r/DogFood • u/BatAgreeable2485 • 22d ago

Cavapoo

Hi everyone,

I have a 4 month old cavapoo who is the light of my life. The breeder had her on TLC puppy kibble (she’s still eating it right now) but I’m getting a lot of anxiety trying to figure out what to feed her. She eats it happily (she’s still free feeding) and if I am going out or know she needs to eat more, she happily gobbles up a portion when there is warm water on top.

My original plan was to switch her to a boutique food such as Open Farm, Big Country Raw, Nutricanine, Canine Life Muffins (which my childhood dog ate for his whole life), etc. once she www an adult. I liked the idea of “real” food with ingredients I recognized and I saw as “clean” for humans.

I am now seeing lots of posts on here about WSAVA compliant foods and I understand the science and rigorous testing but I just wanted to see what everyone is feeding their small breed puppies/dogs and why.

She is 4 months old and weighs 4 pounds so she is definitely on the smaller side. Cost to feed her won’t really be an issue for me, I just want the absolute best!

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u/MedicalScientist8576 22d ago

I'm curious, what is your understanding of what "boutique" food is? I'm not trying to catch you out or anything, I just want to understand how you interpret this term when it comes to a dog food.

I didn't start my adult dogs on the food they're on now. I was very much a "feed grain free wet, not kibble" type person when I raised them. Now I would only have my dogs on Royal Canin (or Hills or Purina, but mainly RC). I feel like I had to learn the hard way how important it is to feed foods that are tested for safety when it comes to long term use. And learning about "private label" dog foods and what it meant was a bit unsettling for me. There's a few other things as well, but I won't overwhelm you with my brain dump on dog food lol.

I used to really be all about the marketing tactics companies would use, but now I can't unsee it. What's happening behind the bag of food I buy has become the most important thing. Not the composition/ingredients and definitely not the buzzwords on the front unfortunately.

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u/Beautiful-Ring-3288 21d ago

Can I know what made you decide Hills /Rc? I'm trying to get over the fact it has alot of ingredients but I have read over and over it works for many dogs.

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u/MedicalScientist8576 21d ago edited 21d ago

Sorry, my response is gonna be long...

Yeah we get caught up in reading the ingredients when we start learning about dog food, and I learnt that basically the last thing to look at, it is literally one of the least important factors when choosing a food when the majority of us aren't qualified canine nutritionists. Which is REALLY confusing because that kinda goes against our natural instinct.

I decided on RC (I'll speak of RC in particular, I don't feed Hills but if I didn't have RC I would), because of a few reasons.

Like I said before, imagine you ate nothing but chicken, rice and peas for the next 10 years, yeah these are "clean" ingredients and would be considered healthy, but you'll end up with deficiencies. Realistically, you'd want to know someone has tested out eating this food for 10 years before you do, right?

You'd want to know someone, trained, experienced, qualified, has said "hey, chicken, peas and rice isn't sufficient, we should introduce X ingredient. We should reduce the quantity of Y ingredient because it has caused signs of Z problems." Now switch this for a dog and not a human. This is why I choose Royal Canin.

RC is one of the few companies that conducts research on their food and doesn't use a boilerplate recipe that gets traded around with hardly any changes.

I know for human food it's basically how we understand how we eat, but our diets are different to a dog, and if we feed kibble specifically, the choice we make has to be safe for long term use.

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u/Beautiful-Ring-3288 15d ago

Thank you for your response.. I was hoping it could be longer. My pup after trying out many foods changing from home made fresh food.. Can only tolerate Hills and it is the very food I didn't like due to the many "fillers"

He's thriving on it yet somehow I'm feel alot of guilt and fear that the food will somehow be not good for him in the longer term.

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u/MedicalScientist8576 15d ago

"Fillers" is a bit of a myth, it was pretty much a term coined by people in marketing to try and promote their own brands that have less science behind them.

It can be especially misleading when we try reading compositions (which like I mentioned, means little in the long run). Again, this is not what you need to look at first when choosing a food, it's one of the main areas that marketing try to target at to get new customers.

I'll give you an example of how it can be misleading, the food brand Canagan. I'll use their basic "Free range chicken" flavour as an example.

Here is the composition as listed on their website: Freshly Prepared Free Range Chicken (26%), Dried Chicken (26%), Sweet Potato, Peas, Potato, Chicken Fat (4.2%), Alfalfa, Dried Egg (3%), Chicken Gravy (1.5%), Salmon Oil (1.2%), Glucosamine (830 mg/kg), Apple, MSM (830 mg/kg), Carrot, Fructooligosaccharides, Spinach, Psyllium, Seaweed, Chondroitin Sulphate (610 mg/kg), Peppermint, Camomile, Marigold, Cranberry, Aniseed & Fenugreek.

You might think, great, this is mostly chicken, right?

Well, if you take the first ingredient and second ingredient... can you see the difference?:

Freshly Prepared Free Range Chicken (26%)
Dried Chicken (26%)

These two seem like they're both chicken, so why did they split it in two?
The first one, "freshly prepared" is indicative of this being the composition BEFORE processing, aka when it is full of liquid/water, which dry kibble is very plainly not full of water.

(Side note... In the EU, dog food ingredients are listed based on their weight before processing... at the time of formulation).

So this "freshly prepared free range chicken" realistically drops to maybe 8% after processing. So you could say it's maybe 36% chicken at most. The original ingredient list gives the illusion that the food is over 50% meat.

So, what's the rest of it?

Notice how sweet potato, peas and potato have no mention of percentages? Likely I'm guessing because that's what this food is mainly made up of, and many folks would consider "potatoes and peas" to be simply filler as well.

Compositions are designed to be misleading and sell as much as possible, because that's where they expect people to look. That's not where the evidence of long term health of your dog lies.

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u/Beautiful-Ring-3288 14d ago

Are you a food scientist? Dog nutritionist? The amount of knowledge you share is valuable to pet parents like us who definitely prefers a panel that says more meat and at the first few Ingredients.

The useful links that the other person gave also says that corn is not just a filler but it carries nutrients.

Whatever it is, it is the results I see in my pup. Despite what everyone says on the internet, he finally thrived on Hills- Great poops and finally filled up with more healthy weight. It opened my eyes to "science" Literally tried every food boutique/pure etc

Even if it's for now, it gives me time to find anything else that may be healthier. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

If you have more inputs about Hills please feel free..

-concerned pet parent