Is it ok for dogs to be fed commerical dog food or should they be fed specially formulated home-made food?
Jared asked:
Is anyone aware of any studies done on how harmful animal by-product meal can be to dogs? When answering this question, please state personal experience and/or scientific documentation.
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Is anyone aware of any studies done on how harmful animal by-product meal can be to dogs? When answering this question, please state personal experience and/or scientific documentation.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:14 pm
+All dog foods are not created equal. There is a huge difference in ingredients, quality of ingredients and company standards. When wondering what to get or comparing your current food it is best to do as much research as possible.
Your options are a raw diet, which is one of the greatest diets for dogs. To learn more go to. Raw really means nothing cooked; meat, bones and organs. This is not to be confused with allowing your dog to eat cooked bones, cooked bones are harmful, raw bones are not. This is the dog’s ancestral diet. If you think a dog should not be eating raw meat, go back and study wolves. Ask yourself what year was dog food made and then how long have dogs been around without our help of over processed dog food and gravy.
Another option is kibble and wet food. I think a good choice is both. Feeding Kibble 2x a day 12 hours apart and wet food 2x a week in place of 1 feeding of equal calories is a good balance. When you are looking for a healthy dog food it is important that not only the kibble be high quality but the wet food, treats and chews be high quality as well.
Foods to avoid: Pedigree, Beneful, Purina, Iams, Nutro, Alpo, Ol Roy, Mighty Dog, Ceser, Eukanuba, Science Diet, Purina, Royal Canin, Eagle Pack (not to be confused with Eagle Pack Holistic) and of course all grocery store brands i.e. Publix brand dog food, Winn-Dixie brand dog food etc.
These foods have low quality ingredients that can cause allergies, diabetes, bloat, overweight, oily skin, excessive and or runny stool and a myriad of other problems. Most of these brands are owned by companies like Del Monte, Proctor and Gamble, Mars and Nestle. Do you really believe that a company like Proctor and Gamble who makes beauty products, household cleaning supplies, baby items, prescription drugs and many others is the best suited company to make quality products for dogs? 50% of Mars is pet food, 45% is unhealthy snacks like candy bars. Does this sound like the best company to make dog food? All of these companies have one thing in common, they have the advertising to make you believe pictures of meat and veggies and healthy dogs running around on the commercials is what you will get. Knowing the truth about what is in these foods is devastating.
Quality dog foods: Innova, California Natural, EVO, Karma, Wellness, Wellness Core, Orijen, Canidae, Merricks, Artemis, Taste of the Wild, Nature’s Variety, Solid Gold-Barking at the Moon and Timberwolf.
Here are several websites to do your own research, which I highly suggest. A lot of questions here about dog’s health problems are a direct result of the food you are feeding. Read the ingredients label on the back, go to the website and see who owns the dog food, look up the ingredients and learn why it is used and what the pros and cons are. Changing to a healthy low grain, no grain dog food will relieve most of your dog aliments and give you a healthier and happier dog.
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
any dogfood is ok but better is kibbles n bits
June 5th, 2009 at 3:47 am
Honestly, I believe organic kibble is the best. Not all natural brands.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
You should either feed them home-made food, or invest in a brand like Innova, Blue Buffalo, Halo, Orijen or anything like that. There is still alot of argument over the side effects. Commercial pet food is NOT healthy. It’s like feeding your pet McDonalds for dinner every day (minus the fattening part). The fillers are stupid. Basically when your dog goes threw a whole bag of dog food, most of it is fillers so your dog really only got nutrients from 30% of it. Also, some studies are pointing towards all the dyes and glutens and by products to cancer. Also, stool problems and skin problems can happy. Just read about any of the brands I listed and decide for yourself.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
I too have worried about this question. I have a great vet who broke it down for me. Each dog food company (the big names) spend money for researching what exactly each mineral and vitamin does for the dog. If it was so toxic how did our dogs when many of us were younger ever survive? How do dogs survive today- not everyone who owns a dog can afford to pay a dollar a pound for dog food.for the specialty organic food- and yet the dogs live on. While foods are engineered to make the poop more solid and less gross for owners to pick up- it also has minerals that can’t be gotten in your kitchen. If you decide to do your home made food make sure you get good balanced recipes from a book and know what supplements you will need to add to that food.
Know that ‘natural’ on the food means nothing. I am not even sure how regulated ‘organic’ is for dog food by the FDA.
Also know that what you feed your dog should be more solid than mush- if your dog has teeth. Kibble creates a friction that helps with tarter build up.
Good luck.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:46 am
It depends on the quality of the food. A generic food or grocery store brand like Iams, Pedigree or Beneiful and full of fillers and by products. There is little or no meat in them.
By-products are the non meat parts of an animal. It includes feet, feathers, ears, snouts, beaks and other non digestible parts. Dogs need meat to thrive. By-products are not meat and should not be the main meat in a food.
There are some very good commercially available dog foods. These contain several meats for various sources (chicken, fish, beef etc) and are in meal or regular form. Some are grain free and good for dogs.
Home made meals can vary as much as commercially available foods. But a home made food may be better as there would be no chemicals and the sources can be controlled. Not all of the methods of feeding are the same.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:41 am
You don’t have to get all scientific about it because it is very simple feed your dog good mix table scraps and dog food together the dog will live a long and happy life just as long as you let him be a dog good keep fed good. Make sure that he gets to run and have fun do not keep him locked up in the house or chained up. Remember a dog is a animal not a human.
June 14th, 2009 at 1:46 am
there are a lot of things that dogs need that would be so hard to include in a homemade dog food. i am a vet tech and a certified science diet rep and i can tell you that while science diet is good
i like royal canin…you can get it at a petsmart store
they do things like use cranberry for preservatives and they inject nitrogen in the bags instead of oxygen so it stays fresh longer and they included vitamins for hair and teeth and they have speical foods for different breeds. yorkies have such bad teeth the yorkie food is for them and their teeth, bulldogs with bad joins and skin, german shep with bad joints rottweilers with bad joints pugs with tongues that are hard to eat the food so its shaped different….so many diff kinds of foods for diff dogs and its considered a super premium food and iams and science diet are just premium foods…i cant say enough good about it….they eat less of it cause there is less filler and so they poop less…it does cost more but they eat less and its so worth it
June 14th, 2009 at 9:16 am
I prefer to feed my dogs only the higher quality grain free kibbles and I have noticed that my male Shih-tzu no longer suffers from chronic ear infections nor is not scratching all the time like he was doing before on the kibble with grains. I also add about a Tablespoon or 2 of canned food to their kibble (I only get the canned dog food that is 95% meat that is made to add to the kibble like Evangers and Wellness brands).
The brands I feed them now are Wellness CORE, Orijen, Horizon Legacy and Timberwolf Organic Wild and Natural. I like to rotate their food every 2 months or so.
If I had the space and a bigger freezer I would probably feed them a raw diet, but since I don’t I feed them the best quality kibble that I can and sometimes will get them the dehydrated food as well and I do try and cook for them at least once or twice a week as well.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I acidentally gave baby a good rating, kibbles and bits is crap!
Raw bones and meat diets are the best for your dog, I put my dogs on a raw diet and they are doing so much better compared to when they were eating kibble and they were eating Innova, a high quality kibble.
My dogs diets are made up of mostly chicken, but they also get egg, turkey, and fish(only tilapia, and without bone for fish).
If you want more information about what you can feed your dog, a great place to look, and ask questions, is.
the place is dedicated to dogs of all sizes.
I decided to put my dogs on a raw diet after researching it, I didnt have to do much, even though I did, it was so disturbing, I discovered for myself the relationships between vets and their associations, the vet colleges and the pet food companies, and the vet associations and the pet food companies, along with the scams behind repeating vaccines.
If you go to other alliances on purinas website you can directly read that they combined with the american college of veterinary nutrition to form the american college of veterinary nutrition CURICULUM, yes…vets are taught by purina’s standards, yet purina sells dog food for profit. …
Tom Lonsdale is one of the few vets that support a raw diet, and they that do take their business in their own hands, every thing they walk on is risking their livelyhood, vets are under vet associations and those associations follow the money, when a vet threatens the money, they tend to loose everything, and fighting back is not posible with a multi-billion dollar industry. His website is
The three most common companies, the ones in vets offices, that give financial kickbacks to vet associations and vets are Iams, Purina, and Hill’s Science diet.
Pottenger study is not about by products, but it is about raw versus cooked. Please look into it to learn more about our carnivorous animals.
Bigdogsporch.com can give you ancedotal experiences with raw and if you read some of my other post on yahoo You will find some info too.
Owner of three raw fed dogs. ,, and
If you want to know my top three kibbles are: Orijen, Evo, and Innova, but even those cant stand up to the ultimate diet, raw.
June 15th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
From my own personal experience of having had both pure breeds and mixed dogs from the pound I think it depends on the dog. Our schnauzer needed expensive high quality food and if he got into anything else he usually had a trip to the vet. Some of our dogs could eat anything. Two lived until they were 17 and one was 20 years old. I have had another dog that only lived until he was seven and it was because of a kidney problem. I am old and have had about ten dogs total through out my life. Right now I have one street dog that likes to eat anything he can find but we try to only give him his organic mix. My suggestion is to talk with your vet about the breed of dog you have.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:20 am
That would depend on what you feed your dog.
Ours is ALWAYS Nutro. It’s healthy and organic…
June 20th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Kibbles and Bits gave my dog urinary tract infections. That cheaper stuff is just not carefully formulated and dogs can have reactions to them.
Miscellaneous, slightly unrelated note: IAMS, the company, tests its products on dogs and cats (we’re not talking taste tests) so you might think twice about supporting that company. Just sayin’.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Homemade food is good, but some commercial dog foods are just as good.
Here is a site that will show you which dog foods are the best and the worst. I suggest that you get any one of the dog foods that are top rated.
Most of grocery store dog food formulas, like IAMS, Pedigree, Science Diet, Purina,and etc contain “meat and bone meal” which has been known to contain dead dogs and cats that were euthanized in animal shelters. Their bodies are picked up and bought by the truck load by “rendering plants” , that also pick up road kill, dead live stock, and etc. They are shredded, and boiled. They skim off the fat on the top of the “soup” and collected it and sell it to pet food companies as “animal fat”, the rest of the animals’ remains are crushed up, dried and sold to dog and cat food companies as meat and bone meal.
You can read more about it here.
Here is an article where the owner of a rendering plant talks about it. He says that cremating the dead shelter animals would cause pollution, and that rendering them is good.
Here is further information on what you shouldn’t see in the ingredients list in your dog’s food.
Top rated dog foods like Canidae contain good healthy ingredients.
The raw diet, which is also known as the B.A.R.F. diet is another good alternative to the grocery store crap dog foods.
Here is information on getting started on it.