Which Blue do you all feed?

I think I'd go with the Wilderness.  The really high protein, and high cal makes it great for underweight puppers.

They do have a small breed with tiny little kibbles and I think that comes in chicken or lamb.

The fish, as I recall is all farmed to better control the ingestion of contaminents, so it's unlikely that it's preserved with anything bad.  However, you can go to the bluebuff.com website and ASK.

What I personally feed is the large breed, with an occassional fish and sweet tater bag, or lamb and brown rice bag.  Thunder gets Wilderness to keep the weight on through the winter, and the cats get Wilderness.

Ok..I'm cool with the farm fresh fish.

My sister beat me to it, she went out and got some sample bags of Merrick's puppy food, figured it looked good, aside from some of their QC issues in the past. Remember this is her dog and her choice, though she does listen to me for the most part.

I'll try these sample bags and see how he does before we actually buy a bigger bag.

As a side note, this little dog was knocked off the couch 2-3 weeks back and hit against our coffee table, I believe, thinking back, this is when he started walking somewhat hunched up.

Don't know if it was the angle I was bent down with earlier, while trying to grab a pan from the cupboard, but I noticed he was favoring his left hip big-time with a funny bounce walk, he has been walking oddly.

Told my sister that she needed to get him in soon and to quit playing the guessing game of what is or is not wrong. For now, I'm sneaking in very very tiny amounts of baby aspirin into his dinner meals, as I know that hip hurts by the way he bounces his weight forward while walking.

Oh yeah, that pupper needs to be vetted.  That's why those little dogs make me so darned nervous.  They seem to break too darned easy.

I'll just keep my opinion of Merrick to myself.  Yes, it does look like a nice food, but the on going QC issues scare me too much to take a chance.

Me too...I'm not a fan of merrick at all, my dogs will not be eating it.

Casey's eating the Wilderness bag right now - we rotate through. He likes this one well enough, although his favorite seems to be the fish. We did the small bites for a while, and it was fine - but the regular kibbles aren't all that big, so I didn't see the need to take away his fish for the small bites.

See, I didn't think the kibble was all that big myself, but, you've got some folks who think that their dog couldn't possibly handle anything that size and buy a small kibble no matter how bad the ingredients are, just because it's small.

Some of Merricks stuff looks REALLY tasty, but I just can't nudge my mind past the QC issues and take a chance.  But, I'm the same with Diamond, and getting that way with Mars, the Nutro people.  I've heard the have another big recall coming because of their rice again......that company just has too many issues.  But, then, they go from absolute garbage (Doggie Bag) all the way up to Ultra, and want to have a product for every niche rather than just focus on capturing a good chunk of ONE segment of pet food buyers.  I dunno, do one thing and do it RIGHT?  Instead of a bunch of things half arsed?

glenmar

I dunno, do one thing and do it RIGHT?  Instead of a bunch of things half arsed?

HAHA! My feelings exactly!

glenmar

See, I didn't think the kibble was all that big myself,

It's not. I feed it to all my pups(unless I've got a bag of Orijen) and no one has ever had a problem =]

The small breed is smaller than their regular cat kibble...teeny tiny.  Suppose if you are feeding it to a pet mouse it'd be the right size.....

My dogs just get the adult chicken and brown rice formula.  We've had better results with that than any other food they've ever been on.  I didn't think they kibble was big at all. Sophie was on Innova for a long time and that I would say is probably on the larger side, Blue Buffalo I don't think is at all.  Great food IMO!

For the chi, you might also look into luxating patellas. It shouldn't have anything to do with the hunched up walking, but the bouncy walk does sound like it, and it's common in small dogs.  A good quality food never hurts, but it really does sound like he has something going on that nutrition alone isn't going to fix

Unfortunately I am familiar with the luxating patella issue, my 2 small dogs have that problem as well. Walking hunched up is something they never do though.

I think we've narrowed down the *possibility* of the weight issue, when we think back, this dog started losing weight around the time we switched him to a chicken based diet; i.e. Orijen and then homecooked, both very highly substituted with feather-based meat.

In the past, with cal natural chicken/rice, this same dog couldn't eat it because he would hack it up, at that time, we switched him to lamb based foods and called it good. We done forgot ALL about the hidden possibility of an issue with chicken.

Thus, I picked him up some Lamb/rice puppy formula of the Blue buffalo, I chose the puppy because of his need for nutrients. This is not going to take the place of visiting the vet, obviously, but we have to start somewhere.

FWIW...my 3 dogs loved the little nibbles they got.

Ah!  Lightbulb moments are wonderful, aren't they?

The lamb and brown rice puppy is nice.  I'm not sure though that the nutrients are all that different from the adult lamb and rice....haven't compared the two, but you might want to.

One thing that I have noticed wit Blue is that regardless of kcals, most of the foods have the same feeding recommendations, so do watch the amounts.  If I remember correctly, lamb is one of the lower kcal foods, so you should be ok.