I went to Petsmart earlier today to get yet another gallon container of enzyme cleaner. I've been through so much of that stuff since I put my house on the market that I ought to buy stock in the company. Anyway, while I was there I took a stroll down the dog food aisles to see if by any chance the store was having a sale on small bags of food and if those bags contained a lamb and rice formula that both of my dogs could eat.As a general rule, I'm very picky about the food that goes into my dogs' mouth, even more so than I am about the food that goes into my own mouth. While I'll eat a hot dog or a slice of bologna that's chopped full of animal byproducts or buy a cereal that is equally full of food dye, I don't like buying dog food that contains the same. As I've said before on this blog, Bella, my cocker spaniel, is allergic to pretty much everything and once had a bad bout of pancreatitis. Consequently, I have to analyze the labels on every bag of food that I buy for whelp-inducing ingredients and fat percentages.
I spent hours upon hours researching dog food long before the dog food recalls of a few years ago. I have several folders worth of printed out information to prove it. That being said, I'm also broke at the moment. That makes it a little hard to buy the good stuff.
Case in point, the last time that I was home, my dogs decided to help themselves to my mom's dogs' Kibbles-n-Bits, a food that has been called the Twinkies of the dog food world. Within an hour of eating the food, Bella began pooping trace amounts of blood and scratching like crazy. Luckily, I had the foresight to bring probiotics and Benadryl with me so I doped her up on both, and my mom, scared that something was wrong with the food after my sister's dachshund also threw it up, trashed the bag.
The pet food stores were closed when Sick Fest went down so we went to Walmart in hopes of finding a bag of Maximum Nutrition Lamb & Rice. It's not Canidae or Wellness by any means, but it's the only food that Walmart carries that is free of byproducts, gluten, food dye, and corn. With the exception of Canidae, which contains lamb in addition to several other sources of protein, the Maximum Nutrition is also the only lamb and rice food that I have bought that Bailey, my chihuahua mix, can eat without throwing up yellow bile afterwards.
Well, wouldn't you know that Walmart has stopped carrying it? I don't know if it wasn't selling well because it cost more than Iams and Pedigree, but it's no longer on the shelf at either my or my mom's Walmart. Lovely. It also wasn't on the shelf after Bella got sick from the Kibbles-n-Bits. With nothing else open and six starving dogs at home, my mom bought the only thing she could--Iams Weight Control.
Her dogs loved the Iams. They didn't pick out pieces like they did with the Kibbles-n-Bits, and they ate less of it. My dogs loved it, too. Now here comes the big "but." Bella's itching has gotten worse since she began eating it. I'm not surprised, looking at the ingredient list. Corn is the number one ingredient. Chicken by-product meal--i.e. chicken feet, chicken beaks, and who knows what else--is the second ingredient. Not good. Not good at all.
I have suspected for some time now that Bella is allergic to both corn and chicken. If you shop online or go to the right pet store, it's not hard to find a corn-free dog food. However, good luck finding a non-chicken based, corn-free dog food that is also low in fat in those stores. A salmon-based dog food is what gave Bella pancreatitis to begin with.
So when I went to Petsmart at lunch, I spent a good 15 or 20 minutes reading dog food labels. I found a few maybes, but they are all out of my price range for the time being. I'll have to wait until my next Paypal payment to try them. Frustrated that Petsmart didn't have anything that I could both afford and my dogs could eat, I drove a few parking lots down to Target, hoping that they would have their own version of Maximum Nutrition or maybe even Dr. Fosters & Smith in stock. Several years ago, I got an email from Dr. Fosters that stated that select Targets would be stocking their dog food. Unfortunately, my Target isn't one of them.
Once again finding nothing that my dogs could eat, I drove to Kroger. As luck would have it, Kroger was having a sale on the small bags of Lassie Natural Way dog food. For those of you who have never heard of Lassie Natural Way, it's not as good as Canidae or similar holistic dog foods but it's far superior to Iams and Pedigree. My dogs have eaten the senior version before, but, of course, it's primary ingredient is chicken. I wanted lamb. The lamb, however, is just a few fat percentages lower than that salmon, pancreatitis inducing food.
I bought it nevertheless. At $3.99, which was half off the normal price, I really couldn't pass it up. I'm just scared to death that it's going to bring on another episode of pancreatitis. I mixed a little of it in with the Iams. Bella liked it, and Mikey--I mean Bailey--ate it as well. So far, neither seems sick, which is a good sign, but, if I can manage to guilt trip my grandmother into giving me $35, I still plan on buying a big bag of Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice next week instead. When it comes to my fur babies' health, I don't mess around. When it comes to my own health, well, let's just say that there's a reason it takes me forever to finish a 30 day supply of vitamins.
