"We can't afford those expensive brands of foods at the pet store, What can we buy at the grocery store that will be Ok for our six-month-old retriever pup?"

Good question! And anyone can understand how the price of the super-premium brands sold at pet stores and veterinary clinics can be out of budget, especially with a big dog. Most dogs that are very young will do well on most any brand. They are healthy and their organs are pretty resilient to nutritional insult in the short term.

It is your dog's long-term health that is of concern. If right now you cannot afford one of the super-premium brands, we suggest one of the grocery store premium brands like Cycle Puppy or Alpo. These brands have all been reformulated and are much improved. They will provide your puppy excellent nutrition as long as he is healthy. As your dog gets older, try switching to a formula for older dogs.

"We feed a grocery-store canned food to our dog. He has bad breath all the time. Do you think it's the food?"

It could be the food, but it could also be dental tartar and gum disease caused by the exclusively soft food diet. Because he doesn't eat any type of dry food, your dog is not getting any rough form of abrasion on his teeth. The soft food may be accumulating on his teeth and the decaying food particles causing the bad odor. Try mixing a good quality dry food with just a small amount of the canned food and see if he'll eat it just as well. If so, he will be getting good nutrition and the abrasive action of crunching on dry dog food will help the bad-breath problem.

"I've seen both pet-store foods and grocery-store foods that brag that they are 'all natural' and 'free from added preservatives.' Is this really important or is this just marketing?"

It is mostly marketing, but there is some scientific basis in feeding a food free of preservatives. However, most of these pet-food companies are playing a name game trick on you. By saying they have "no added preservatives" they are not saying there are no preservatives in the food. They don't add them, but the preservatives have already been added to the raw ingredients before being purchased by the company! Pretty tricky isn't it?

Preservatives are necessary in all pet food. If they didn't have preservatives of some kind, they would spoil on the shelf in a matter of days or even hours. Many so-called "all natural" foods use vitamin E or vitamin C as a preservative.