Personal Musings from Simon Jones

I welcome any tips on this. Being the dog lover I am, I have two gorgeous dogs, a Yorkie and a Doberman cross Collie and I want to make sure they have adequate nutrition in a perfectly balanced diet. Unfortunately whenever I buy the top quality, expensive dog foods, noses get turned up. The Yorkie is fine, she’ll eat anything, but the Dobie is underweight and needs a little bulk. He won’t starve himself to death and he still has all his energy and bounce, but he keeps losing weight. I found mixing a little human dinner (carefully selected) sometimes makes him eat half the bowl, but often he’ll just lick it off and leave the dry kibble. Tomorrow that may not work. I take up the bowls as a matter of course no matter how much or little he’s eaten, this has improved things slightly and he’s eating more than he did, but it’s still not enough. Now my favourite dog food is probably Burns; it is good value, reasonably good quality dog food. This will not get eaten alone… ever. Gelert has been better, especially with a decent mixer. Royal Canin gets a very confused look… the list goes on.

There is one way I can get him to eat every bite with ease…

By feeding Bakers Complete.

I hate Bakers Complete. The price is reasonable and it looks pretty, it’s also easy to get hold of, store and feed, but the ingredients are very low quality, it’s full of additives and colourings and causes severe flatulence in these monsters… but he eats the whole bowl!

What do Bakers do to their food to make it so desirable? Is there something they use that I can add to a higher quality food to get the same reaction?

The way I see it now is that he’s made his choice. Quality nutrition is useless if he’s not eating it! Bakers may be low quality, but if he’s eating, he’s getting more nutrition than from something he’s not.

Unless someone comes up with a better idea which works, I’m thinking of buying a 15kg bag of Bakers complete, filling him out a little on that, and then I can happily watch him not eat knowing he’s a good weight. Perhaps mixing two bags, one bakers, one higher quality… I don’t know. All suggestions welcome.