News/Views

Best Pet Foods!

by in Frontpage Article January 18, 2016

From reviews.com…..   pretty good info on pet foods

In early 2015, the law firm of Morgan and Morgan filed a class action lawsuit against Purina over ingredients found in its line of Beneful dog food. Despite this lawsuit — and the thousands of complaints of kidney failure that led to it — the products remain available to purchase at a store near you.

Of the pet owners we surveyed, 70 percent admitted that they didn’t know all of the ingredients in their dog’s food — including the very ingredients at the heart of the Purina lawsuit. All dog foods claim to be “premium” and “all natural,” but with very few regulations on what it takes to meet these qualifications, many of these claims are little more than flashy marketing gimmicks and false advertising. So, we dug behind the label to sort out which ingredients make an excellent dog food and which ones should be avoided.

At the end of the work, we settled on 134 formulas across 29 approved brands.

10 of Our Favorite Dog Food Brands

Our Research

Ten people on our team dedicated full-time work to this project, investing over 1,400 hours into this single page.

  • We built a list of over 11,000 people with connections to the dog food industry and narrowed it down to the best.
  • Over 20 experts contributed their valuable time to our work, including veterinarians, dog trainers, animal behaviorists, university researchers, and authors.
  • We surveyed 300 dog owners and asked them if they knew what was in their dog’s food.
  • We gathered a list of over 8,000 search queries to find out what matters most to dog owners.
  • We read and analyzed 72 of the most popular articles and studies on dog food.
  • We compiled a list of 2,223 formulas from 115 brands and reviewed their ingredients.

Bad ingredients make dog food unsafe and unhealthy.

The Truth About Recalls and Manufacturing Practices

Safety has always been the biggest concern for pet owners — and one of the hardest challenges for dog food manufacturers to meet. Since the 2007 recalls on Chinese-sourced food, many consumers have started reading labels to see where their food was coming from, but even ingredients sourced in the US can be unsafe.

The Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) sets and maintains standards for the proper levels of ingredients in pet food, but it’s the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that determines the quality. FDA regulations, however, don’t guarantee that all ingredients will be safe.

Ingredients from rendering facilities, for instance, should be avoided. You’ll recognize these ingredients on the label under generic terms like “meat” and “meat meal.” In California, manufacturers have given them the appetizing name of “dry rendered tankage.” So why avoid them? It’s almost impossible to tell what’s being rendered: It can be roadkill, zoo animals, and sometimes even spoiled meat from the grocery store that’s still wrapped in plastic.

Life Stages

Your dog’s life stage should factor into his or her diet. Puppies and seniors both have specific dietary needs. Large-breed puppies can develop developmental orthopedic disease (DOD) if they eat too much calcium — the maximum amount of calcium listed in their food should beno more than 1.5 percent. Senior dogs often require less protein because they are less active. And if they suffer from arthritis, many formulas contain glucosamine and chondroitin, both of which alleviate joint pain.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *