What is the Best Food to Feed Your Dog

What to feed, that is the question. 

Over the years we've fed many different types of food for our dogs. When I was growing up my parents fed Kal Kan canned food to our dogs plus table scraps of all sorts. No one worried about whether the chicken bones, pork chop bones, or steak bones were cooked or raw (in fact we would have been appalled at the idea of feeding them raw). This went on for my whole childhood and never had any issues whatsoever. 

I'm definitely not advocating this, it's just an interesting fact.

When I moved out and got married we fed any old dried food because we simply didn't know better, and our dogs had a lot of health problems (cancer, kidney failure, etc.) as well as fleas and were stinky and required a lot of baths. Over the years I started to do some research and upgraded to high end dry food. This was back when "human grade" kibble was not the norm so I would drive an hour one way to some obscure small family-owned pet shop to obtain this. That went on for some time until I then decided to try raw feeding which lasted about a year. The dogs loved it but it was a chore going to the meat market for huge cases of raw meat/bones and then having to feed them outside (messy). 

After that we started feeding Sojos which is a raw food "mixer" where you buy the food and then mix in your own meat. Well that was what we stuck with for quite a long time as it was really simple, probably at least about 10 or 12 years. During that time our dogs' health became much better, they did not smell like dogs (really no smell at all), and great teeth. We had a lot of fleas though, in fact we were overrun with them. The only problem with the Sojos was I always felt it had way too many oats in the ingredients. In fact it seemed like it was mainly oats plus the meat we added. 

Fast forward to 2014 and we had lost two senior dogs (ages 14 and 15) to congestive heart failure and lymphoma and my other senior was not doing well (age 14). I switched away from Sojos to home cooking and have never switched away from it. We now have an english setter and two pointers and they are in great health, smell great, and we have not been bothered with a single flea since 2014 when we switched to home cooked. Who knows if they are connected but I'm not going to complain about it and I hope I'm not jinxing us by commenting on it! 

Bottom line for us is home cooking works the best and the dogs love it.