I recently visited a shop in town that specializes in natural pet foods. I was really amazed at what I found! We are all familiar with supermarket dog food, and then there is the pet food sold at Pet Smart, which offers some better grade foods. But nothing prepared me for what I found at the natural pet food store.

Everything is made from human grade ingredients, not the bits we don't acknowledge exist, lol. The canned foods I bought don't smell like dog food. They smell like chicken pot pie.

My Lola is now eating free range bison and wild Atlantic salmon. Whole grains, organic vegetables. I wish I'd found this sooner.

Does anyone else use this type of pet food? Do you have any recommendations?

I've been feeding my kitty California Natural cat food since she was little. The stuff is made here locally near my home so it's a bonus I am supporting a local business.

Here is the link

http://www.naturapet.com/display.php?d=home-tab They make dog and cat food

They also make Innova, which is another natural blend I think. I wish my kitty would eat their canned food, but she'll only eat Scince diet, which is pretty good I guess.

I just bought Innova EVO for my kitty. I've mixed it with her regular kibble and she seemed to like it. It kind of has a weird smell but she didn't seem to mind.

I am a member of a Labrador chat board (very similar to this board) and they have a lot of advocates of the natural diet. They all make their own (or so it seems). One poster showed photos.....chicken, lamb, rice, etc. all cut and mixed and put into individual baggies for freezing so each meal is all ready to go at meal time. I read that some dogs have a hard time adjusting to it (diarrhea and constipation and gas) but those that are successful are showing benefits (shiny coat, cleaner teeth). I guess the advocates state that the animal by-products used in commercial pet food is full of icky yucky stuff that used to be just thrown away and these folks believe that it should remain thrown away.

For me, I'm not sold yet. My doggies are happy and healthy. My black lab has a touchy tummy and I don't know if I want to deal with weaning him off the kibble that doesn't bother him right now.

The one caution I have with animal "health food" stores, is that some of them have extremely high pressure sales tactics. I think this is true of many small stores of any type, because they have to compete with "the big boys," but if you cave easily under pressure you can find yourself spending more on "Fluffy's" chow than on your own. On your first visit, tell them you're just doing a little research of your own before deciding on buying ANYTHING, and ask if they have any samples that you can try your pet on, "because he/she has sensitive digestion and/or is very picky." Our local gourmet/health food pet store gave us dozens of samples to let our kitty try.

Funny thing is the only one of the samples she would eat was 100% salmon with extra salmon bone/meal. It wasn't but a couple dollars more than the premium grocery isle brand we were buying, so we considered switching, but soon realized that it made her VERY stinky (at both ends - she'd never had gas before, EWW). So we went back to feeding her from the grocery.

I feed my cats Welness brand human grade cat food, it definately makes a difference in there coats, less shedding, less waste. I didn't want renderd animal byproducts in my house. not to mention the other crap they put in comercial pet food.

Kaplods,
I heard that cats are not supposed to have a fish only diet. It is ok if they have fish mixed in with their normal food but I believe it depletes their B vitamin?

I am religious about reading ingredient labels for me and my cat. I bought my stuff from petfooddirect.com. I also read about it on about.com (and other places). It was highly rated.

I also buy Wellness for my two 6 month cats - Diego and Serafina They love it! They don't get any wet food - bad for their teeth!

My cats are quite fond of Wellness, both the kibble and the canned. I have one old cat with a thyroid problem and a touch stomach, and she has the least problems with Wellness.

Susanne, I'm wondering what your pet food is really including. From Wikipedia
the wild Atlantic salmon fishery is commercially dead; after extensive habitat damage and overfishing, wild fish make up only 0.5% of the Atlantic salmon available in world fish markets. The rest are farmed, predominantly from aquaculture in Chile, Canada, Norway, Russia, the UK and Tasmania in Australia. When you see wild salmon available for humans, it's always Pacific, and usually Alaskan. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what's there, just that you seldom see wild Atlantic salmon. You can get it in northern Europe I think, but pretty much what you buy in the US is farmed.

Hmmm, didn't know that about an all fish diet, good think we didn't follow through with it.

I did know that some of our very "human" concerns about byproducts is actually more our own squeamishness than "health" related. Things we consider byproducts (skin, organ meats, bones) are actually vital parts of an animal's diets. I was reading that an area in Colorado was seeing a lot of ill and obese wild Cougars, because people were feeding them grocery store meat (ok, let's not even go into how STUPID it is to feed wild animals in general, but specifically PREDATORS, and in fact there are usually laws against it).

Anyway, the animals need the bone, skin, and innards for complete nutrition. Feral dogs and cats eat them, why wouldn't we want the whole animal and even a little vegetable matter (they eat that in the wild too, wolves even eat berries sometimes) ground into the pet food, just because we think it's "icky."

It just goes to show that you have to educate yourself, because when people are selling you stuff they can make good seem evil and vice versa, till you don't know which way is up..

Hi alinnell, I post on the same board but use another name,
I am an advocate of the holistic and natural dog food, I am not a fan of raw not because I think it is bad for the dogs, it just takes way too much thought for me

Dogs in particular don't do well with corn and wheat, runny eyes and goobbers, itchy skin etc. so best left out of dog food. I also find that it has cost me no more than the pet food brand because i feed less. I use a little know band called Fromm, smells good and my Dixie Chick loves it!

I could be way off but the whole thing about innards etc and saying it is what the ferral animals do is not a fair analysis, for the most part they eat that way because they have to, generally they are not healthy, they eat all kinds of stuff to survive. Our house pets get good medical care, love, cleanliness and shelter from the weather. We (humans) use to eat that stuff too to survive but we don't have to any more, we have better nutrition, better health care and all of that stuff too.

My dogs either get Merrick brand dry kibble or when there is a special on it, canned Merrick's food. The food looks like something you'd find in a human convenience meal, bits of chicken, peas, carrots, etc., not that mushed up who-knows-what's-in-it kind of canned food. My sister also cooks up a batch of dog food every week for her dog from the Barker's Grub cookbook. He was attacked by a pit bull a few years back and the vet had to close off one of his jugular veins. She started cooking him up foods to help his blood supply increase and to help him recuperate from surgery. She doesn't have kids either, so he's her baby.

I would agree that "wild" diets aren't necessarily optimal diets for humans or animals - especially since today's natural environmentsm aren't all that natural, and animals have to eat what they can find, not what they need. And I also agree that "intuitive, doesn't necessarily mean right, but if you're going to give an animal a diet drastically different than that of it's wild counterparts in their "natural, unspoiled, native habitat" (if you can even determine what that was) you have a responsibility to find out if it's going to do more harm than good. The article on the cougars was written pretty convincingly about how wild animals feed and the nutrients they gain from a natural diet and even how they duplicate it in zoos. Apparently it is very unhealthy for animals to eat only muscle meat because it does not contain all of the vitamins and minerals that the animal would ingest with the digestive tract and bones. Calcium is in bones and to a lesser degree in some plants, but not alot in muscle tissue itself, and grocery store beef and chicken is a lot fattier than natural prey animals, so it's higher in calorie than the wild diet.

I was watching a zoo documentary, that zoos have had to change even herbivore diets over the last ten years (in the same habitats) because modern produce has fewer nutrients and higher calories due to higher sugar content than the same produce weight for weight than in the past (because of selection of plants that grow faster but at the expense of nutrient development, and the increased demand for sweeter and sweeter varieties).

The saddest part in all of this is that nutrient content labeling is still stricter for pet food than in human food.

My point about the kibble really goes lile this:
grocery store food has the most unrecognizable ingrediants and generally the most filler. It requires that you feed large amouts of dood to meet nutritional value. Pet store food, although more of the ingreediants are recognizable, there are still a lot of fillers in the food like corn and wheat which are undigestable for dogs and can be the cause of alergic reactions/behavior for your dog.
Natural/holististic foods use totaly recognizable food, although you might not eat the food, you would most likely partake in all of the ingrediance.
The best part about natural and holistic foods is that you have to feed less wich is less out put too.
I will not dissagree that there is a more "natural" way for all animals to to eat. But we live in a convience world, I work, raise the kids, keep house etc, I can't fit in a raw diet for my dog, it is to expencive and frankly too much work. I think it is good to know that there are now foods readily available that more closly mimic the natural diet than what is available in the grocery store or the pet store.

I'm not sure I should mention this but DH tried out our cats latest food. He said it tasted like dried hamburger, very meaty.

The ingredients looked ok and I guess if our cat can eat so can we? I wasn't about to try it though. These are the ingredients:
Turkey
Chicken
Chicken Meal
Herring Meal
Potatoes
Chicken Fat
Egg
Turkey Meal
Natural Flavors
Apples
Carrots
Tomatoes
Cottage Cheese
Dried Chicory Root
Taurine
Herring Oil
Rosemary Extract
Vitamins/Minerals
Viable Naturally Occurring Microorganisms