There is a whole landscape of pet food, from generic and inexpensive, to higher-quality “natural” products. The following guidelines are based on a scale of 1 (the poorest) to 10 (the best) to help you determine a better diet for your dog:

Dr. Tiekert’s Scale of Nutritional Adequacy in Pet Food

1. All meat. Animals in the wild don’t eat just meat. They eat everything when they kill their prey, including the intestinal contents. In a rabbit, the intestinal vegetable contents amount to about 40 percent of body weight. Animals also eat bones, a source of calcium for the body.

2. Soft-moist food. These diets are high in sugar, chemicals, dyes, propylene glycol, and other additives to give them shelf life, softness, and an artificial look. Their labels make for interesting reading, and that’s about the most you can say about them.

3. Soft moist and dry combinations —”generic brands.” The cheap generic and store brands have been incriminated in veterinary literature for their poor quality. They are infamous for mineral deficiencies, particularly zinc.

4. Standard commercial diets—the “name” brands. They are adequate in most cases for most normal, healthy, young to middle-aged animals, but they are not optimum. They are merely adequate. These products are reasonably well researched, but quality comes second to price and palatability. They are made to be competitive and are usually loaded with chemicals. An average age thirty-pound dog eating this food regularly will consume nine pounds of chemicals a year!

5. Top shelf lines. These products, including Science Diet and Iams, feature higher-quality ingredients but still have artificial preservatives and other chemical additives. I place some “natural” products in this category because they are made with inferior ingredients such as “wheat flour” (a euphemism for white flour). If the product is made with whole grain, it will say “ground whole wheat” or “whole-wheat flour.” There are, unfortunately a number of low-quality products that come with high-sounding names.

6. The so-called natural lines. This category includes Precise, Natural Life, and Verus, products made with the finest-quality ingredients. They use vitamin C and vitamin E as natural preservatives instead of using artificial preservatives, and the added minerals are chelated with amino acids for better absorption. For most dogs, I recommend their “senior” formulas, which contain lower quantities of protein.

7. Homemade. The very best food you can feed your animal is the homemade diet made with fresh foods. You can’t do better for your animal.