Feed your pet right

The authors of “Feed Your Pet Right – The Authoritative Guide to Feeding Your Dog and Cat,” came to an interesting conclusion at the end of their excellent and highly acclaimed book. To some of us, they said, feeding our pets is as much about values as it is nutrition.

They concluded that, nutritionally speaking, most commercial pet foods from the large conglomerate pet food manufacturers are pretty much alike. Pet food regulators on both sides of the Atlantic dictate that all dog foods meet basic nutritional requirements. (Note the term “basic” nutritional requirements, because that’s about all they are). Yes, some might be marginally better than others, but, by and large, they’re all much the same.

Nutritionally speaking, dry dog biscuit, also known as kibble, is little different from tinned dog food except that the tinned dog food is wet and the kibble is dry.

And, as will be no surprise to many, one brand of either is pretty much the same as any other.

Achieving nutritional balance

The difference between those large commercial manufacturers and those of us who home cook for our dogs is how we achieve that nutritional balance.

Their way is to highly process questionable ingredients – the valueless leftovers from human food production – and then add back lost nutrients and flavour by synthetic means such as spraying taste and man-made nutrients onto dry, nutritionally bereft machine-made biscuit, or pouring the same into a tin of mushed up ingredients that looks more like mud than food.

The home cooking way

The home cooking way is by lightly cooking high quality, 100% human grade, natural ingredients that more closely mimic a dog’s natural diet, creating meals that look and taste like proper food because we use the same ingredients purchased from the same places in the making of the food that we ourselves eat.

That means meat that looks and tastes like meat because it is meat, fish that looks and tastes like fish because it is proper fish, and fresh fruit and vegetables that look and taste so good…..we sometimes eat them ourselves. (Absolutely true – just don’t tell our dogs though!).

Think how much better you’d feel about what you feed your dog if you did the same and home cooked for your dog!