I think that you have raised some very interesting points here.....


wrote:
I am old enough to remember when we had dogs we bought frozen raw horse meat for
them. later my parents starting feeding "kibble".

I remember 40 years plus ago my Grandmother only ever fed offal and
other meat to her cat - it lived until almost 20. OTOH my previous cat
lived on a diet of tinned cat food and biscuits and even though it was
the top brand died of kidney failure at 12.....


I have one dog (inherited) who
went to emergency with congestive heart failure. 1500 bucks later I got back a nearly
dead dog with "6 months to live". She is allergic to nearly everything. She looked
listless on her allergy and then her "heart" diet and her fur (she is a Pom) was like
straw. At the same time our new springer broke out in hot spots and granuloma.
1.5 years ago I switched all the dogs to a raw meaty bone diet, the Pom is fed whole
raw fish (that includes head, tail, innards). Within a week she is back to bright,
sassy, and now her fur is like silk. It is now 1 year 9 months since she almost
died. None of my dogs have bad teeth anymore, none foul breath, none itchy or
problem skin, their coats are all full and lush.

Food allergies seem to be something of our times......I really can't
remember even a couple of decades ago that there was such a high
profile....an example would be nut allergies....unheard of when I was a
child in the 60s but these days you can't even send a child in with a
lunch containing any trace of nuts just in case it effects someone with
a nut allergy....interestingly enough when I was expecting the youngest
(now almost 6) the advice was not to eat any nuts while pregnant because
the theory was that nut allergies developed before birth - conversely of
course, it could be because people don't eat so many nuts these days
that the allergy has developed.....Now, I'm wondering if the same
applies to other animals.....My experience with dogs actually differs
from yours.....mine become unhealthy if fed a pure , protein
diet....(and you don't want to be the first downstairs believe me)....So
I wonder how much of this is actually down to the evolution of these
creatures as well....



Dog evolved for over a million years and their food is nearly 100% raw meaty bone.
Now that so many "premium" diets are sickening and killing dogs due to fungal toxins
growing on the grain used in the diets, so many dogs have allergies, cancer, etc.
more people are taking dogs back to natural raw meaty bones diets.

Who has the money and interest to do the research to answer these questions? it isnt
simply one dog food, there are hundreds. For most dogs the grain based food works OK
so the number of dogs would have to be very large to get any kind of significance.
Or maybe not.

I would hazard a guess that most of the research is done by the Pet Food
companies but, certainly in the UK, commissioned via the
Universities....afterall it is not in their interests to produce a food
targetted at a certain animal/fish that does not provide for the
nutritional needs of that creature.....this has to be coupled with a
little bit of sceptism that a company commissioning research on one of
their products wants a positive research project saying that their
product is the best......the ability to read behind the lines is an
essential qualification needed when reading such reports, and to read
the one that actually came from the research rather than the one put out
for marketing....


I do know one thing brought home the need for proper food diets was a study I'd seen
done on ferrets. I used to have ferrets but it broke my heart that they went into
this horrible decline between 2-3 and died so young. I had no idea why this was
happening until I read up on raw diets for dogs, then did a search on the net.

http://www.wessexferretclub.co.uk/comments.htm It is not standard research, but
some one that has tried various things and kept track.

I've had similar experiences with guinea-pigs and rabbits....my pair now
have a very mixed diet with little reliance on the commercially produced
food although they do get this daily as well....key I guess is a mixed
diet....



I think the same is true of fish. Koi and Goldfish dont eat "veggies", they eat the
itty bitty critters on the algae. In China and Japan they power feed the young ones
live food like blood worms, black worms, daphnia, etc. all manner of "meat". I have
been feeding my koi a high quality koi food, Rangen koi color. It isnt ideal, but I
havent had any disease in my fish since I went to this food (and a veggie filter and
heating the pond in winter). So I dont really know which is responsible for the
health of my fish. In spring I do see a little bit of white crap on a few of them,
especially my black koi which show everything. But as the water warms it goes away.

One of the problems is that without a controlled environment it is not
possible to say what is the actual cause of fish thriving/not
thriving.....it could well be claimed that a change in diet might cause
a lack of growth but without actually having a control enviroment to
compare with the statement it becomes very much an IME.......not only do
we have the variable of the change in diet but also other variables -
and a pond can hardly be claimed to be a closed environment so even if
we believe nothing has changed it could well have....



I feed my 22 fish about 1/2 cup a day. The less waste grains in the food, the less
mess in the water, the less ammonia too. This coming year I am going to look for
even more natural food, something like this
http://www.jehmco.com/PRODUCTS_/FISH...eze_dried.html

Sadly, it isn't always possible for everyone to feed a natural diet to
their fish.....in fact it is nigh on impossible unless we return them to
the wild....but we do the best we can with what is available......Good
luck, Ingrid, with the move to more natural foods - I'm sure your fish
will appreciate it and thrive - plus look forward to hearing how they do....

Gill



Ingrid