Just shows how long it is since I walked down the baby food aisle I know some people recommend it as a kong filling.

Tasty food, sure - I've used it for rats to sneak yucky tasting medication in, but as far as nutritional value, it's not going to be of much use to anything but (human) babies really! I think in Helena's case, it'll just fill Zena up (if she likes it) without really adding much nutritional benefit.


Can't remember if it's been mentioned but reading back your first post, I see Fish4Dogs kibble mentioned - have you tried their salmon mousse? It's not a complete food but fish is an easily digested protein (definately consider this along with the protein figure - 30% easily digested protein like fish/chicken/egg may be better than 40% of slightly harder to digest proteins). They have some short dated pouches half price at the moment - 45 pouches for £10.70 inc. postage, and although it's only 14% on paper, remember it's wet food so that figure should be slightly higher, and it may tempt her into eating if you mix it with some other stuff.

Im being a bit dim here but trying to figure out the figures here

I get if you remove the water and you are doing the dry weight % protein

But then not understanding how that is comparing back to kibble - because kibble has at least 70% carbs that are just added to make it able to be extruded and are not really neutritionaly available to the dogs either so is that really no better or worse than the water?

Most meat is around 20% protein and most of the rest is water so tins are just reflecting this - so 70% water isnt a bad things its just natural

I've actually been feeding that in each meal mixed with the Chappie as I thought it would be quite high in protein even though it doesn't actually state the level on the pouch. I've always mixed this in with their kibble on and off, and thankfully, I just ordered another box when they told me it was half price, otherwise I would have run out by now. It's too sloppy to use on its own in the balls, but mixed with Chappie it's perfect.

Water isn't a bad thing but it does mean you need to feed more of the wet food. Like my adding water to a cup of kibble, for example - had the dog just been fed the cup of kibble, it would only need to eat 100g of food to get that 20g protein. But to get the same protein from the wet kibble mush, it would need to eat the 200g. If the dog isn't eating very well, the more concentrated the food, the better, in this case.

Unfortunately pet food labelling may meet or exceed legal requirements.

The label shows only the CRUDE protein in the product.

It does not differentiate between:

Complete and incomplete (dogs need complete protein in order to meet their essential amino acid requirements)

Bio- available protein and non bio available protein (egg is considered the "perfect" protein, leather is 100% protein but completely bio unavailable to the dog.

And as indicated before, the moisture level of the food will need to be removed to get a TRUE picture of the ACTUAL protein content v the CRUDE protein content.

The way to calculate the ACTUAL protein in dog food is as follows:

First of all you remove the moisture content because water does not contain protein.

Each food has a different moisture content. Wet food is generally around 75% water and dry food circa 10%. The moisture content will be on the label; it has to be by law.

So when you remove the moisture content from the food you are left with "dry matter", so if a food was 10% moisture it would have 90% dry matter.

If the CRUDE protein content on the label is say 21% you divide the %age of the protein by the dry matter and multiply 100 (to arrive at the percentage overall)

ergo

21/90x100=23% ACTUAL protein by dry matter.

It is essential to understand the dry matter formula as otherwise you can be fooled into thinking that Naturediet contains very low protein (11%) however when this formula is used it has a 44% protein content and so is higher than most dry foods.

This is why you need to UNDERSTAND food labelling to be able to compare foods otherwise most people end up comparing apples with oranges!

I've been giving the salmon mousse as a topper on top of complete to my 2 skinny boys and they have a tiny bit more covering on them now. I was going to suggest mixing the mousse with mashed potato to firm it up a bit.

Recently saw a youngster I'd bred and expected him to be all leggy like his sister. He wasn't to my suprise, he's on Orijen, which is high protein.

Re the swallowed spatula - a dog I owned gulped down a canvas lead whole (he'd already had 2 ops for blockages caused by eating non-foodstuffs) and it sat there in his stomach for 15 days before it came back up, albeit a different colour. From memory it was about 4' long (have a photo somewhere).