FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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Nutrition and Feeding
What foods do you recommend?
We carry and recommend Royal Canin and Purina diets. These companies do extensive research and make excellent veterinary prescription diets as well as general diets for pets. If you are looking for a "holistic" food, we would be happy to help you choose an alternative diet appropriate for your pet's needs.
Do you think I should cook for my pet?
In general, we do not recommend homemade diets. Veterinary nutritionists report that most of the diets published for pets in leading books and resources are actually not balanced! This can lead to life-threatening nutritional deficiencies. If preparing homemade diets for your pets is something you want to do, be sure to balance the diet. The following resources can help you formulate a balanced, individualized diet for your pet. This does involve a fee and often means buying a premade nutritional supplement mixture to add to the diet.
Petdiets.com
BalanceIt.com
University of California Davis (telephone consults 530-752-1393)
University of Tennessee Veterinary Nutrition Service (email utvns@utk.edu)
Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine
Angell Memorial (telephone consults 617-588-7282)
University of Missouri (email datzc@missouri.edu)
Do you recommend raw diets?
No, the proponents of these diets do have some good points but these diets are associated with health risks to not only pets but the humans they live with. A recent study showed that the odds of shedding Salmonella species was 20 fold higher in dogs fed raw meat diets over dogs in the control group. Furthermore, raw meat diets were associated with the shedding of extended-spectrum cephalosporinase Escherichia coli (a strain of E. coli resistant to antibiotics).1 The American Veterinary Medical Association, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not recommend these diets because of the human health risk.
1. Evaluation of the Risks of Shedding Salmonellae and other potential pathogens by therapy dogs fed raw diets in Ontario and Alberta. Lefebvre LK, Reid-Smith R, Boerlin P, Weese JS. Zoonoses Public Health. 55:470-480, 2008. |
