We believe that nutrition is the cornerstone of good health, and just as you can't build a house on sand, you can't build a healthy body with poor nutrition. We get many calls for consultations and may not be able to accommodate a non-emergency for a few weeks. One of the first things we do is send them to the web site and have them get one of the better books on natural diets. By the time the appointment rolls around, we often see many of the initial problems have improves strictly through better feeding. We fell that nutrition is so important that we have developed a scale of Nutritional Adequacy for feeding our pets...

This scale is as follows, with 10 being the best and 1 being (in our opinion) the worst.

Meat ONLY Diet. While meat is one of the most important components of many natural diets, you must remember that a dog or cat, in the wild, eats everything when it kills its prey, including the intestinal contents. In a rabbit the intestinal contents amount to about 40 percent of the body weight. The dog in the wild also eats the bones, a source of calcium for its body. This is why many home-prepared diets include vegetables and calcium and not just meat

Soft-Moist diets. (Gaines-Burgers, Prime, etc.) These diets are very high in sugars, chemicals, dyes, etc. They have labels that make interesting reading.

Soft-Moist and Dry combinations (Kibbles and Bits, etc.). Also included in this category are the generic brands. The generic and store brands have been incriminated in the literature for being of poor quality, and tend to vary from batch to batch.

Standard commercial diets. The name brands. They may be adequate in most cases for most normal, healthy young to middle aged animals, but we want more than adequate for our animal comapnions.

Highly advertised "Top-Shelf" lines like Science Diet, IAMS, ProPlan and ONE. These are higher quality in their ingredients, but still have artificial preservatives, and other chemical additives. There are some natural products in this category, but often are made of inferior ingredients. There are, unfortunately, a number of other low quality products that come with high-sounding names.

I added this level to include some of the better "natural" brands that have become available. Nutrumax is one of the more popular "natural" foods that is a cut above the others but still fall (in my opinion) short

Flint River Ranch, Pet Guard rank at our top. These have shown consistent quality and results. We also include Solid Gold, Nutro Max and Wysong as some of the best alternatives to home-prepared food. Some have had mixed reviews from clients and may not be consistent bag to bag. We are sold on Flint River Ranch (yes we make some profit on it) but we have been feeding it for over 4 years and have had super results. I, especially, like the fact that it is baked and not pressure cooked. I feel this maintains a lower level of free radicals and keeps the vitamins intact. That is why it is the one we feed and recommend to our clients. Most of these foods are made with high quality ingredients. There is no ethoxyquin or BHT. Flint has just added a new product called (and I still wonder who thought up this name) DryWater. The food is great as it is the closest thing to home prepared but in a dry form. You add hot water and it has veggies and all the good stuff in it so it is great when away from home or someone is puppy sitting.

Remember… We still recommend a home prepared diet but know that time makes it difficult or the pet will not give up it's dry food. In this case, we have found these brands to be the best alternative

A Home-Prepared diet made with fresh foods, preferably RAW. This is the best way to care for your pet and we recommend a natural home prepared diet for all of you that can do it and for the animals that will eat it (most love it).

It is the recommendation of our practice that you feed either a home-made diet or Flint River Ranch, Wysong or Petguard (or a combination of home-made and one of these commercial foods to make sure you are giving optimal nutrition to your pet. We are adamant when we say that you should never feed a diet below level 5. We believe that nutrition is the cornerstone of good health