Canned Dog Food – What Are the Benefits and What is the Downside?

Feeding canned dog food can certainly have it’s benefits to your dog’s health but it can also have a downside depending on your dog’s personal needs. One of the first considerations is of course taste. If you have a picky eater, canned food will be a definite plus as it is generally very tasty. It can also hold health benefits if you have a dog that is suffering from kidney issues because canned dog food is high in water content, so it will help your dog go to the bathroom more frequently. Along those same lines, it’s easily eaten because it’s soft and it’s easy on the stomach for those with digestion issues.

On the downside, one of the main problems with canned food lies with owning a larger dog breed. If you dog requires a large quantity of food/calories each day, the amount of canned food required to meet that need is going to be large and expensive compared to a dry dog food diet. It’s also important to kaneles note that dog’s that don’t have any dry dog food or chew bones in their diet are going to need regular dental care because their teeth are not getting cleaned properly with hard foods. It is also possible that too much wet dog food can disagree with your dog’s tummy and cause diarrhea.

Once you’ve considered the basic considerations of feeding your dog canned dog food, you need to think about the actual ingredients of different wet dog food brands. This is going to require you to do some label reading. This is easier than you think if you know what to look for. To start with, identify a food that is formulated for your dog according to life stage or size according to the label.

Then you should begin looking for a protein source or meat on the list of ingredients. Your meat source should always be one of the first three ingredients on the list because ingredients are listed according to weight, largest being first, therefore you will want your meat source to be at the top. You should know that if you have a fresh ingredient like chicken as the first ingredient it does not always mean that there’s a large amount of chicken in the can. What happens is, there’s a great deal of water in fresh chicken, this causes the weight of the chicken to go up. However, if the first ingredient listed is chicken meal, then you know that the dog food contains a large amount of it.