Understanding Dog Food Ingredients

A good dog food is one which provides your pet with good quality ingredients which combine to provide him with a top quality nutritional diet. The ingredients in dog food are human grade, which means that they are suitable for human consumption and therefore good quality. Dog foods which have the very best quality ingredients are known as premium dog foods, and as these ingredients cost more, together with the expense of testing and evaluating them, these products are similarly more expensive. Manufacturers who opt for a cheaper cost product achieve this by sacrificing quality.

These manufacturers consider that the uneducated consumer will frequently opt for a cheaper alternative, and many consumers feel that the convenience of buying their dog's food at the grocery store at the same time as buying their own food makes good sense.

This is not correct, however. For example, a popular pet food manufacturer sells its products through grocery stores world wide. It is a reputable company, one which consumers would reasonably expect to care about the animals who eat their food. Looking more closely at these foods, however, it is hard to believe that this is true:-

Lamb Meal, Rice & Barley Formula

The ingredients in this dog food are poor quality, and the food itself is highly unappealing - a really bad choice for your pet.

The ingredients on a dog food label are usually listed in order of content, with the highest content being first. The first ingredient in this product is corn, which is a cheap and low quality protein source. This is then followed by chicken by-product, poultry by-product, animal fat, and lamb meal: apart from the last, all poor quality protein sources.

The only good quality protein source is the lamb meal, which is lowest in quantity. Even just the fact that this dog food company has used a number of different protein sources is a sign that they are using the cheapest ingredients available to them.

In fact these five ingredients are the first five on the list, which means that the ingredients which make up the majority of the product are all low in quality.

This cheap, inferior food is not the best to give your pet, and yet the manufacturer is making millions of dollars each year from it. This in itself shows us that this manufacturer cares about profit, not your pet. You, as a caring pet owner, should think twice before buying their dog food products.