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Thursday, April 17, 2014
From the desk of Sharda Baker.
Hi and welcome everyone!
This is Sharda with a wonderful newsletter about dog food labels.
Here we go!
When choosing healthy dog food for your dog, it is also important to understand dog food labeling.
As many people have discovered when shopping for their own food, labels can provide you with a wealth of information when you are trying to choose healthy foods.
The same is true with dog food, In order to make the best and healthiest choices for our pets, it is important to make sure that we know how to read as well as understand the information provided on dog food labels.
Dog food labels must contain such specific information as the name of the product, the guaranteed analysis, the nutritional adequacy statement and feeding directions.
THE EFFECTS OF POOR QUALITY DOG FOOD
Dog foods that are poor in quality typically contain a number of filler ingredients, rather than the actual nutrients, vitamins and minerals that your dog needs to be healthy.
A wide variety of issues can result from poor quality dog food, including heart problems, obesity, behaviour issues, lack of energy and markedly reduced life span.
Scary thought isn’t it?
A close friend of mine had two dogs who both died very young, around age 8.
Both had lived a life largely on tinned food and fatty table scraps and I have no doubt that their poor diet contributed to the dog’s shortened life span.
One of the reasons for these issues is the fact that POOR quality dog food is provides bulk, not necessarily nutrition. This creates a void of the nutrients that they do need to maintain their healthy.
On a human scale, this could be the equivalent of eating junk food or fast food every single day. Humans that subsist on a diet of junk food or fast food are frequently overweight, suffer from heart problems, diabetes and experience mood swings.
The same can be said of a dog that does not receive adequate nutrition through their dog food.
I know, it’s not rocket science is it?
DOG FOOD RECALLS
The recent dog food recalls} have shocked most pet owners. Some pet owners suffered the devastation of the loss of a beloved pet due to elements contained in pet foods that proved to be fatal to their dogs.
It should certainly seem as though a pet owner should be able to trust the name brands they find on their pet store shelves, but as we have seen, that is not always the case.
Even some of the most expensive brands that are frequently advertised with vigor were found to be completely unsafe and were eventually pulled off the shelves.
This would certainly seem to indicate that price cannot always be a good gauge of quality, and particularly of quality control.
While many pet owners trusted the brands they frequently fed their pets, assured that the foods they were giving their pet owners would not shorten their lives, they soon found out the hard way that the commercial pet food industry was rife with problems.
One of the biggest problems with many of these foods is the fact that ingredients are often imported from other countries; countries where there are no regulations regarding the manufacturing of quality dog food.
As a result, it should really not be surprising that so many dog food brands became contaminated and resulted in the death of several animals. It is still unknown exactly how many dogs may have unnecessarily died as a result of dog food contamination.
One thing is certain: even one death was too many.
I hope you learned a lot from today’s dog food newsletter.
I will be back for more!
Warmest regards,
Sharda Baker