• TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        The crazy looking food, itself, has decent reviews, but the owners of Gentle Giants used to run a puppy mill disguised as a dog rescue from what I have found about them.

        There are quite a few bad reviews about the puppy mill from the mid to late 2000s. Like this one for example.

          • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Yea I dont really trust the reviews. I’d rather go with what a vet recommends, and it’s not that. I wouldn’t try it for my pup. I was just surprised that the reviews were so good for the food, in the first place.

            • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              Unfortunately, vets aren’t the most reliable source of nutritional info for your dog either. True to form in this late stage capitalist world, so, so, so many vet schools are funded by brands like Iams and science diet. They literally fund the schools and write out lessons and classes. They teach vets that your dog needs grain or whatever ingredient they use to make their food more profitable.

              Not to mention, your vet most likely gets kick backs for selling science diet in the office. So…it’s a tough situation. Listen to your vet, for sure. But also use a little logic. Read the label. If corn or wheat is like the second ingredient or the third? It’s probably not a great food. And all of those big brands are guilty of doing that. Also, chicken byproduct meal? Yeah, no good. Rice? Not terrible, but it shouldn’t be a massive part of their diet. And cats, even less so.

              Kibble companies got in while the market was even more unregulated than it is now, which is still way too unregulated. Kibble is convenient for us but in truth, it’s not the form the bulk of your pets food should be coming in. By nature of making it a hard dry biscuit, they need to use stuff like binders, starches. Starches that turn to sugar when interacting with the enzymes in your pets saliva. Which is why so many pets have tooth decay and gum disease by three years old.

              Best advice: whole, raw foods. But the tricky part is it needs to be balanced. There are raw pet foods like primal, small batch, vital essentials, Stella and chewy’s that all come as a full, balanced meal. Even those refrigerated cooked foods are better, though still not completely biologically appropriate.

              Sorry, I worked in the pet nutrition industry for years and really believe in what I’ve learned. Definitely try to get some of the raw foods, even if it’s just 1/3rd of your dogs diet. And always add good veg, a whole egg with the shell, raw goats milk, etc.

              Oh—and human-consumable raw meat actually has higher allowable levels of contaminants like fecal matter and pathogens because it’s produced to be cooked away. So…yeah.

    • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Dude also claims that his Great Dane (that he developed this food for) lived to be like 27 years old or somthing stupid like that. Great Danes live like 5-7 years, typically. Maybe like 10 on the outside if they don’t die of bone cancer first (they get that a lot as a genetic side effect of being bred to be huge). The oldest confirmed dog ever was supposedly 31 years old (https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208478868/bobi-worlds-oldest-dog-dies-portuguese), but these sort of age record-breaking dogs are highly suspect in general because dog life expectancy is pretty consistent by breed.