What To Look For In A Pet Food

Everyday pet owners file into pet supply stores to purchase food for their dogs and cats. Just walk through the isles at any local pet supply store and you’ll see isle after isle of food. It almost seems like they have more food in the store then they do supplies. So with so many different foods on the market it’s easy for the consumer to see that dog and cat food is cheap and somewhat easy to make. The question though is why is it so cheap and why do we have so many different brands. Are they all different?

Not really! If you look at the ingredients of the food which is on every bag being sold, if you’re not looking at this information then you should be, you’ll see that most foods are made up of the same ingredients. More often than not one of the first ingredients will be chicken-by-products or poultry-by-products. Essentially what this says is that this is the Heads, Feet or Internal Organs of a chicken. That sounds delicious. More often then not you will also see fillers such as ground corn meal, or ground sorghum. This is another great choice being that dogs have a more sensitive digestive system then humans do and we can’t digest corn so why would we expect our animals to be able to?

As with all human grade food the ingredients at the top of the list are in the product the most according to the weight. So when you see the good stuff like ground chicken meal (no by products) in the middle or near the bottom then understand that you pet isn’t getting what they should be. Being able to digest the food less means that you have to feed more food to get the nutrient value and it also means more waste to clean up.

So what is best to feed your pet? One of the first three ingredients on the bag should be ground “meat” meaning ground chicken, turkey, beef, lamb, etc. next should be digestible grains like rice, brown rice, barley, oats, etc. Organic food has started to take a bigger part of the pet food varieties. Organic isn’t always necessary better but it is a big step in that direction. What organic means is that the food has been grown without pesticides and herbicides. It also means that the meats of the food haven’t been altered by hormone injections and such.

So before just buying any old food off the shelf, read the ingredients and become informed as to what is best for your pet. As with humans, the better food that we eat the better that we will feel and the better we will be able to live.

By: Maxwell

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The article is written by Maxwell an associate with www.pawsuppetsupply.com

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