Which food and why.......

With all the dogs and cats I’ve had over the years, I really never paid much attention to what food I fed them. The dogs usually got something like Gravy Train and the cats, Meow Mix. I never had any issues with food allergies. When we had decided to get Sami and Miko, I thought it was time to step up to the plate and feed them the best food possible. So, after a little research, we decided to go with Nutro Max puppy food.


At around 8 ½ months of age, Sami got really sick and for awhile we thought we were going to lose her. She was throwing up stomach bile and her appetite was not very good. My vet ran various tests and tried different medications and nothing was helping. So, he had me take her to Indianapolis Veterinary Referral and they got to the bottom of her problem rather quickly. She was having a severe allergic reaction to her food causing Inflammatory Bowl Disease. They said it would be time consuming and expensive to find out what it was in her diet that was causing the reaction, so the best route to go would be to put her on a limited ingredient diet or novel protein diet. So, she now eats Venison and Potato and takes a small dose of Prednisone each day. She has blood work done to make sure the Prednisone is not affecting any of her organs and so far she is doing great!

So, after we got that figured out, we got to thinking about what to feed Miko when she was a year old. Since we didn’t know what triggered the allergy in Sami, we weren’t willing to keep Miko on a diet that could potentially cause her problems as well. Then we heard about Blue Buffalo.

It all sounded really great with the life source bits and all and she seemed to really like it. Then we started noticing the inconsistencies with the amount of life source bits in the food. We got one bag that was at least half life source bits. Well, after a few days, we noticed her poops were black. At first we were alarmed as dark stools can be a sign of blood in the stools. Then I got to thinking about the extra life source bits she was getting which are black in color. So, we separated out the life source bits out of about 3 days worth of food and after about the second day, her poops were back to normal.

Then, this last bag had no life source bits at all! Well, if these life source bits are so important, you would think they would make sure the bags of food were consistent. So, we decided to change her food because of that and a couple other things we were noticing. One, she chews on her feet a lot more then Sami does. She could be just more of a clean freak then Sami, but on the other hand, some things in the diet can cause skin allergies. The second thing is that she seems to belch a lot after eating.

Well, I had noticed a few people lately talking about California Natural. Since a lot of dog food has chicken in it, I decided to go with the Lamb and Rice formula. I’m just now starting to mix it in with the Blue Buffalo, so it will probably be a couple weeks before we can tell any difference. Also, I can’t remember what we had the cats on before we also had them put on the Blue Buffalo. So, we switched them to the California Natural as well.

It would be nice if others would share what they feed their Shibas. And why…..

Two is more fun then one.