Deleting Questions? (Ping Mustang Mel)?

Just spent a lot of time carefully writing an answer to a question. I go to hit answer, and the question has been deleted! Worse yet, the user doesn't allow e-mail, so I can't e-mail them the answer I wrote for them.

Have you ever deleted a question? Why? What do you think about deleting questions?

(P.S. if you're Mustang Mel, here is the answer to the question I wrote for you!)

What I always tell people re. dog food, is "If it works, don't fix it". In your case though, it sounds like it might not be the best diet for him.

I know I'm going to get some thumbs down for this, but I'm going to say it anyways, because I know a lot of people are going to say the opposite, and I don't agree with it. There is nothing wrong with Science Diet. People don't like it for a lot of reasons, none of which in my mind are any good (mostly its based on inaccurate information floating around the internet, and a general distrust of anything that is too 'commercial').

In general, I would say --- pick a food, feed it for a period of at least one month, evaluate the results. Do you like what you see? Or not?

You can look at things like energy level, coat quality, stool quality, etc. to make your decision. If you like it, stick with it. If you don't like it, pick another diet, and feed for a month (make sure you allow a 'cross over' period of about a week, during which you feed steadily more of one diet, and less of the other.)

Couple more general points --- By-products aren't evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with feeding by-products *PROVIDED* that the by-products are of reasonable quality. (unfortunately, due to labeling laws, there is no way for a manufacturer to put a statement re. quality of their ingredients on the label).

Grains aren't evil either. Many, many, many dogs do very well with diets including grains, and have for many years. The issue is there is a small percentage of dogs that can't tolerate grains (just like there is a percentage of people who can't take grains). Wild canids will actually eat the gut contents of the animals they kill early on in the feeding process. Given that most of what they kill are herbivores, this means that they eat partially digested plant material all the time.

Don't necessarily trust (or distrust) a food which lists something like "Chicken" as the first ingredient. Why? Because its a game they play. They know that people like to see a 'meat' as the first ingredient. They also know that most people don't know that if they list it as 'chicken' its measured in a hydrated form (i.e. with all the water in it), so it moves up the ingredient list. When its turned in to a kibble, most of the water comes out, and who knows where it would sit in the list. This isn't necessarily the mark of a 'bad' food, pretty much every food plays the 'label game' to some extent, just recognize that it doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. Similarly, food companies can move things down the list by 'ingredient splitting'. People don't like to see grains high up on the list, so they split this up, by using a couple of distinct varieties of grain, rather than a single source grain, which moves the ingredient down on the list.

The one thing I would stay away from is any food listing an unnamed meat source as the primary protein. There is only one reason I can see to not list the protein source --- because you plan on changing it depending on what is cheapest. This scares me. It means that one bag of food can be completely different than the next bag, which is especially concerning with a dog with allergy problems.

Contrary to popular belief, vets do get educated re. nutrition, you can probably trust your vet to give you some good information on nutrition.

Hope that helps a little with your search for the right food for your dog.