My dog has eaten the Dick Van Patten's Natural Balance - great food and he loves the logs - I'll buy the log and cut it up and put 6-8 squares on top of the dry. He's getting a little chunky, so I switched to the lower calorie version of the Natural balance and instead of the logs bought some frozen raw dog food - the pet store said it would be less calories than the Natural Balance Logs. but, it's sortof gross to chop up the biscuit size raw thingys. I don't think I'll do the raw after this bag is gone. It stinks! My cat who I just switched to canned cat food was on Science Diet Prescrition CD cat food - He was nutritionally starved. I think he was becoming diabetic - lost the luster in his fur and lost a lot of weight. Now this happened slowly over time, but since I've switched his food he's a new cat, gained weight and is much perkier. I feel very guilty about feeding him Science Diet all these years. Rudy has always been on a premium food. We used to feed Wellness, but he likes the Natural Balance and it agrees with him, so we're happy for now.

I disagree with several of these points. 1) For every listing of "by-product", subtract 10 points This is the industry's definition of by-products: The non-rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hoofs. It shall be suitable for use in animal food. If it bears name descriptive of its kind, it must correspond thereto. None of these things are bad for an animal to eat. In fact brain tissue contains taurine, an important amino acid that is not found in other body parts. Liver is an excellent source of iron. Bone and cartilage contains calcium, phosphorus, glucosamine, and chondroitin sulfate and other important trace minerals. How do you think wolves survive 20 years without someone sprinkling vitamins and minerals onto their food? They eat the WHOLE animal, and therefore don't need extra stuff. Vitamins and minerals are only added to pet food because much of the healthy stuff has been removed. The only reason people don't eat by-products is because we think they are yucky tasting (well, some people eat by-products, they just call them tripe, menudo, liver, etc). Wolves don't eat the meat and leave the rest of the animal laying around, they eat the whole animal, and since dogs and wolves are genetically identical, dogs should eat the whole animal too. The "evil" of by-products was invented by a very clever marketing firm, not based in fact or science of animal nutrition. 2) For every non-specific animal source ("meat" or "poultry", meat, meal or fat) reference, subtract 10 points This isn't a problem unless your dog has allergies. 3) If the food contains BHA, BHT, or ethoxyquin, subtract 10 points Actually, if the food contains these preservatives, subtract all 100 points. NEVER feed a dog or cat a food containing these items. EVER. 8 ) If it contains ground corn or whole grain corn, subtract 3 points 9) If corn is listed in the top 5 ingredients, subtract 2 more points Corn is not a bad thing to be in dog food, unless your dog happens to be allergic to it. However I agree it should not be a top 5 ingredient. 11) If lamb is the only animal protein source (unless your dog is allergic to other protein sources), subtract 2 points 12) If it contains soy or soybeans, subtract 2 points 13) If it contains wheat (unless you know that your dog isn't allergic to wheat), subtract 2 points 14) If it contains beef (unless you know that your dog isn't allergic to beef), subtract 1 point There is nothing wrong with lamb, soy, wheat, or beef unless your dog happens to be allergic to any of these items. The soy and wheat should not be in the top 5 ingredients since they are not animals, and dogs are by nature, mostly carnivores. 13) If it contains glucosamine and chondroitin, add 1 point Actually don't bother adding a point because the amount added is never enough to have any benefit. The other points are good. I personally would add a lot more points for raw diets though.

I used Iams for over 17 years - then the dogs didn't seem to do so well on it any more. So 1.5 years ago I switched to Nutro dry kibble. In the month or so before the wet food recall, I noticed my dog's coats weren't as nice, they vomited on/off yellow frothy stuff, and they avoided eating it until the last moment before we went to bed. Sometimes I had to encourage them with people food on it. These are dogs that are 12, have always willingly ate dry kibble, live indoors with us, and never over eat. The vet and I attributed it to hunting dogs doing what they like to do on our long daily walks (we live in the middle of nowhere, where there are many tasty temptations on the trails). Then around the first part of March, one of mine had violent seizures for the first time in her life at age 12. There is a family history; her brother has mild seizures 2-3 times year. so mild we don't medicate for them; and I know they can spring up at any age, so truly that is the most likely answer. However, that day I stopped feeding the Nutro, and began home cooking cold turkey. That strange vomiting with both dogs ended that day (despite the fact I thought switching to such a rich home cooked diet would cause some upset). Coats sleeked back up in short order. Please knock on wood for us, but no seizures yet (I still am reluctant to connect that to the food, because of the dog family history, but need to put it out there because I do think there is something less than fatal in this food that was at the least causing the vomiting/tummy upsets. My girl had a cluster of 6 in less than 24 hours, and it took days before she was "normal", ie pacing for hours, some vision issues, couldn't sleep, wobbly legs, etc.) It was a nightmare. Then I heard about the wet food recall. I thought I was a food snob. I did ask questions, but 1) how can I know if I am not told truthful answers re QC and ingredient issues, and 2) frankly, accidents like a bad batch of X can happen - to both pet and human grade food. I don't know what to think now, except that if commercial wet food has issues with rat poison, plastics poison, god-knows-what-else is still in it that is causing problems less than death in it, too much Vitamin D (the Royal Canin lawsuit, which btw, I had tried the cat food years ago and it was simply awesome at the time, but still, they screwed up)... well, I can guarantee that as a home cooker, I can be more careful than that. I am just lucky that I can make the time to home cook - what a burden that would be in other circumstances for a lot of people. The cat would be harder to do a good home job with; so I am trying Felidae dry kibble. P.S. The store and Nutro were very stand up about taking our returned sacks of dry kibble for full credit.

I just check on the Nutro website as well and they have notice on "rice gluten" saying that while it is an ingredient in their products they did not purchase it from the same company as Natural Choice, that company was Wilbur-Ellis, a huge agri trading company. Hmmm, now I'm a little worried. Just because they didn't buy there's from Wilbur-Ellis doesn't mean that the supplier they bought theirs from didn't also get some of the same tainted product. I don't know what else to feed my one old Border Collie in the meantime, he has very bad digestive problems and any change even a slow changeover gives him near uncontrollable diahrea. Nutro Lamb & Rice is the only food I've found that he can eat and be regular and I've tried different brands of L & R plus other things. What ticks me off is it's a well known fact, if I know it then people in the agri-biz have to know it. That China has so badly polluted nearly all of its agricultural land that the only way they can get any food to grow in order to feed their people is by using such heavy concentrations of fertilizers including melamine apparently. Concentrations so huge that most food grown in China would be deemed unsafe for human consumption by the FDA, Health Canada etc. for sale here.