Choosing the best way to feed dogs and cats
PEOPLE often ask me about pet nutrition, and I’m always happy to offer my thoughts. I have never been convinced that there is any single ideal way to feed pets, any more than there is a single ideal way to feed humans. My best summary has always been that people should choose a good quality diet that than can obtain conveniently and at a reasonable price. They should then feed that diet to their pet for 6 – 8 weeks, and observe the results. If a diet suits an animal, they will thrive, with a healthily functioning digestive tract, a glossy coat, well-defined musculature and plenty of energy.
If some of these boxes are not ticked, then it’s worth considering a different diet.
As for choosing between commercial food (dry or wet) and home prepared food (raw or cooked), there are advantages and disadvantages to each. It’s a personal choice for you to make, to suit you and to suit your pet.
I know many people who want to feed their pets fresh home-cooked food with unprocessed ingredients: they know that this is the ideal nutrition for humans, so why should it not be the same for animals? They have heard that processed food is bad for humans, so why should it be good for animals? These are good points, and I have three arguments to counter this idea that “fresh is best”.
First, all complete commercially produced food has been specially formulated to ensure that it provides all the nutrients that pets need. If you are home-preparing food, it’s more difficult than you’d think to be sure that you are including everything necessary, in the right quantities. If you are determined to home-prepare food, then you should use a recipe designed by a pet nutritionist, adding appropriate supplements to make sure that the final rations are nutritionally complete. If you don’t do this, there is a risk that you may inadvertently cause your pet to fall ill because of a nutritional deficiency or excess. I have seen examples of cases like this in real life: dogs with bone disease because of mineral imbalance in the diet, and cats with painful joints caused by excessive Vitamin A. I have never seen illnesses like this in pets fed on complete commercial diets.
Second, it’s expensive and time consuming to properly home-prepare food for pets. You need to find a recipe, buy the ingredients, mix them up, add supplements, and perhaps cook them. That’s fine for some folk, but several people who I’ve discussed this with have given me their direct answer: “If I had to cook for my pets like I have to cook for my children, I’d rather not have pets at all”. Fair enough!
Third, I have yet to see evidence that home prepared fresh food is any better for pets than commercial diets. You would think that it if was spectacularly better, then someone would have carried out trials to demonstrate improved health, less illness, longer lives, or other benefits. It wouldn’t be difficult to do a trial like this: a thousand dogs, feed half of them on commercial food, half of them on freshly prepared food, and record how often they need to visit the vet, and how long they live for. The fact that a trial of this type has not been done on any major scale suggests that any difference in outcome is likely to be marginal or non-existent. I sometimes see dogs and cats living into their late teens and even twenties, and there is no particular dramatically successful nutritional strategy that I can spot.
If I am pressed to say “what type of feeding is best for pets”, my simplest answer is to explain how I feed the animals in my own household.
My dogs are fed on a high quality complete commercial kibble diet, made from specific ingredients that can be read on the ingredients label: chicken, brown rice, plus a few other supplements. I prefer to use a complete commercial diet as I know, for sure, that it supplies all of my dogs’ necessary nutrients. I prefer to see the specific ingredients (rather than generic “meat and animal derivatives”) as it reassures me that they are being fed higher quality cuts rather than random offal, and these are likely to be more easily digestible, with a lower incidence of gastrointestinal upsets. And I know, after feeding my dogs the same diet for many years, that they thrive on this food.
Meanwhile, the cats are fed on a mixture of a similar type of high quality commercial dry kibble, with a sachet of moist food every day. Cats can be fed on a solely dry or just a moist diet, but the mix of both suits my pets well.
One of my cats (Couscous) has to be given a special diet, fed separately in a microchip-controlled feeder that will only open for her. If the other cats (or dogs) go up to it, the lid remains shut. (the dogs have tried to get in, as the toothmarks on the feeder show). If she approaches the feeder, an electric motor slides back the lid so that she can eat. Her diet is more specialised and more expensive than a typical cat diet (it costs four times as much) so it would be a waste if the other cats (not to mention the dogs) ate it. It’s important that she gets this diet: research shows that special nutrition can help cats with kidney disease to live for twice as long as they’d live on a standard cat diet.
Pet nutrition is one of the keys to good health: choose carefully and they’ll thrive.