Dog Food Analysis Link

This link will get you to an analysis/ review of all the different (USA) brands of dog food, their ingredients, and their rating-by-ingredient from the Six Star Premium (very few foods are Six Star)to the lowest, One Star.

Six Star has eleven products. One Star has 265 products.

They state how they assess the food. Links to FDA and Menu foods recalled are there.

Right off the bat, they tell their reason for the site's existence:
"Because commercial pet food is, historically and on average, so incredibly awful"

It helps to understand what Karlin was saying about why a corn meal, listed second, may contain more meat than the meat meal that was listed first. Talk about convoluted! Now wonder we are all lost in The Pet Food Land of Confusion.

http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/
http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/

Enjoy!
Dorothy

Just be aware that there are many ways of analysing dog foods and this site has totally differing views on some foods compared to say the Whole Dog Journal, whose reviewers can be publicly identified. Who does these reviews? What are their credentials?

Personally I get a bit frustrated by sites like this one, which could be really useful if more accountable for their content -- but they post in anonymity (without explaining why).

They say:

The ratings given and comments made about the foods assessed on this site and ingredients listed are the opinion of the Editors.

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What "editors"? 'Editors" of what? This amateur website? Who are they? Why are they unwilling to take responsibility (or credit) for the site? "Editors" makes them sound like some sort of official organisation and as if they have authority of some sort connected to a commercial publication. But this doesn't seem to be the case.

If you check their 'memberlist' there is one member -- named, guess what, 'editors' -- and no information on who this is:

http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/member.php/uid/1

They say no one has to agree with their analysis: obviously that is true, and that's fine. But they do put themselves forward here as authoritative -- instead they are anonymous posters behind a website. As a journalist I could never use such a site as an informed source, because there is no way of evaluating who is posting this, what their motivation is, what their level of authority or knowledge is on nutrition, whether they don't have their own agenda to downgrade certain foods. It's a shame they take this approach as it would be very helpful to have some gauge of who runs the site so that one could have greater confidence in the ratings, IMHO. I would not rely only on a website like this, though it may be helpful to many, in that it gathers together some general guidance on anaylysing foods yourself, and as people weigh up the range of choices it gives one perspective that people might want to use. I would disagree with some of their ratings however and it isn't clear how they came to their star ratings for each. Also be aware that many nutritionists, and the WDJ, would disagree with some of their statements about grains, beet pulp, etc in foods.

I just like people to be cautious on their sources for making decisions -- anyone can put anything up on the internet and when there's no accountability associated with a site, then I am extra cautious.

Just for general info: did a Whois search, the domain is owned by Olivier Duque in St Cezaire, France. I googled him, and the only other reference I can find is that he, along with two others, run the Boxer World email list.

I like this article on trying to wade through the terms and ideas that get thrown around about what makes for an appropriate food:

http://woodhavenlabs.com/dogfoods.html

Karlin said:

I like this article on trying to wade through the terms and ideas that get thrown around about what makes for an appropriate food:

http://woodhavenlabs.com/dogfoods.html

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For those of you who have not looked at this, do so or save it to your Favorites for reference. It really is a very good tool to help you make decisions about feeding your dogs, particularlty the "dictionary" to all the food terms. Thanks, Karlin, for posting this again.

That is an excellent link Karlin. Marked in my favorites. Very detailed and easy to understand.