Poor little Mabel. She must feel incredibly picked on. I just changed her dog food to a higher calorie brand. Unintentional higher calories, but it’s a fact nonetheless. She was pretty trim for a while, but the other day I noticed her looking more and more like a, well…like a piano bench.
Funny how this has led here. A few months ago, when my mom’s dog Emma was diagnosed with cancer, I was sharing the news with a co-worker who asked what kind of food Emma ate.
Purina. Why?
“Well, every dog I’ve heard of who had cancer ate Purina brand.”
Now, I’m not trying to “dog” Purina in the least. I always thought them to be a fine brand. Perhaps they have a higher quality food line that I just don’t know about. And canine cancer victims can certainly have eaten other brands of food. But I’m not taking any chances. Plus, now that I have researched product ingredients, I found all the same ingredients in dog food that I am trying to avoid in my pantry.
Mason, our older Lab, has dined for several years on Nature’s Recipe as a direct result of suspected food allergies. So he gets no funky additives, while I get almost no price breaks. After the first puppy year, Mabel was on Beneful’s Healthy Weight food, and looking mighty fine indeed. But even the thought of Purina being culprit to cancer had me scanning the dog food aisles for a more acceptable brand. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, but I chose IAMS because I remembered it being in the vet’s office from time to time.
Two months passed before I noticed the Mabelline looking a little broad across the backside. The only thing I could attribute it to was the food brand change, so I started investigating doggy calories. Turns out, I was feeding Mabel FOUR HUNDRED more calories a day than she was used to eating. No wonder the poor girl plumped up.
Joining the rest of the family, Mabel is now on a diet. Didn’t I say some things I change will affect the entire household? I reduced the quantity of her food to adequately supply an appropriate number of calories for her to burn. I have shared with her all my reasons for this seemingly cruel change, including the fact that she is a large breed dog and extra weight will stress her joints and her heart. I don’t think she really cares about my reasons, but she’s not complaining too much. She has other things to complain about, like squirrels in her yard and birds in her trees. And, as with all my food investigations now, I have confirmed that the food she presently eats contains no harmful or unscrupulous ingredients…just a heck of a lot of calories!
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