Your Bag of Kibble Might Have Pretty Pictures, But Do You Know What’s Inside?

Posted by & filed under cat health, diet and health, pet food ingredients, poisons and toxins, specific ingredients, Useful.

By Green Dog Pet Supply

We all love our pets as members of our families and want to do the very best we can to keep them healthy and happy, but many of us overlook the very foundation of health for our pets – their nutrition. Just as our own health is affected by our daily nutrition habits, dogs and cats can develop chronic health issues like diabetes, skin allergies, inflammation issues such as arthritis, yeast overgrowth, bowel issues, urinary infections or crystals, and even cancer. We often don’t realize that chronic issues are developing at a cellular level, and of course many pets seem “fine” until a crisis occurs. Of course, the very best way to support our own health and the health of our companion animals is for all of us to eat more whole foods and cut out processed foods as much as we can.

However, processed kibbles have come quite a long way in the past 10 years, and there is a great disparity between what you might find on the pet aisle of your local grocery store and what might be available at your local independent pet retailer. It is not legally required (it is actually prohibited) for manufacturers to use language on a pet food label that would help a consumer to know if the quality of the ingredients on a label are similar to the ingredients you might use to cook your own dinners or are simply waste products that were inappropriate for use in human foods, though there are some things to look out for on kibble labels that will give you a good idea. I hope to empower you to recognize some of these “red flag” and “green flag” ingredients that might help you to determine the quality of the ingredients in any dry kibble you’re feeding to your pets.
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Beware of Cocoa Mulch

Posted by & filed under events, Useful.

Photo by Katie Backus, Permission given to Green Dog Pet Supply.

I covered this a few years back, but it seems lots of people are forwarding us the warnings about cocoa mulch, and I thought it was definitely worthy of a blog post.

There is a mulch sold by garden stores that is made from cocoa bean shells. It really does look good, has a lovely fine texture and smells fantastic, just like chocolate. The trouble is, just like chocolate, it contains both caffeine and the chemical that is toxic to dogs called theobromine. Though deaths from eating cocoa mulch are not widely reported, there have been a number of cases of dogs becoming ill from ingesting it. Symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea, hyperactivity, rapid heart rate, muscle seizures, and possibly death. The concentration of theobromine in the mulch is actually quite high, making it more dangerous than something like milk chocolate, and since it does smell so delicious, there is a risk that some dogs might eat it.  So, if you have an indiscriminate eater, try to be vigilant on walks if you see your dog really nosing around a mulched area.  If you really want to use cocoa mulch, look for a variety that states that it is theobromine free (though it still might contain caffeine, which could also be harmful to pets), or just consider some of the old favorites like tree bark.

(photo borrowed from the ASPCA website)

Some of Our Favorite Nutrition Resources

Posted by & filed under diet and health, Useful.

I wrote this up a while back for a nutrition lecture I was giving, and I thought it might be useful to post it somewhere for more people to use. These are some of our favorite resources for people to use when trying to educate themselves about their pets.
– Christine

Resources:

Watch the documentary “Pet Fooled” on Netflix! Tremendous opportunity for learning and spreading knowledge to others in your life who might not realize that what they’re feeding can hurt their beloved pets.

Excellent Link for Dog Nutrition (though cat folks can definitely glean some knowledge here too: http://www.dogaware.com/
The woman who compiles this site has encyclopedic knowledge about diet and nutrition for dogs and writes a lot of the food articles in The Whole Dog Journal.
Key links on her site that might be useful to you:
Lots of links to common health problems in dogs
http://www.dogaware.com/specific.html
including a ton of info on kidney disease and diet, specifically a lot about protein and its relationship to kidney disease: http://www.dogaware.com/kidney.html#protein

there are a lot of good articles that she wrote for Whole Dog Journal on home cooking: http://www.dogaware.com/diet/homemade.html

Sites online specifically for cats:
CatInfo.org – written by a vet, this is a comprehensive site that covers the basics of feline nutrition, with excellent discussions of common health issues such as diabetes, UTIs, and hyperthyroidism. She also has great info on Making Cat Food with good tips about transitioning a picky cat’s diet
Holisticat (includes an email list)
CatNutrition.org: feeding cats for health
How to Prepare Fresh Cat Food (technical but very complete)
The Feline Future Cat Food Company (Instincts TC) – a mix to which you add your own meat. I don’t carry it but it seems great. Good answers to peoples’ questions on this site about raw foods.
Feline Instincts – a mix to which you add your own meat. They also have a kidney diet
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