Feeding guide for puppy owners

writing out my puppy guides and im now on the feeding section.

ive written what the pups are weaned (well will be) on. and ive also written about raw as thats what mine are fed on full time (ive put the sticky in on raw feeding off here) now where i need your help is to maybe help me name some top brand what you consider high quality, dry foods and wet foods and what books are good to read on nutrition.

ive recommended Ian billinghurst's give your dog a bone book as ive read that one, dogsey is also getting a mention.

so what do you think?

Dry Foods
Fish 4 Dogs
Applaws

Arden Grange
JWB
Wainwrights

Wet Foods
Nature Harvest
Nature Diet
Wainwrights

I would tell people what to look for in a food, as well as listing a few good foods. This way when they come to inevitably change foods, they at least know what they are looking for.

Try to chose foods with fewer grains;
Better fillers include; potato, rice, (is it oats or barley or something else.. can't remember but SB knows!)

Foods are listed with the highest SINGLE ingredient at the begining working their way down.
Foods that start with a meat as the first ingredient are best. Beware however, of foods with multiple grains that APPEAR to have a high meat content.
For example it may say:
1) Chicken, rice, maize, vits and mins

2) Chicken, rice, vits and mins

Although they look similar, if you add the rice and maize in the 1st one, they will most likely exceed the chicken, making grains the highest quantity ingredient.
This is where looking at the percentage analytics is useful too.

A food such as Fish 4 Dogs uses over 55% whereas something like JWB is around 26%. F4D, Applaws, Orijen and Arcana are also grain free which most people feel is an advantage.

Good luck writing it all, sounds like fun

Have you remembered to include how many times a day to feed and when to reduce the meals?

I am afraid that the majority of foods which have meat as the first SINGLE ingredient STILL have grains/cereals/carbohydrates making up the largest proportion of the food.

So saying that meat should be the first ingredient is not necessarily an indicator of a better food. As most of those labelled eg Duck and Rice, should really be called Rice and Duck.

As for recommending foods, hmmm, I would mention those from different price ranges so that you do not alienate owners

I remember when I inherited a cat and the owner said it only ate fresh fish.

What she meant was that she only FED fresh fish, the cat did not have an issue eating El Cheapo Cat Food (after the 4th day of nothing else appearing).

Just a thought.

yeah ive got all that, and what they are being weaned on, just giving them other ideas of good foods for if/when they want to switch.

Apologies for hi-jacking your thread, mine are on JWB and thinking of switching to skinners, but notice the comments regarding maize. Is this not an ok ingredient?

Which Skinners were you looking at? the Duck and Rice and the Salmon and Rice don't contain maize. I'm not sure about the other foods they sell, but those two definitely don't.

Those are the field and trial range, and my dogs are just family pets so I was looking at light & senior, chicken & rice and puppy & junior.

^^ Mine have Skinners D and R and do very well on it.

It doesn't matter about the Field and Trial bit -- most people who feed the F&T are feeding it to pets (me included). The F&T just means it is VAT free which is obviously a bonus.