Deals.Woot

I agree with checking ingredients, also to look out for corn & corn base products. Did you know "fish farms" trained the fish to eat corn. If you haven't already check out Food Inc. great source of info.

A local store sells 20# bags of chicken leg quarters for $12.95. We grab a bag of that and brown rice and frozen mixed veggies. All that stuff, including bones, goes into a pressure cooker and gets cooked down into a mush that we use to supplement dry dog food.

@okham: Yeah, with a 3 and 4 year old in the house, our mutts are well fed with all sorts of stuff. As long as it doesn't have chocolate or onions in it or too much dairy, I don't worry about it. Every so often, we deal with an evening of varnish stripping fumes, but no other signs of digestive problems.

Ive used Members Mark Lamb from Sams club for 11 years now and 3 dogs. Price has gone from $18 to $32 for a 40lb bag but it is still the best value I can find and a premium dog food.

This topic has been beaten to death... And then some. It's pretty simple.

Feed your dog (or cat) the best food you can afford. A quality food should , at the very least, have a named meat ingredient as the first ingredient. Better yet, a named meat meal (Chicken Meal, Lamb Meal, etc.) should be the first or second ingredient. Meat meals are animal muscle tissue cooked down to a dry state, which actually provides more meat/protein content. Usually a named meat product in the list includes its water weight. When cooked down it's actually only about 20% of its original weight. If that meat was listed as a meat meal, it would most likely be placed lower in the ingredient list (by weight). Avoid foods that use meat byproduct meal.

Avoid ANYTHING and everything with corn as an ingredient, it's a cheap filler and dogs have a very hard time digesting it. Soy is sometimes added as cheap protein, which is less biologically available for dogs vs meat proteins, so if given the choice, avoid it.

Diamond also makes Taste of the Wild dog food, more expensive, but not as expensive as other "top of the line" brands.

@kamikazeken: dangit!

At some point I'd like to switch to giving my cats better food. But my vet has told me "the worst wet food is better than the best dry food" when it comes to cats (they aren't designed to chew or digest dry food...increases urinary tract infections, risk of kidney stones, etc). But the fancy feast I give them has things like "animal digest" and "meat by-product" in it. Even the high end popular brand names have this stuff in it (like Purina "Pro Plan"). You really need to go way up the ladder to get quality cat wet food. And man it is expensive.

Right now, I can't afford to spend $1.20 per can of cat food (currently pay $0.52 for FF via Amazon subscribe and save), but at some point I'd like to do it. Maybe when my kitten is older and doesn't need to eat a full can every day.

@thewronggrape: I think some dogs that have been further removed from the "wolf" origins do just fine with the lesser meat content foods. We've bred them to eat agricultural foods. But some of the newer, or even more "wolfish" breeds do very badly with the corn/soy/wheat etc.

I'm just happy when people do the best they can by their pets; if it's pedigree and love - cool. If it's a specialized diet and hearty training program, cool.