You might be better off with a home made diet. You can buy the ingredients in bulk and save in the long run. I recommend getting one formulated by a veterinary nutritionist. Other kinds of animal nutritionists receive varying degrees of education and not all are qualified to be formulating diets. Better safe than sorry. IMO.

Chisue, so sorry about you dog, Westies are so sweet. You might want to try Nutro Natural Choice chicken rice and oatmeal formula. Compare the labels for ingredients, ect. Pets Mart where I shop has it on sale for $1.65 a can, usually 1.75. you can also buy it by the case. It's supposed to be good for sensitive stomachs. I feed my beagle the dry kibble and use the canned when I give her pills and she gobbles it right up. Good thought and prayer for your Westie.

Thank you, ms. Minnamouse and Beagle_NC.

I cooked for our last Westie from age 12 until he died at 16.5. How/where would I find a recipe formulated by a veterinary nutritionist? I just fed cooked ground beef, rice, with a little cottage cheese. That dog was show quality. This one is our puppy mill rescue. (No 'good deed' goes unpunished! lol)

A food that might be worth trying is Hi Tor Eno diet. It is formulated to be a replacement to ID, but is not RX.

I bought the Hi Tor equivalent feline kidney diet for my cat for a few years. She liked that brand and tolerated it better than the RX formula- not to mention that it was quite a bit cheaper.

I was never able to find a store that carried the specialty Hi Tor diets anywhere nearby to us, we always had to order them, but even with shipping, it came out much cheaper than buying the RX our vet carried. I think we use to go through petfooddirect.com.

I feel for you, my old lab had a sensitive stomach and would occasionally go through terrible bouts. For some reason she tolerated fish based dog food better than just about anything else. Though we tried a lot of different foods in a lot of different price ranges, the food we found she tolerated the best was Purina Pro Plan Sensitive stomach. In her later life, we made a lot of rice and vegetable mix to supplement her regular food, just because it was bland and satisfying enough (she was an eating machine).

Best of luck to you.

Here is a link that might be useful: Triumph Hi-Tor/ brochure download

There's Petdiets.com who will formulate a diet for a low consultation price.

Then you can find veterinary nutritionists by going to either of the websites http://www.acvn.org/ or http://www.aavn.org/.

You can probably find more by Googling.

Regular practice veterinarians receive varying degrees of nutrition education as well, like continuing seminars and conferences and staying up to date on studies, but not all do and some choose to take behavior as an elective in school instead of nutrition, and some vets just aren't that great and will claim to know more than they do. They're like anyone else in that regard, I guess.

Not everyone will agree with me, but vet nutritionists and scientists who study the domestic dog nutrition requirements all agree that dogs benefit from vegetables, just like we do. Like us, they can't digest cellulose either but no one would argue that vegetables don't provide fiber, nutrients and antioxidants. I won't get into evolutionary history and all that because it's a hotly debated topic on the internet..

Dogs also benefit from a degree of starch (grains, potato or other sources) and are fully capable of digesting it. They create amylase, the starch digesting enzyme in their pancreas and the starch digestion takes place in the small intestine. They don't produce salivary amylase because they bolt their food, it doesn't stay in their mouth long enough for chemical digestion in the mouth to be of much benefit.

Lean meats are healthier than fatty types.

Just some fyi. I guess why I wrote this is to show that this is what experts in this field say but you can find much conflicting info from lay people who have some strange, unfounded ideas. Like veggies will shorten your dog's life, dogs can't digest starch, dogs do best on the most fatty cuts/types of meat, etc.

chisue, a knowledgeable person told me about this person once. I did not use her but she was highly recommended.
http://www.monicasegal.com/

Try Primal - found in the frozen food part of the pet store

And I didn't think this was a very active board... LOL

Thank you all.

MsMinnamouse, I appreciate the background on vets 'missing' the nutritional training. (Remind us of MD training, too?)

Quasifish -- I don't see why I couldn't try the Hi Tor Eno, although the nearest retail for it is 11 miles from our home. At least I could ask our vet about it. (Not to her advantage for us to switch though.) The shipping costs from Petfooddirect are almost equal to the cost of the cans! We'll see what the local retailer quotes.

Mazer -- I'll look at the Primal frozen too.