What do you feed your corgi?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mary on
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I was also considering wellness. There is one called Wellness Core I think that is supposed to be good. I don't think I want her to have that much protein, at least not yet. The "regular" wellness looks pretty good. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really super picky about what she is going to eat, I'm fine with not feeding her a completely meat based diet. But I'm just sorting through the *good* foods and trying to see what is a good value for the dollar but still healthy. Which wellness did you feed her? Royal Canin is supposed to be pretty good from what people have said as well.
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Permalink Reply by kristinstyle on
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We fed her the Wellness Super5Mix Small Breed - Adult Health in a dark pinkish bag. She really liked it. The food is smaller in size and is easier for them to digest since their digestive system is smaller than other breeds. Because of her bladder stone problem though she has to stay on the Royal Canine. Wellness was one of the best brands. We did a lot of research on food before we decided on a brand. I'm sure your corgi would love it. Below is a helpful link.
http://www.wellnesspetfood.com/dog_wellness_dry_super5mix_small_adu...
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Permalink Reply by Jill, Kari & Jackson on
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I started Kari on Science Diet until she was about 10 months and since then I've been trying to find a better food for her. She really liked Wellness and I had her on the Core variety. I really liked the Wellness but the price tag was catching up to me so I decided to try and find something good that was a little les pricey. I found Taste of the Wild (http://www.tasteofthewildpetfood.com/ ). She absolutely loves it. She wouldn't really eat the Wellness but she devours this stuff and Jackson is envious. Its grain free and has meat as the first 2 or 3 ingredients. Also has blueberries and whatnot, ingredient list on the site. I also give her an egg and some cottage cheese and some veggies now and then and she is about 24 pound with a shiney coat and good digestive tract. Jackson is on Canidae right now and he likes it but isn't in love with it. I'll be switching him over when he turns 10 months to a new formula or a new brand, gotta see what works best.
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It looks really good, but looks like it'd be pricey. But I'll have to check it out since it costs less than wellness :). The website has a location that sells really close to our house. I'm hoping to stay around $2 dollars/pound or less for bags around 20 pounds.
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Permalink Reply by Joanna Kimball on
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The price per pound isn't a good indicator. With some foods you're going to be feeding three times as much, so saving money per pound isn't going to help you any.
Taste of the Wild is a Diamond food. Diamond is an absolutely colossal company - think Purina - and has had some very serious quality control issues because it has so many suppliers and goes through so many thousands of tons per week. It's also important to know the parent company because the different brands that the company makes are going to be different mixtures of the same ingredients. In other words, Diamond isn't getting a "better" tomato pomace for Taste of the Wild as it gets for its cheap lowest-common-denominator foods. It's using the same rice products in TOTW as it does in its Country Value brand, which is a total crap food.
Taste of the Wild also has very moderate protein levels. That's important because the impression you get of the food is that it's nice and meaty. After all, it's grain-free, right? But meat, when dried, has a protein level of 40-60%. The further your grain-free kibble gets from that, the more of it is no longer meat. Making a kibble with tons of potato is not really any better for your dog than making it with tons of corn, but using potato lets them label it grain-free and catch the exploding market. So when you have a grain-free kibble with protein levels that approach conventional kibbles, go look at what they're using to replace the grain. Diamond uses potatoes and peas and tomato pomace - note that this does not mean lovingly baked potatoes; it means potatoes cooked at very high temperatures, ground up, and dried into a powder, ditto with the peas. Tomato pomace is a tomato byproduct - essentially, it's what's left once they take the juice out for the ketchup and V8 industry - and is used to bulk up the dog's poop and give consumers the nice shape and size of stool that they associate with good health.
I would rather support companies that actually believe in a certain quality of feeding, as opposed to ones that know consumers want a grain-free food and figure out a way to tweak their ingredients to make it that way. My favorite company is my own kitchen counter, since I feed raw; I KNOW my dogs are getting real cuts of chicken and beef and duck and they're getting fresh vegetables and uncooked oils. If I couldn't feed raw I would use a Natura product (Innova or EVO) or Orijen, or another kibble made by a company that didn't also make turkey feed or supermarket-brand foods.
Here's one article that explains what menhaden fish meal is, but the information is widely available elsewhere including the AAFCO food definitions: http://www.alternet.org/water/73516/
Also, the reason I think that human-grade ingredients are important is that most protein sources for pet foods are the meats that cannot be used for humans and so are available cheap for pet food. This means any cow that died en route to the slaughterhouse, any animal showing evidence of disease, etc. Human-grade meats are not necessarily pretty - forget the pictures of juicy steaks; what's actually happening is that vast quantities of dead chickens are being cooked at extremely high heat so they can be dehydrated and ground into a dry powder (chicken meal) or sent raw or frozen through enormous grinders and emerging as a liquid slurry (chicken). Because of the way all pet foods are manufactured, every ingredient has to be made into either a liquid or a powder. But at least the human-grade meats are not coming from already-decayed animals.
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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I just wanted to throw out there that the idea of saving money with a more expensive feed because you can feed less might hold true with a larger dog.
I have two fairly active Corgis. One gets 2/3 of a cup a day, one gets 1 cup per day. I feed Iam's.
Sure I would feed "less" with a more expensive kibble, but how little can I possibly feed my dogs and keep them happy? I hear that argument a lot.... "Oh, you'll feed less with a more expensive food!' and I look at the amount in my dogs' dishes and think "Why would I want to feed less?"
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Yeah I kinda know what you mean. And I understand that if she is getting more digestable products in her food then technically she will eat less, and I have been factoring this into my decision as well. When I've been comparing foods I've also been comparing what the manufactor recommends for feeding at her weight and I compare that to what I'm currently feeding her and what her current food would recommend for her weight. I have noticed that with some of the better brands there isn't a huge difference in recommended feeding but for some there is a slight difference. So yes, I know that feeding her a better brand will probably mean she will eat less but there is a price that I'm not quite ready for, thus my comparison with the dollars/pound. Initially I will probably put her on Blue Buffalo or By Nature while I look around a little bit more and check out some of the better brands mentioned by others in this thread. I'm not horribly concerned with it, I have a basic knowledge of what ingredients to look for and I know I will be doing a little switching as a check out some of the different foods out there :)
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Well, remember that dogs are supposed to be hungry. If you want to satisfy their urge to chew, give them a good raw bone. When mine were on Orijen for a few months (we had a house fire and were living in an apartment), they were eating no more than a half-cup each per day. They got fed once a day. We are primates; we eat all day long and are built to handle lower-quality foods (like starchy fruits and vegetables). They're carnivores and are meant to eat infrequently and have empty stomachs most of the time.
The manufacturer's recommendations are not accurate for many dogs. They're decent guidelines to start with but you have to watch your dog and adjust it up or down depending on what the dog tells you. When I was feeding a half-cup of food the recommended amount for the dogs' weight was something like a cup and a half. If I had fed that they would have blown up like balloons. Right now (feeding raw) one of my adult bitches gets three times as much as the other one does. That also means that different brands are going to require different amounts fed; for example, you might have to feed a cup of Wellness but a half-cup of some other brand with what looks like very similar ingredients and nutrient profile. That's why it's really impossible to equate price per pound to actual amount spent on feeding.
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"....are meant to eat infrequently and have empty stomachs most of the time."
I believe that claim is up for serious debate among the experts. Smaller carnivores, like coyotes, foxes, African wild cats, etc, eat small meals very frequently. Lions and wolves who kill big game do eat much less frequently, then gorge and then lie around for awhile, but that is not necessarily the model for our canid friends.
There are confirmations of domestic dogs dating back around 15,000 years, but growing evidence that the real split occurred much farther back:
"Mitochondrial DNA control region sequences were analyzed from 162 wolves at 27 localities worldwide and from 140 domestic dogs representing 67 breeds. Sequences from both dogs and wolves showed considerable diversity and supported the hypothesis that wolves were the ancestors of dogs. Most dog sequences belonged to a divergent monophyletic clade sharing no sequences with wolves. The sequence divergence within this clade suggested that dogs originated more than 100,000 years before the present. Associations of dog haplotypes with other wolf lineages indicated episodes of admixture between wolves and dogs. Repeated genetic exchange between dog and wolf populations may have been an important source of variation for artificial selection."
The majority of feral dog populations show minimal large-game hunting ability (they can catch smaller critters like rodents) and are primarily scavengers. The tendency of our dogs to constantly be on the lookout for crumbs even when they are not hungry would seem to point to the behavior of a scavenger, not to a large-game hunter. Imagine a lion sniffing around the ground constantly for something to munch... it wouldn't happen!
Much of the research I have seen indicates that domestic dogs likely evolved from off-shoots of the wolf that gave up pack hunting in favor of hanging out near humans and eating the leftovers, so to speak. It is difficult, from a behavioral viewpoint, to imagine successfully domesticating a group of animals that behaved or ate the way the remaining populations of wolves behave today. It would be too dangerous to be around them.
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Studying wolf eating behavior is one of the hobbies of those of us who are very serious about feeding raw. Wolves make multiple attempts at large prey and fail far more often than they succeed. They do not eat for days at a time. When they do get a deer or a moose or other large animal, they gorge themselves, then eat scraps and bones, then rally for the next series of attempts. Analysis of wild wolf scat shows that they much prefer big game to small game and eating mice and so on is a survival technique and not what they want to do.
The source above is talking about mDNA control regions. That is not at ALL the same as the DNA that makes you a human and Clue a dog. mDNA is studied because it has a relatively constant rate of mutation and is passed from mother to children and then from her daughters to their children without being mixed with male DNA. So it functions a little like a biological clock and comparing specific tiny pieces of mDNA in populations of related individuals is a good estimator of how long ago those populations were the same. The bold-faced paragraph is pretty much what you'd read about your own mDNA if you compared it with a population of, say, New Guinea Islanders.
Just like the Papuans are still humans, even though they have not been mixed with your (presumably) European or Eurasian DNA for upwards of 100,000 years and have very different mDNA control regions, dogs are still genetically wolves. They are very special wolves, with certain aspects of the wolf phenotype either brought to the fore or pushed back, but wolves they remain.
In terms of whether dogs can bring down game - I sold two Dane puppies, two years different in age, to the same family. When they were about four and two, a full-grown whitetail buck jumped into their yard. They had him down and dead in seconds. It actually caused a bit of trouble for the owners because it was off-season and you're not allowed to "hunt" deer with dogs in the state in which they live, so it was confirmed by the game warden.
Every population of animals works on the economy of calories. If food, even substandard food, is available for little to no spending of calories in effort, it will be chosen over food that requires calories to get. So dogs around human habitations will scavenge, in the same way that squirrels around human habitations will scavenge or deer will come eat your garden. But a squirrel or a deer or a wolf has not changed into something not-deer or not-squirrel or not-wolf because there are easy food sources around.
It's funny that you bring up lions, because lions actually ARE behavioral scavengers. If they can take a kill, they'd much rather do that than go after a live animal themselves. And lions on the edge of human settlements do indeed sniff around all over the place, steal from trash cans, dig up rubbish heaps, and so on. Animals do what works. A typical dog lives in a world where food regularly shows up on the floor or ground without warning, so of course it's going to sniff around constantly. If it lived in a world where food never fell from the sky or blew across the sidewalk, it wouldn't spend any time sniffing at all.
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Permalink Reply by Kyle, Megan and Loki on
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would you like to trade? I am currently feeding Orijin again (red meat, chicken is bad for the Loki) and when i fed him as little as 1.25c a day he got too thin, like started to see his ribs, 1.5c and he keeps a defined waistline but I can't see his ribs, at 25 lbs. Your dog(s) sound much more cost effective.
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Yow! That is amazing - it must work like Atkins for him or something. It just goes to show that bag recommendations are pretty much meaningless. You have to feed as much as your dog needs, however much that is.
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