Chihuahua Crossing Forum Closed

I realise just how confusing picking a food can be, so here is a list of what the ingredient names mean.  All the info comes from Victoria Stilwell's 'It's me or the Dog-How to have the perfect pet' book.  I highly recommend it!  I hope it helps...

• chicken, lamb, or beef:  if one of these is the first ingredient than you know it contains a decent amount of the clean part of the meat.  If a large portion of the food is made with good cuts but is not expensive, it is likely that a percentage of the meat is actually water.


• chicken, lamb or beef meal:  meal means that the meat has been ground or reduced to small particles.  Bone meal is made from drying and grinding bones.  These are first sterilised by steam-cooking under pressure


• chicken by-products:  Look away if you're squeamish!  By-products include necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, and intestines, including organs.  Sometimes the head and back too.  Feathers are allowed, but not those that've slipped in during processing. 


• meat-byproducts:  parts that are considered unfit for human consumption.  Heads, feet, tails, hair, ligaments, bone, intestines, lungs etc.

(by products dont necessarily mean the food is bad.  In fact, in the wild organ meat is one of the first things the dog will eat from the kill.  The stomach, intestines, and all it's contents are pulled out and eaten first.  However, wild organ meat is generally fresh and nutritious, unlike the the meat that can be used in dog foods.  We, as consumers, have no way of knowing if the organs were deseased before they went to the food processing plant.

• corn, corn gluten, and other cereals:  corn and corn products are difficult for some dogs to digest, as they are for humans.  Corn is however used liberally in dog foods as a filler, protein and sweetener.  Corn is a cheap protein and fills the food out nicely, but it isn't as nutritious as other foods.  In both dogs and humans corn is a known allergen.  If your dog has been scratching excessively or licking its paws, or has repeated ear infections, too much corn in the diet might be the culprit.  Corn can also cause bloating in dogs, which is highly discomforting. 


• digest of beef:  this is recovered meat from the beef carcasses.  The 'material' is chemically recovered using enzymes.  It's not meat; it's anything but!  The term may also refer to clean tissue that has not decomposed.


• digest of poultry by-products:  this is 'material' recovered from carcasses, including heads, feet, and viscera.  Faecal and foreign matter isn't supposed to be present in poultry by-products, but it is acknowledged that these elements may unavoidably find their way into the food during processing.  It just depends how clean the factory is.


• oils and fats:  at the rendering plant, fat is seperated from meat using extreme heat and pressure.  Then the fat is sprayed over the food at the end of the processing to make it more palatable.  However, the high heat in the rendering process can destroy vital amino acids in meat protein.


• additives:  a wide range of extra ingedients is added to dog food, from vitamins and minerals, to antioxidants, colourings and preservatives.  The reason for many of these additives is due to the vitamins and minerals naturally found in the raw ingredients being destroyed in the processing.  Colouring is added to make the food look more appealing to the owner.  Dogs colour is not great so it wouldn't matter to them!  Antioxidants such as BHT and BHA and preservatives such as Ethoxyquin are chemicals that may adversively affect dogs behaviour in the same way as junk food and fizzy drinks effect children.  They are in the dog food to give it a longer shelf life. 

Good quality food, and there are good brands on the market, will not only use decent ingredients such as high quality meat, but it will also have been produced in such a way that it retains as much of the basic nutritional value provided by the ingredients.  This involves slow cooking at low temperatures under vacuum conditions. 

Love, Jess x

Pixie she will be 3 months after 2 days!

I just found a trick to make her drink water:I put a tiny piece of dog cookie in her bowl of water.So in order to reach the cookie,she has to drink some of the water first!!!!

I am really thinking to start making her food myself....I feel sorry for her...she has to eat the same food 3 times a day....She never complained,she always eat all the food,but she will become fed up in the long run and at least in fresh homemade food you will not find all the addititives that you get in canned food!

Wow, 4 weeks is way too young for a pup to leave her mother and littermates   I took in a foster chi last year who was 6 weeks old... and she was very very young! 

I would consider switching her from Pedigree... it is a very grain heavy food with by-products and hardly any meat.  I would look for a puppy food where meat is the first ingredient, and with no corn in it (or it's at least the 4th ingredient down).  I personally would feed a holistic food with human grade ingredients, but if you do not have access to them there are other choices.  Royal Canin Mini Puppy is a good food for picky eaters, and the kibble is tiny. 

You need to be very careful if you cook for her, because you need to make sure she is getting everything that she needs.  There are lots of websites which can help you if you decide to cook for her everyday :D

Also, I would be sure to have Nutrical on hand, since small, young chihuahuas are prone to hypoglycemic episodes. 

Jess gave some great info

Oh wow, I didn't realize you lived so far away.. oops

I'm at work right now, but I have a ton of links on my computer at home with dog food information (I am crazy about dog food research ).  I'll post them up for you this afternoon :D

You can use honey as a "kind of" substitute for Nutrical... if Pixie looks lethargic or you sense that her blood sugar is getting low, you can give her a little bit of honey.