Natural Holistic Pet Care

©NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

First.... An advertisement

We are an INDEPENDENT DISTRIBUTOR and do make a small commission on purchases of Flint River Ranch. That, in no way changes the fact that we feel it is one of the best available commercial kibble diets.

We feed it to our own pets for one meal a day and their raw food for the other meal. We do this for a few reasons; 11 dogs (even small ones) can get expensive eating just raw, the time to feed in the morning is limited and we were having dental issues (some of ours refuse bones). We have used FRR of and on for over 20 YEARS on thousands of our cases with complete satisfaction. The small additional income goes toward supporting many of the free services we try to provide both privately and on-line. These foods are more expensive than some of you your store bought foods but they have to be because of the better ingredients. We also think that baking instead of high pressure high heat cooking and extruding preserves the vitamins and nutrients. Overall, if you are feeding kibble, using Flint River helps you end up with a healthier pet, less medical bills and they seem to eat less so it comes out very close to less quality foods, cost-wise!

Rest assured that if we did not totally believe in it as one of the best kibble diets out there, we would not recommend it and if the quality ever drops or becomes questionable we WILL stop using it and recommending it.

Now.... Your Pet's Nutritional and Health

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 have therefore developed a scale of Nutritional Adequacy for feeding our pets.

Please realize this was first written in 1996 so the whole movement towward commercially available raw foods, grain free diets and prey model feeding was not yet over the horizen. Dr. Ian Bilinghirst ("Give Your Dog A Bone") did publish his book in 1994 but it had not yet become well known.

 

Our current belief is that, in most cases, raw feeding is the best approach to most of our cases. We have moved away from home made diets in favor of commercially available frozen diets because of client complienace and convenience and have been feeding our dogs Bravo for the since 2009. We also will feed Stella and Chewies raw freeze dried and use their treats. Prior to the Bravo we fed Priarie and there are a number of excellent raw food sources available. We are using what works in our household and each situation is different.

As mentioned above, we have gone back to feeeding Flint River kibble for the morning meal (with some Stellah and Chewies Chicken occassionally) out of convenience, confidence in quality and for dental maintainance as some refuse bones (actually look at us like are crazy for offering them).

 

Here is the feeding scale first written in 1996 with recent updates (so some brand names may not still be around):

 

You can also access our article on Nutrition in our information library under Client Information in the main menu. Look for the Red Articles Tab and the Magazine Chapters are there.

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

Level 1 (Poorest)

All meat (meaning ONLY meat). Remember, the dog in the wild eats everything when it kills its prey, including the intestinal contents and bone. 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. When you feed a meat ONLY diet you can create severe and dangerous calcium deficiency. This is why we call this the poorest. Add the proper calcium and it shoots to the top!

Level 2

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

Level 3-4

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.

Level 5-6

Standard commercial diets. The name brands. Adequate in most cases for most normal, health) young to middle aged animals. But merely adequate.

Level 7-8

"Top-Shelf" lines. Science Diet, IAMS, ProPlan. 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.

Level 9

Flint River Ranch and Pet Guard are some of the best kibbles. Flint River Ranch is the one we feed and recommend to our clients. This food is made with the finest quality ingredients. They are all "human grade" It has Vitamin C and Vitamin E as natural preservatives instead of artificial preservatives. There is no ethoxyquin or BHT. The minerals are chelated with amino acids to provide better absorption. We feel that this is the best of the "prepared" diets that we have found. 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 Flint River Ranch to be the best.

Our experience with Flint River Ranch has impressed us with its consistently high quality and we use it almost exclusively. our distributor ID is 1483 (needed for an order). Click Here For More Detailed Flint River Information

Level 10

A Home-Prepared or quality commercial frozen raw diet. This is the best way to care for your pet and we recommend this diet for all of you that can do it and for the animals that will eat it (most love it).

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