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We have been struggling for years over the right food for our dogs.
We have had Great Pyrenees with low metabolism and Corgis with high metabolism.
We have fed canned, dry, wet, dehydrated and home made.
It seems of late that the fad is wildly expensive raw food in either freeze dried, or dehydrated format.
The Whole Dog journal just published a review of the raw dehydrated products that neither raves nor denigrates these products. If you can find it, may I suggest reading it.
Our take is this.
We buy premium food to get away from imports, food with acceptable levels of rat feces and dirt, and overloaded with cheap fillers.
That has had us bouncing from dry kibble to dehydrated foods.
The dry we have used is Acana Ranchlands. Its made in Canada, has an array of product with various protein levels and is about $80 a bag, for the big bag ( 23 pounds I think ). The dogs wolf it down ( four Corgis ) and seem to like it. But they like anything!! What goes in dry comes out pretty dry and after a couple of days in the sun looks like small charcoal briquettes. I dont know if that's good or bad. It runs to 30%-38% protein per cup, which for our Corgis is high. We have to carefully monitor treats and extras on this diet or the weight slowly climbs.
We switched to NRG Maxim in either buffalo, beef, chicken or fish about 7 months ago because it was lower in protein and had no grain fillers. The weight came off the dogs and they seemed to really like it.
The stuff going in was colorful with the vegetables staying true to color. The stuff coming out was not dry, nor in hard little balls, and retained a lot of the incoming color. ( Kind of like humans eating corn on the cob if you get my drift.)
We supplement it with leftovers like meat, some vegetables, and some fruits...not a lot, but some variety.
The rub now is the price. With a recent price increase this June 2013, the meats have become $157 a box..add tax at 8.7% and we are talking $170.
If you are in a dog set up like ours with small dogs who eat a lot due to dog volume, or have a big dog that eats a lot, like three cups a day, that is closing in on two boxes a month..........and that puts me over the threshold of pain. I should eat that well!!
The Whole Dog journal extolled a US product made by a California company called The Honest Kitchen. Love is the one they reviewed. It seems to be higher protein and calorie count than NRG ( almost the same as Acana kibble ) and a ten pound box on line is less than $100. We may try that and see.
Bottom line is that NRG is good stuff....but may have priced themselves out of the market but for those dog owners with one small precious pet.
Making our own raw is out.........tried it. Too time consuming. When making the dogs' food exceeds by 50% the time expended on our foods, we draw the line!!
So all in all. We think the product is a five, but it only gets four stars because of the price.
Hope this helped.
Add on a day later.
We did some homework on the Honest Kitchen. While assembled in the US, a lot of the dehydrated material is not US. Also its a 40 cup box not 70 like NRG..so the number of boxes needed to equal the same volume of NRG ends up with matching price.
So I will leave it like this.
NRG is the Ferrari of dehydrated dog food. If you can afford it...go for it.
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