Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler The Wife and I started a new business last year.

The Whole Dog Journal is awesome. I highly recommend you try a subscription. I know you would love it.

Purina One Chicken and Rice here:

Ingredients

Chicken (natural source of glucosamine), brewers rice, corn gluten meal, whole grain corn, poultry by-product meal (natural source of glucosamine), whole grain wheat, animal fat preserved with mixed-tocopherols (form of Vitamin E), soy flakes, soybean meal, animal digest, glycerin, calcium phosphate, caramel color, calcium carbonate, salt, potassium chloride, Vitamin E supplement, choline chloride, zinc sulfate, L-Lysine monohydrochloride, ferrous sulfate, sulfur, manganese sulfate, niacin, Vitamin A supplement, calcium pantothenate, thiamine mononitrate, copper sulfate, riboflavin supplement, Vitamin B-12 supplement, pyridoxine hydrochloride, garlic oil, folic acid, Vitamin D-3 supplement, calcium iodate, biotin, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K activity), sodium selenite.

The Chicken as the first ingredient is good, but it goes down hill from there. Brewers rice, corn, by-product, wheat, soy, animal digest all very very bad.

Take a look at our white paper on the home page on by-products and animal digest and tell me if you really want to feed that you your pet.

Can we say rendering plant? Yuck!!!!!

Paul, interesting info. Best of luck with your business venture. Hopefully enough people are interested in seeing that all members of the family have proper nutrition.

As a life-long dog freak, you have my highest admiration for your efforts.

Our dog eats only meals prepared for him by me.
There are lots of dog recipe books out there.

My pack of four was gone before the Chinese melamine thing, so when this little guy came along, I just couldn't trust anything labeled "dog food."

I would love to try to get him on something like your products, but I'm not a masochist. Imagine the hound that gets fresh, warm food everyday, staring into his dish, (that's right, a dish--he hates bowls), then straight back into my eyes saying, "WTF?! Some wood-stove pellets fell on my plate! Waiter, waiter!"

Best of luck to you and your wife, Paul. You already have one key element to family business success in the pocket---you named your wife first in the thread title. Smart man.

I know nothing about this level of discussion around pet food so I have nothing to add but I'll share a related story about cat food and feline communication.

One of my wife's now deceased cats was on store bought cat food and we decided to upgrade him to a better food as we were told the old may be contributing to his urinary tract infection. The cat went a couple of days without eating a thing. I figured, 'Pfftt, if he gets hungry enough, he will eat it.

On day three, we returned home to work to discover that he had crapped in his food dish. He had never missed his litter box before and it would have been a bit of an effort for him to pull this off as the dish was on a raised wooden platform in the shape of a cat that her brother had made for my wife as a gift. He would have had to maneuver his rear end up onto this platform and ... well, you already know the rest.

People say animals don't truly communicate? I say they do just fine.

"Man. That food taste's like Crap!" LOL. What a funny story.

Funny story. They say u r supposed to slowly mix the new food in with the old, increasing the new food amount a little at a time.

Our dog had horrible allergies and dermatitis - to the point that her skin reddened and blackened - and was diagnosed with a grain allergy, as well as allergies to most grasses and trees. Yes, I'm that guy who takes his dog to the allergist for skin scratch testing. Since she's a chihuahua-Pekingese mix, they had to shave about half of her left side to get enough skin surface area for testing ...

Since we switched to grain-free food years ago, her allergies are significantly better. We get Taste of the Wild Salmon flavored dry food for her at our local Tractor Supply Store. It has a such a strong odor that we had to invest in a large sealing plastic bin to keep it in.

TSC also carries the Blue line of products, which I notice are 34% protein vs the 25% in Taste of the Wild.

It was tough to find grain-free snacks that we can hide her Benadryl in. We've settled on Pupperoni.

Cool thread, and let me add my best wishes for your business!

You can. Its probably a good idea if you are switching from a really poor dog food to one of the high quality kibbles as they generally are very high protein. The difference in the protein content can be staggering. I would keep an eye on their stools for awhile when I switched foods. Consistently runny stools would be the first sign that food was not going to work.

BTW my dog LOVED canned tripe. Would go wild for that stuff.