Choosing your dog food
I was sent this email from a friend who trains at my club, the Fox Valley Dog Training Club. It is helpful information and something to be aware of. Personally, I feed my dogs either Canidae or Blue Buffalo – just fyi.
Subject: Feeding Healthwise, Innova, EVO, Karma or California Natural to pets? Read this…
Ken and I just learned that in early June, Natura (makers of Healthwise, Innova, EVO, Karma and California Natural) were purchased by Proctor and Gamble. And at about the same time the plant where the foods are manufactured has been expanded. Google news only reveals 2 articles on this, so it wasn’t widely publicized.
Now there are many fine P&G products in our home right now: soaps; toothpaste; dish washing liquid; etc. But we spent a lot of time and energy selecting a dog food that we felt would meet our dogs’ nutritional demands. We’re worried that as P&G clearly plans to expand the distribution of these products, quality control may not remain intact, ingredients may suffer…or both.
If you’re happy with your food, don’t mind the change and plan to continue feeding these products, I’d watch the ingredient labels closely for changes, should fillers and chemicals start to creep in over time.
We’ve decided that we’ll either seek out another brand or cook for them ourselves.
Feel free to share the heads up with your friends feeding these products.
Barb
3 Responses to “Choosing your dog food”
Another opinion about the same dog food issue…
The purchase of Natura Foods by Proctor and Gamble was publicized in the financial section of various newspapers when it occurred. Your petfood retailer should have told you about the purchase as many distributers did inform their store clients.
Previously, Natura products were not carried by large chains such as Petco/Petsmart but rather were sold through boutique-type stores (with the possible exception of Pet Supplies Plus that does sell a number of high quality products).
My local boutique store has opted to no longer carry Natura products because of the possible change in manufacturing procedures. A recent discussion with them and their distributers seemed to indicate that the 2 (I think) production facilities for Natura products could not produce enough product to meet the demand of supplying the large chains of petfood stores. Hence we all worry about a cheapening of manufacturing procedures and ingredients.
As many people learned with Canidae products, a manufacturer is not mandated to immediately notify the public when a change in formulation or manufacturing procedures occurs. Canidae users did not discover nor were they notified of the changes for a number of months. Some pets seems to do fine with the change and others did have digestive/health issues.
Talk to your petfood suppliers and see if they are no longer going to carry Natura products. You may find, as I did, that there are some real sales on the current stock of food.
Decide if you want to support a company like P&G that uses animal testing for their products. Then, make a change if you so desire. If you need some suggestions beyond what your pet store sells, check out the Feb 2010 issue of Whole Dog Journal for their list of quality foods.
Kathy
And another opinion…
As a retailer of high quality, wheat-free, corn-free, soy-free and by-product-free pets foods we were aware of this sale before it occurred.
WelPet bought out Wellness and Eagle Pack foods last year and the changes that occurred after the buy out were good changes, for example lowing or removing the salt from the EP Holistic line. Thought the treatment of some of the higher up employees was questionable, we choose to not drop those two foods when bought out and we took a wait and see attitude. So far, all is well.
With P&G: wow, that was more difficult. They have had over the years numerous recalls and issues with production in many of their products. Look what occurred with Iams and Eukanuba. In addition to that, the animal testing and terrible treatment of those animals concerned us. It P&G can’t handle what is on their plate properly now, how will they handle the addition of marketing a multi SKU dog product to the box store market? At this point in time, nothing has changed “ON NATURA PACKAGING”. I cap’ed that because by law, pet food companies have up to 6 months before they have to change the ingredient labels AFTER they change the ingredients. We are not encouraging new customers to use Natura. We are not discouraging those that use it now. If asked, we tell them about the buy out. We are exploring the market for new and better foods.
P.S. Canidae did put an itty bitty label on their foods saying there is a change, when they did their change. It was so small that even though we handle dozens of bags a week, we did NOT see it until the representative pointed it out. It was interesting that NONE of our customers had any issues with the ingredient change until about 2 months later when the “news” hit all the forums. Then everybody was swearing that their dog got sick. Interesting.
Nadine
Kristin,
I’ve had a disturbing discovery, but also exciting. I’m 99% sure this is the reason why Rubi has been so sick. Her symptoms are somewhat similar. I imagine they would have gotten worse if we would have continued much longer on this brand of dog food. I have attached the consumer affairs website.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/pets/canidae.html
Here’s the story of Rubi…from the beginning of this journey. About 2 months ago, Rubi started throwing up again if her tummy was too empty or if she consumed more than about 1/4 of cup of food at once. This was so confusing to us because it was unlike her. We also noticed that she was losing hair on her legs and and eventually on the top of her
head by her ears. We took her to the vet and immediately they put her on the bland can food diet. The vet ran multiple blood tests and did a barium test as well….also included are multiple check ups as well.
We tried many different variations of medicine for her on top of all this. None of it was working. So, the last thing the vet suggested was antibiotics. Within less than 24 hrs of her taking that, she stopped throwing up and was back to normal. So, we finished the antibiotics and the vet gave us the go to slowly putting her back on the hard food. Less than 2 days later, she got the worst diarhea I’ve ever seen. Rubi was only 1/2 hard food and 1/2 blank canned food at this time. We let it go for 4 days because she was still drinking and peeing and acting normal. We finally decided to expirement and take 1 variable away…the dry dog food, Canidae. Within less than 2 days of being completely off the Canidae, she has had a normal stool and no vomitting!!!
This has been quite an adventure. Rubi has been such a trooper.
I wanted to tell you immediatly as I know you like to use this food for a lot of your dogs. I never want to see any animal suffer like Rubi has the past few months.
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