Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
About three weeks ago, my puppy started producing runny and bloody stools. I was very alarmed by this and my mood wasn't improved when I saw things on messageboards basically saying it's parvo virus and your dogs a goner. However, experience has taught me that messageboards can be full of self appointed "experts" who actually know very little about the subject that they are giving us the benefit of their wisdom, so I wanted far more proof than that. Eventually, I came across two videos produced by registered vets which, essentially said that, while bloody and runny stools can be a symptom of something very serious, there was far more chance that it was nothing to worry about - especially in puppies that are showing no other symptoms of distress (mine seemed fine except for the issue with the stools). Indeed one of them said that before taking your puppy to the vet it would be worthwhile putting them on a diet based on boiled white rice flavoured with chicken stock for a couple of days to see if that stopped the problem - it did in my puppies case and it's not returned since.
Now, the relevance of all of this to the subject being discussed here is that it seems that, for the first eight weeks of my puppy's life, her diet consisted, almost entirely, of Pedigree Chum puppy food. Back in the 70s when we first had a dog in the family, Pedigree Chum was considered to be a cut above other dog foods and I can remember it being recommended to us by a vet back then when he
was asked what we should feed the young dog we had bought from the old pet shop upstairs in the market.
Any research you do now on Pedigree Chum is pretty damning with the most generous reviews I came across placing it in the "fair" category, so I was determined to wean my puppy off it as quickly as I could - looking back, I'm pretty sure this was a factor in the problem with her stools. I didn't help by stupidly buying her my previous dog's (that i had taken on at the age of six) favourite snack which I'm sure contributed to the problem, but also my attempt to improve the quality of her food by giving her a tinned puppy food (costing three times as much as Chum does) full of what was advertised as genuine meat products - from what I can see, sometimes such foods are too rich for young dogs.
So, the upshot is that my puppy still has Pedigree Chum as one of her three meals of the day, along with James Wellbeloved complete puppy food (highly recommended online and by the sales staff in Pets at Home I spoke to who were scathing about Chum) and cooked chicken.
My first three dogs were, basically, fed on a combination of tinned dog food not considered to be as good as Pedigree Chum and whatever when it was considered suitable for them included the one out of the six dogs I've had before this one that lived the longest life and another that, I'm fairly sure, lived for the second longest time, whereas my last three dogs were all fed what are now considered to be more "dog friendly" diets and none of them have lived what would be considered a long life by dog standards, albeit one of them died after being hit by a car at the age of seven - I can't say I saw an improvement in general health and liveliness when compared to the three earlier dogs either.
So, although I've seen and heard enough positive stuff about James Wellbeloved food to make it part of my dog's diet for the rest of her life (it's quite expensive, but not terribly so and, from what I can see is often the subject of special offers which encourage buying in bulk), I'm slightly sceptical about the "modern" recommended dog diet - seems to me that, just like with humans, there's a lot of fadism about.
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