It really depends on the dog some can handle completely awful food and live to old age, but these are rare. Also keep in mind even if dog survives or looks "okay" by buying lower food you are supporting what is used in that food, and any buddy dog or other who dies from that food, just like those who buy purebreds support animal overpopulation (guilty here). I would buy the best food you can afford (within reasonable limits of course. Ol roy if thats all you can afford, do the dog and our society a favor and don't get a dog).

I wouldn't support Purina even if it meant half the dogs in our city got PTS its painless and even IF the numbers PTS in shelters fell. The surviving dogs themselves wouldn't be living right if Purina like foods ran the world (and IT will IF we let them) getting sick and dying or having muiltpial health issues. Plus our own children are at risk from these Big box company too if they eat the food/and dont tell me no chlid doesn't eat pet food. , the only reason IMO they support shelters at all is because the shelter A gives them the rendered bodies to put into the food B it cons the moral instincts of the people by ways of lies and foully spent $$ going to creepy experiments (Iams does it why not Purina?) and C it hurts the natural world we live in making that highly processed stuff to feed the dogs. Don't get me wrong I think Its great that that one dog got home but its only 1 dog of out of litterly millions ... purina see it as, OH too bad we can't have his dead body for dog food right now, oh well... we'll just prey upon some ignorant person buying the dog and get as much $$ from the doggies food and THEN we'll get our dog carcass in the end, complete with a paying costumer.

One of the reasons that Whole Dog Journal will not put a dog food on their "approved" list without the manufacturer freely giving out the name of the manufacturing plant when asked by a legitimate inquiry is that such full disclosure helps guard against the kind of accident that occurred in 2007. Many of the small dog food companies have their foods made at plants that manufacture for many different companies. Knowing that the precise ingredients that the individual manufacturer specified for their food were used in the manufacture of it is part of the trust that small companies must have in these "batch" manufacturing plants. At least one pet food plant used ingredients not specified by the pet food manufacturers whose food they were making, according to Wikipedia's article on Protein Adulteration in China Having the name of the plant that manufactures your food easy to look up in case of a food contamination event allows consumers to decide whether to buy other foods made at that plant. Given all of that work that WDJ does to get this info for us, it is pretty obvious that the plants that are making these foods are right here in the US and Canada. The protein supplement that was imported from China was criminally poisoned with the addition of melamine plastic in 2006 and 2007 and there is evidence that there was a similar outbreak in 2005 (see the Wikipedia link below). Chinese companies who participated in this in 2006 and 2007 that poisoned our pets were not immediately sanctioned, and the milk industry went on to commit horrific poisoning of baby formula and milk products in China that was not discovered until May 2008 and not made public until August or September. Milk products from China shipped all over the world were found to have melamine in them even into 2009. From Wikipedia: "Two people were executed, one given a suspended death penalty, three people receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), being fired or forced to resign. Yes, all that had to do with the poisoning of babies and others who drank the milk in China. It only came to light because a New Zealand affiliate of the Chinese milk company kept insisting that something was wrong and had to be investigated. Melamine can be manufactured from urea (a concentrated part of urine), coal, and other sources. Urea and other nitrogen sources are added to the feed of ruminants (multi-stomach animals, animals who chew a cud) to increase the nitrogen level because they can get protein's nutrition from these non-food sources due to their unique digestive processes. THAT is how melamine started being put into food - the waste from making it was used in cattle feed. when it was made from urea. A crude way to measure how much protein is in a food is to measure the nitrogen level. Melamine, urea, and some other non-foods increase the nitrogen level without adding to the nutritional level (except for ruminant feed). So now, they have to use more sophisticated testing methods to test foods for animals and people. Because people cannot be trusted, in capitalist or socialist countries, not to poison each other for profit or to make their expected output! This all goes back to my sneaking feeling that this planet can only healthily sustain a very tiny fraction of the people we have living here. If we can't eat whole foods, or feed whole foods to our meat livestock and pets, then we are going to have this kind of thing happen. I have been discussing the need to change our diets to "no processed foods" with my fellow chronically ill friends online. Most of us had no children. It is turning out that this is a good thing.

Precious. I had never seen it before. My favorite is the dry catfood commercial where the cat starts to eat and is transported to a beautiful colorful world with fish,cows, a rolling brook and green grass. I think that's what Cat Heaven looks like.