The Ultimate Pet Food Guide: Everything You Need to Know about Feeding Your Dog or Cat
Product Description
A comprehensive, authoritative guide to everything you need to know about feeding your pet–including homemade, commercial, and raw food diets. The 2007 pet food recalls followed a multitude of pets getting sick and dying from contaminated food; now pet owners must take charge of what they feed their dogs and cats. With The Ultimate Pet Food Guide, veteran dog trainer, behaviorist, and author Liz Palika focuses on nutritional needs and covers every type of feeding, including controversial raw diets, homemade cooked food, and commercial foods. Palika also addresses introducing new foods; what “human foods” pets shouldn’t eat; free-feeding; responsibility for food safety; where ingredients come from; and red fl… More >>
The Ultimate Pet Food Guide: Everything You Need to Know about Feeding Your Dog or Cat
Bob Recommends: Are you a freak? Then learn how to freak dance you silly freak 
This book presents an easily understandable, yet comprehensive review of the options available to feed your pet. The book covers the complete range of pet foods, from kibble you can get at almost any store, through specialized dehydrated natural pet foods, and finally to raw or cooked foods you can prepare at home (too much effort for me!) Being a dedicated dog owner, I focused on that part of the book, although there is also lots of information on cat foods.
Although the book provides a few examples of good and bad pet foods, its real value is that it taught me how to become an educated pet owner, so that I can provide my dogs with healthy meals that meet their nutritional needs. Understanding the nutritional needs of dogs is not obvious to the typical consumer – for example, it turns out that there is “good” kibble and “bad” kibble. Good kibble tries to mimic what dogs and wolves evolved to eat in the wild, while bad kibble mostly consists of grains and whatever meat byproducts that pet food conglomerates can put together at a cheap price. (You don’t often see wolves, which are closely related to dogs, out cooking up a batch of rice or wheat for dinner….) I found this book to be a tremendous source of information on this subject. As another example, ground corn (the first ingredient in some dog foods) includes the entire ear of corn – not just the corn kernels, but also the corn cob, all ground up together. Yuck – but it’s a lot cheaper than meat! Care to guess how much of that ingredient nourishes your best friend and how much passes straight through, for you to clean up later?
In summary, this book really makes you think about what you are feeding your pet, and gives you the information to make better decisions. As Ms. Palika writes, the old adage that states “we are what we eat” also applies to our pets. Taking the time to understand that can pay benefits in healthier pets that are likely to live happier, longer lives. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book has some good information about why commercial foods are not ideal for dogs (and cats), but really the bulk of it is for feeding homemade cooked foods and there is not a lot of other options. My main issue with this book is that it claims to be something that it’s not. If the title was “Ultimate Guide to Feeding Homemade Meals”, that would be fine.
Mostly, I was disappointed with the lack of information on raw feeding. The author is clearly against raw feeding, so there is not a lot in that chapter except warnings. If you want to feed raw, there are a lot of better books to read. Also, there was a chapter on feeding kibble, but adding supplements to it. I’ve heard countless times there can be serious bloating issues with mixing kibble and other foods since the kibble expands in a dog’s stomach. She didn’t mention this at all.
Additionally, there were some contradictions that left me confused. In one part, the author says not to feed garlic to dogs, and then later she recommends several products that contain garlic. She also states that dogs need vitamin C and a good source of this is citrus fruits, and then later says never to feed a dog citrus fruits.
Overall, I think it was a decent read and there is pockets of good information, but it is by no means an “ultimate guide” and I would recommend several other books above it. If you’re looking for information on home cooked meals, there was a lot of recipes. But I haven’t read a lot about cooked feeding, so I can’t say if this is truly the “ultimate guide” to home cooked pet food compared to what other books are out there.
Rating: 3 / 5
I found the information in Ms. Palika’s book has helped me a lot in looking at the labels of my cat’s and my dog’s foods. I appreciate the recipes for home made diets, both raw and cooked, but I don’t cook that much for myself. But at least after reading this book I understand what to look for when buying a commercial food–and I even found a safe, easy to feed raw food brand for my pets. Thanks!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a great place to start if you are considering feeding your dog homemade food. It has many recipes and suggestions so you don’t have to search several different books.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have tried some of the meals and gotten a lot of great ideas . My girls were already eating cooked chicken, this gives them some variety.
Rating: 5 / 5