"It Changed His/Her Life!"

brookcove

Lots of  us are passionate about food, and the idea that what we feed is one of the main building blocks of our dogs' health and quality of life.

I'd love to hear the stories about how you got to this way of thinking.  If you are like me, what you feed now is different from that moment you first starting thinking along these lines, but what made you turn that bag over the first time and really think about what you were feeding?

Since 1999, I've had many light bulb moments. But the best - or most influential - was with Willow and drinking water. Willow was never a big water drinker. One day, I had the thought of giving her distilled, or purified water, instead of tap water (this was in Florida, also where she was born). Maybe the thought came because we didn't drink the tap water either (even with a filter on the faucet). Well, she gulped that purified water down like we'd never seen! She would turn her nose up at outside spickets from then on, as well. She definitely favors distilled/purified over spring. She drinks the tap water here in NH though with no problem but we have house-filtered tap water. This was a big eye-opener for us.

Another with Oakley refusing to eat a bag of Solid Gold. We thought he was being picky but the reality was the company had changed the formula and HE knew it.

And yet another came after reading a book titled Food Pets Die For, recommended by a trainer, in 2002.

Mainly these were eye-openers to the fact that what goes into the body does matter as much for canines as it does for humans...NOT that one manufacturer was the Golden Ticket. We started paying more attention to our own diet after scrutinizing theirs.

When I was 17, my vet's office (where I worked part time to help pay for my private school education) had a little golden mix puppy with a chocolate nose. She was VERY sick, but her owner loved her very much, and said to do whatever it took to save her. Two days after he picked her up, he dumped her off, because the bill was too high. Some kind of love, right?

 

I adopted Grace. She was 10 weeks old, and had renal failure. It turns out, her kidneys never really developed. Of course, I went home with a bag of K/D, and some cans. Grace HATED her food. I would cook up small amounts of chicken, with a lot of rice, to help her eat. She LOVED quail. I read a LOT about kidneys, and what she would need, and ended up feeding her Wellness Senior cans, and Wellness Duck or Whitefish cans. She lived with me, for three months, before she went to the Bridge. It was an intense time of learning, for me. I started off my next puppy (who was my first foster) on Wellness, too. It was the first "good food" I had had contact with. We'd had Toby (who is about to turn 15!) since I was young, and he'd always eaten grocery store foods. I didn't know that anything else existed. I became a label reading fiend, and that eventually lead to me feeding raw, LOL. The best food in the world couldn't save Grace, but it made her quality of life better.

 Rosco came to us on Iams dog food peeing every 15 minutes. Changed him to Wellness, and his life changed! He didn't have to pee every 15. We've since moved on from Wellness, but learning about super premium dog foods changed my world and Rosco's.

 

http://www.critturs.com/prissy.html

Prissy was *my* first dog (that was my own).  When she was about 2 1/2 my best friend and I were walking our dogs and they got into a leftover box of KFC Chicken someone had neatly left on the sidewalk.  While I was halfway down my friend's dog's throat to retrieve what SHE had gotten MY dog was snacking on the rest of the box which apparently was a ton of chicken skin (fried).

At 3:00 a.m. she woke me up puking blood and having bloody diarreha.  I thot she'd punctured something with one of those darned chicken bones we couldn't get away from the dogs  Called the vet (back then you could) and he told me to give mineral oil because an obstruction sounded likely. 

It wasn't -- it was pancreatitis and I nearly lost her.  ($500 vet bill back like 34 years ago).  The day I left the vet hospital with her the vet handed me a "recipe" ... he said "If you love her and want her to live you'll cook for her -- this is easy but it will work".  It was essentially just rice, ground beef and a little egg.

I've been cooking ever since. Have had some dogs on kibble and began to realize about 10 years ago that if I cooked I could feel sure what was IN what I fed them.  I elminate a lot of health problems this way.

When we rescued our lab, Sassy, she had an ear infection. The vet said it was common in labs and gave us some medication to treat it. We did and very soon, she had another one, and another one, and on and on. After a year or so, she started having other allergy problems and I decided to try her on Natural Balance Duck & Potato. After a couple of months, I realized I hadn't had to treat her for any ear problems in a long time. Hmmm...could it be the food? Then it dawned on me that another problem, stinky anal gland issues, had also completely stopped. It took me longer than it should have to realize that while the change in food didn't cure all her ills, it absolutely resolved those 2 problems and for that I was extremely thrilled.

brookcove

Lots of  us are passionate about food, and the idea that what we feed is one of the main building blocks of our dogs' health and quality of life.

I'd love to hear the stories about how you got to this way of thinking.  If you are like me, what you feed now is different from that moment you first starting thinking along these lines, but what made you turn that bag over the first time and really think about what you were feeding?

     Hmmm ... that lightbulb moment was probably sometime in mid 2001 ...

     I'd lost my first Beagle to osteosarcoma in 2000, and when I bought my second Beagle pup, I made the upgrade from Mighty Dog to Eukanuba, thinking it was the best available food. At that point, I'd made the connection between diet and early onset illness, although that was about the extent of my knowledge. Deputy ate Eukanuba for about a year afterwards, and I'd never realized that his severe problems with Pano were diet related ... His coat had always been flawless, but when we got the mutt pup in June '01, OMG ... that was a wake up call. Thunder has always had a poor coat - either greasy or dandruffy or excessively shedding. He had pneumonia when we got him, so there were likely immune related problems associated with the coat problems. It was very thin, especially on his belly and the inner thighs. Vet told us this was perfectly normal, but we just weren't buying what he was selling. There were growth problems too. Actually, that would be innacurate, because the dog basically wasn't growing, for the most part. And the small amount he did grow was quite uneven.

     So, I started associating the symptoms with the diet, and began supplementing him with Nupro. I saw very little difference. Couldn't understand why this dog looked the way he did, and that is when I began researching nutrition, asking questions & the answers all pointed to poor nutrition. I actually remember the lightbulb moment very vividly. Thinking it was the greatest food in the world, I mentioned on an AOL nutrition board that I feed my dogs Eukanuba and supplement them with Nupro! Very matter of factly, someone replied something towards the end of "What's so great about the ingredients?" It prompted me to go and turn the bag over and THAT was the first time I read the ingredient label of a dog food bag.

     Now, I've come a loooooooooong way since that point. Things about digestability, bioavailability, vitamin premixes, quality control, etc. But the fact of the matter is that my dogs could not be where they are today if it wasn't for that one person who asked me the simplest question in the world. Because of that I will never again feed the dogs 100% commercial food in their diet. Or feed something w/o looking at the ingredient list, even if it's not the most popular choice, or a holistic diet, I need to know what they're eating & fix problems quite efficiently with diet. BTW, that thinning hair that our Vet assured us was normal is no longer an issue. It'll never be thick and luxurious, but it's growin in about 50% thicker. And when I began feeding them raw, contrary to the slow growth raw usually produces, this dog (who was by then 11 months) had a major growth spurt & continued to grow slowly, evenly until he was 2yrs old .....

brookcove

  If you are like me, what you feed now is different from that moment you first starting thinking along these lines, but what made you turn that bag over the first time and really think about what you were feeding?

 

What made me turn that bag over? Simple. The people on this forum. I was absolutely Clueless when I first joined this forum. I found it accidentally searching online for help answer a question regarding my mom's older dog Abby. I never knew when buying dog food to look at what's in it. The more and more I learned on here made me more aware of what I was feeding, and now both myself and my mom feed our dogs much much better food. I am more aware of what I'm feeding them, and want them to be healthy as well. 

Science Diet Sensitive Stomach changed my Airedale's life after several bouts of HGE.

Hill's z/d improved Woobie's runny stools, chronic ear infections and inflamed anal glands.

Arabinogalactan powder changed his life.  I'd sell my kid (readily!) to get the stuff! 

we used to feed Purina dog chow. Had a dog develop lymphoma at the ripe old age of six. Vet gave her one month to live. Frantic research, put her on a raw diet, lots of tripe, she lived another six months. Started researching nutrition, switched the other dogs, and wow, who knew dogs don't actually smell bad, fart all the time, have filthy teeth, greasy coats, act old at age seven, if only you feed them a good diet?

I’ve been thinking about this a little more. It has been a journey. I am 42 and grew up on a farm, have had dogs and other animals my whole life. Growing up, I don’t remember what our dogs were fed but I also don’t remember them having any health issues...more behavioral and training issues. In 1999, my husband and I got our first Golden puppy and fed what the breeder suggested, Pro Plan. We were more concerned with good mental health, behavior & training, and didn’t really pay much attention to nutrition then.

It wasn’t until 2001, when we got Willow (our 2nd Golden at that time, from a FL breeder, who recommended feeding Diamond) that the real light bulbs started coming on. Some random, rude, passer-by threw a commercial pet food article at us - while sitting with Willow at an outside cafe - about killing our dog...didn’t know us, our dog, or the food we fed. Willow has always been a beautiful, healthy, happy girl - no health issues that are typical for Goldens, or in general (people were tripping over themselves, and stopping their cars to say hello, no lie!). At that time, we were feeding Nutro (from the feed store and Petco). We did some research and also found out that the local Golden rescue/foster people only fed California Natural. That was our introduction into premium kibble - or turning the bag over, so to speak. And, we are still learning and evolving.

Really the light bulb moment for me was that I make informed choices for myself and DH so never considered otherwise for Bugsy.  So I wanted to feed him a healthy diet and was researching stuff and then we discovered that he had severe allergies which has meant very serious research to get it right. 

Nutrition is an avocation for me so extending it to my dog was a no brainer 

LOL, I remember the night Willow was on her way home with DH.  I flew out to the store late to get some food.  I bought Iams proudly thinking about what a great owner I was going to be.  How, I didn't get her the "junk food" the store had.  I at least knew that stuff like Kibbles and Bits and Puppy Chow wasn't really good for them.  But, at the time I didn't know anything was wrong with Iams.

One night, I was pet sitting for a friend of mine.  He's very health aware himself always with meal replacement bars and fat free stuff in the fridge.  Well, he had me feed his dog for him one sit and THAT was the first time I had ever seen Innova.  I immediately started reading the bag and realized how much better the ingredients sounded.  I ended up asking him where he got it and he filled me in on the store that carried it and a bunch of other good foods. 

I have always fed Maggie *better* food  (like chicken soup and Bil Jack ), but after she had started getting seizures I switched to grain free and no more junk treats. She is in better shape now than when she was a puppy. No more gunky eyes. No more runny nose. No seizures

The other Aha moment was when the vet told me that Gracie was biting on her hind end like mad cause of  flea allergies. I had been trying to figure out if it's a food allergy and have been switching foods .. Now I keep those evil frontline drops on her and she's ok.

I grew up with two dogs, Kimo, an Malamute, and Meeko, and Akita. Both were very much important members of our family (my parents didn't get rid of them even though the doctor's claimed that they were a major problem with my brother's severe asthma). They were fed whatever was on sale... my parents didn't have much money and dog food was dog food, right? They both lived to a decent age for their breed, even though they were overweight and fed crap (both passed at 13).

I got Maddi about 6 months after Meeko died. I've never known what it's like to be without a dog. I swore that I would buy good foods like Science Diet or Eukanuba and not feed dog chow or kibbles 'n bits. Maddi came home with Nutro NC LB puppy. I started to learn. She ate it unwillingly for 3 months. Then I came onto this forum. Then came Innova. Then came the real education. I learned what to look for in a food as far as ingredients go from the dog food project.

Now all the animals in our house get good food. The ferrets get Evo, the cats get evo, good canned food, and one cat gets raw exclusively. Maddi gets a variety of kibble, canned, and premade raw (she's eating it again!) All of our animals have soft, smooth coats. Maddi doesn't even smell when she does fart.

The good food hasn't really changed Maddi's life because she's never been on bad dog food... at least not that she's aware. I know though, that if I hadn't had a learning curve, she'd be on bad food with a brittle coat and stinkyness and I wouldn't know the difference. I firmly believe that good food is giving her a great quality of life.