Have you ever made the assumption that because a product is on the market it is safe? This unfortunately is not true. There are lawsuits before the courts on a weekly basis because of some of the poor quality things that are on the market. My husband had a very bad experience with a poor product that almost cost him the life of his dog.
About seven months prior to our marriage my husband bought a black lab puppy. My husband is a duck hunter and he was raised in a family that always owned a lab. The puppy was very smart and so his training went quite smoothly. We did not have very much money when we were first married and we were saving for a home. We were always looking for ways to save money. When the puppy got to be a year old we switched it from puppy chow to adult dog food. We were feeding him food that we bought from a large farm supplier. When the dog was about eighteen months old we noticed that his coat was getting very thin. When we would pet him there were clumps of hair that would fall out. He seemed to have no energy. We took him to the vet. The vets first question is what have you been feeding the dog. We told him the name of the food and where we were buying it. We found out that our dog was starving. The food we were feeding him was mostly fillers. He was not getting the nutrients needed to maintain a healthy coat or to sustain activity. We felt awful. The vet suggested buying science diet dog food to help get him back on track. The vet explained to us that the science diet dog food might seem expensive; however it is so concentrated with protein and nutrients that you only feed the dog a small amount.
We bought a bag of the science diet dog food from the vet and took the dog home. Within two weeks the dog was filled with energy and you could see that his coat was getting its sheen back. We also noticed that we had much smaller feces to up. When he had been eating the cheap filler food he would have large piles of feces. We went to the farm supplier and told them our experience with using the dog food that they were selling. They told us that the ingredients are listed on the bag as well as the percentages based on weight. They told us that the percentages meet the minimum requirements of the food and drug administration. We could not believe that they could have something on the market that will starve a dog no matter how much was fed to it. We have tried to spread the word as much as possible to let people know the importance of feeding high quality food to their animals such as science diet dog food.