Now they almost hit me on a sore spot - I was a "canned food opponent" since the "Chappi and Loyal era" of my "childhood dogs" from grandmother, uncle and aunt. The "stuff" stank like the plague (the dog afterwards too), attracted maggots like flies and I shook myself at the sight of opening the can and the loud word: FRESSI....

As I got older, I myself decided never to offer my later dogs tinned dog food, but fresh (barf, as it is called today). Just like my parents gave our dogs. Predominantly raw meat, vegetables, herbs and fruit.

Of course, the fresh rumen didn't smell like Chanel No. 5 either, but the dogs didn't smell the odour, on the contrary - they smelled good like dogs and developed excellently from an early age. As long as I had two large dogs, everything went well with Mother Nature - just normal.

When I started breeding small breeds, however, I got to know the different types of dry dog food from a wide variety of manufacturers and breeders who raised their puppies on this dog food and which should be fed to the dogs as they develop into old age.

I have to admit, I did it - I fed dry - it was very easy to tear open the dog food bag, fill it cleanly into the bowl and let my little darlings eat - without any odour. There were no flies around the food bowl (extreme when you live in a rural area with farms), no lack of space in the car - no mess in the bowl and around the mouth - and the puppies thrived and supposedly thrived.

I don't think there is any dry dog food that I haven't tried on my dogs, either partially or occasionally, over the course of umpteen years. A lot is promised and the pet food industry also wants to make a living. It took me a while to get out of this almost cursed dog owner comfort zone - no, to convince myself to let go of this nonsense without taking a butcher as my second husband. incidentally, I have never fed my dogs exclusively with dry food, my bad feeling would have been much worse back then - but I must confess, 3-4 times a week there was dry food, especially on holiday - and then exclusively.

As I didn't necessarily blindly trust the butchers in the south and their "high-society meat" would not have been affordable for the number of dogs I had. -I never had pork - even if it was cheap to buy there.
Tests by Stiftung Warentest, for example, on two well-known low-cost discounters, came in handy for me and my brain - because they now also have a firm grip on foreign countries, so I could buy my holiday ration of dog food locally and there was room in the car for other things. Like many of my dog friends, I used the word "test winner" to soothe my conscience, because after all, I was making sure that my four-legged friends were fed a "healthy" dry diet.

Of course, as a breeder, I attended many training courses to learn or rethink - time and again I attended nutrition seminars organised by various dog food companies and heard what was bad and what was good.
After each information evening, however, I found myself asking myself more and more questions.

Why and why am I doing this with dry food? Where do wild dogs get dry food from? - Does a small dog eat different things than a large dog? Why don't puppies in the wild eat food with special ingredients or additives? Why is there senior food for older dogs? Can my children eat chips every day?

I (finally) came to the end of my tether when I attended a feeding event in which it was pointed out that a dog can never consume the amount of water per day that it needs to regulate its water balance by feeding dry food and that puppies are being fed ill food by soaking the dry chunks to make it easier for them to eat. I was very concerned and immediately stopped giving them dry food.

However, I soon realised that I was reaching my limits in my kitchen when it came to cooking for my whole pack, because after all, the family also demands its own and hardly any "holiday dog sitter" can be expected to feed my dogs fresh food or cook for them every day. So - another problem - and not a small one.
In keeping with my problem, a friend told me at the time that there was actually a wet food on the market that not only contained 1 "cow's eye centimetre" of meat per 1 kg tin, but that it was made from up to 96% fresh meat and was also of a chemical-free quality that I could, in principle, serve my family as a Sunday meal with a little seasoning. It's not a bad thought when you realise that the same criteria apply to the production of this Swedish food as for things that are produced for human consumption.

I had been thinking about making a change for some time, but this gave me the chance to really get to grips with the whole thing and feed my dogs in an optimally healthy way again. So I dared to do a test run with four of my dogs for 2 months and fed them Anifit.

I was helped by the fact that at that time one of my bitches, who had recently had a large litter, had problems with her physical condition and I knew from experience that it takes at least 4 weeks over the duration of the gestation period to bring the mother dog back to just about her original fitness and appearance.
I started with the change of diet and was pleasantly surprised at the beginning that there were no major negative reactions. Of course, the gastrointestinal tract had to adapt. The dogs all reacted more favourably than I had expected and I noticed positive changes after the first week. The dogs were defecating less than usual, which proved to me that the food was being better utilised and my mother dog, who at the time looked more like a plucked chicken than a proud pug, underwent a change within the first 4 weeks that I had never seen before.

The pictures of "before" and "after" speak for themselves.

This product review was translated automatically.