Hi Annabel, good idea – I’ll add one shortly.

Hi Pat, loose bowels are common when a dog changes diet, particularly when the previous diet was fed solely over a long period of time. Dogs can develop intolerances like we can when we don’t eat certain foods over a long time, which causes diarrhea when those foods are reintroduced – whether healthy or not.

Sometimes adding pumpkin or similar to their diet can help you through this phase while their guts adapt to the difference in diet.

Good luck!

Hi. Thanks for your response. Firstly I would like to congratulate you on a really informative website. Stumbling on your website set me on my (very confusing) journey to improve my dogs diet. Previously I naively thought kibble was an acceptable form of nutrition. My labrador, unsurprisingly, has adapted to a new diet of TOTW and varying additions such as eggs, sardines, some raw meat and cooked veggies from a previous diet of solely Advance kibble. My problem is my 10 month old cavoodle. She was doing ok on Royal Canin mini puppy kibble. On reading your reviews I changed her to Ziwi peak canned food for breakfast and frontier for dinner. I have since been battling with loose motions and trying to figure out the problem. Stopping the ziwi peak wet food hasn’t really helped although I suspected the chickpeas were the problem. I am persevering with frontier chicken (the pork made both the labrador and cavoodle vomit) but added some white rice in the hope that solidifies her motions. I have resisted going back to a kibble diet but it is very frustrating!

Hi Pat, you find so many arguments for and against grain or grain-free, but the real issue as I see it is lack of animal ingredients – the stuff your dog really needs.

All commercial pet foods exist to make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Animal ingredients are expensive, grain or grain-free inclusions are cheap in comparison. That’s why pet foods push as much non animal ingredients into a product they can get away with. A common formula will be minimal meat, minimal animal fat, minimum required nutrients (often as a vitamin mineral mix), and then bulk the rest up with whatever they can get away with. Given it can take many years for the health of a dog to deteriorate, or diet-related conditions such as heart or kidney disease, diabetes et al to develop, they generally do get away with it.

Science and research in pet nutrition is rather skewed, especially when you consider the role marketing departments play in it. Pet food is manufactured by some of the most influential conglomerates in the world. This is why we feed hard nuggets of grain (or grain free alternatives) to animals which are factually obligate carnivore like cats, and believe this is both right and scientific. It doesn’t take much to realise this isn’t right for our cats, so why should it be right for our dogs?

Hi Joe, I’m happy to accept your point about Dogs and Grey Wolves.

Regarding stomach contents however, this is definitely not established fact. As a simple example, when a predator kills prey they won’t eat stomach contents first for obvious reasons.

There’s a lot of research which suggests otherwise. I’ll use the word “suggests” as research can “suggest” either way, and there are many variants.

This is what the NRC state:

“Thus, there appears to be no requirement for carbohydrate in dogs provided enough protein is given to supply the precursors for gluconeogenesis.” – Nutrient Requirements for Dogs and Cats.

AAFCO (2016):

“Dogs have no requirement for plant carbohydrate”

Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to promote the line of thinking that “carnivore” and “omnivore” aren’t buckets of which an animal must only be put into one. Dogs have more similarities, in many ways, to cats as carnivores, than they do to us as omnivores. There will always be many ways to label a dog as one or the other, so it’s a case of coming to a logical conclusion yourself.

Pet food manufacturers will always, of course, find ways to justify keeping the costs of ingredients to a minimum, and labelling a dog as an omnivore does just that.