We’ve reviewed dog foods annually for 17 years now, and we try, every year, to tell you something new about the food you feed (or should be feeding!) your dog, something you may not have known before. We also tell you how we define and identify good-quality foods, and how to tell them apart from the products of lesser quality. And finally, we give you a list of foods that meet all of our selection criteria and meet our approval. We’re doing all that again this year, but in a slightly different format.
There are a lot of different factors that should be considered when selecting the right food for your dog. The most important ones, in our opinion, are the ingredients in the food themselves, which is why we spend so much time through the course of the year and space in the magazine talking about dog food ingredients. On the facing page, we have again listed the “things to look for” (desirable traits) on a dog food ingredients list, as well as “things to look out for” (undesirable traits). This really is the most important information to know about choosing good (healthy) dog foods.
I go into more detail on this later on, in the article “Whole Dog Journal’s Approved Dog Food List 2014”
If a food doesn’t have good ingredients, there is no point in talking about where it’s made, where you have to go to buy it, whether it is grain-free or not, how much fat is in it, whether the company that makes it has ever had a recall, or how much it costs. Learning to look at the ingredients panel before you buy is half the battle; the other half is identifying good ingredients (so you can buy that food) and bad ingredients (so you can avoid buying that food).
For some of you, this will be brand-new information. If you’ve never before looked past the pretty pictures on the label of your dog’s food – the juicy steaks, glistening cubes of pink chicken breast, dewy carrots, steaming bowls of rice, and so on – to look at the extremely fine print of the actual ingredients list, you may be shocked to see that what’s actually in the bag is mostly corn, with steak flavor, chicken by-product meal, carrot powder, and brewers rice.
Those of you veteran label readers, we salute you! Your reward is a lot of new information about the foods you should (if you don’t already) love, buy, and feed your dog (shouldn’t all of those always be the same thing?).
To find out more information on the new Whole Dog Journal reviews, and to view the Approved Dry Dog Food List for 2014, check out our article, “Whole Dog Journal’s Approved Dog Food List 2014”
