appear to have taken a great deal of time to compose.  The average person using a product isn't going to know the chemical formulation, every ingredient used, why some ingredients are used rather than others, the relative cost of this versus that,  yada , yada, yada.....unless they are trying to sell this stuff to someone else. []

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

I am convinced, you have to be working for  Abady. [] I guess you didn't read the quote from the dogfood project that I posted, but the person that has that web site has no axe to grind, and is pretty accurate when discussing dog food ingredients. If the cheapest, poorest, dogfood products , contain byproducts, are you trying to tell us that these byproducts  are  better ingredients, than using the actual muscle meat, and expecting us to believe that?  

 
 
Yes, I did read your quote from Dog Food Project, throw the Chicken By-Product meal in the dumpster.  Boy, that is a fascinating assessment and very informative.
 
Why should R. Abady give his ingredients to the Dog Food Project?  Is the Dog Food Project supposed to be every bodies supreme authority when it comes to dog food?  They are certainly are not mine.
 
'Working for Abady', that is funny....[sm=blah2.gif]  Dog food Project....[sm=blah2.gif]
 
 
 
 

Guys.....lets not escalate.

ORIGINAL: cc431

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

I am convinced, you have to be working for  Abady. [] I guess you didn't read the quote from the dogfood project that I posted, but the person that has that web site has no axe to grind, and is pretty accurate when discussing dog food ingredients. If the cheapest, poorest, dogfood products , contain byproducts, are you trying to tell us that these byproducts  are  better ingredients, than using the actual muscle meat, and expecting us to believe that?  

Yes, I did read your quote from Dog Food Project, throw the Chicken By-Product meal in the dumpster.  Boy, that is a fascinating assessment and very informative.

Why should R. Abady give his ingredients to the Dog Food Project?  Is the Dog Food Project supposed to be every bodies supreme authority when it comes to dog food?  They are certainly are not mine.

'Working for Abady', that is funny....[sm=blah2.gif]  Dog food Project....[sm=blah2.gif]

Not only won't they the ingredients  to the Dog Food Project, they  won't give it to any potential customers until they fork over some money by ordering it. The dog food project may not be the be all and end all of dogfood advice, but it certainly has alot more credibility than some of the false information and wild claims I have read on the Abady site.

Here are some more articles on by-products by other sources
http://cats.about.com/od/catfoodglossary/g/chicbyprodmeal.htm
http://www.bodyfueling.com/ARTICLES/Petfood2.html

Here is a list of dog foods and you will notice that all the elcheapo foods that are sold in supermarkets contain chicken byproducts while the better foods, do not. 

http://www.flint-river-dog.com/dogfoodcomparisons.htm