Food Fit Friday

What we feed our dogs is important. Not so much in the exact brand or formula that we feed, but in the quality of ingredients, overall nutrition, and, most importantly, how well our dogs do while eating it. I'm of the belief, gained through feeding raw for years, that variety is an essential part of a healthy diet for my dogs. And since they are used to eating a variety of different foods, they have very few issues switching between foods.

Venison Nutro

Which is great, because it means I can opt in to review a food for Chewy.com this month and know that I will get a realistic idea of how my dogs might do on the food in the longer term.

The food we are reviewing for the month of September is from Nutro, and called Wild Frontier. I chose to review the Woodland Trail formula, which is venison based, as venison is both a meat that my dogs have loved in the past in other forms, and something they don't get often, making it a great choice to try as part of a varied diet.

The Nutro came in a box as big as Koira, making it pretty much a requirement to pose her on top of it (after I removed the bag of food, because the smell apparently came through the box and made her unable to concentrate for her picture op.

And of course, we happened to have a Chewy box from another order that hadn't been recycled yet, so I made Ptera pose a bit too.

So, starting this food, I wanted to share some of our initial thoughts so far. First, delivery by Chewy was very quick, as always. The price point that this food is at is very reasonable for the quality, with the variety we got being $52.99 right now, with free 1-2 day shipping.

The ingredients are very good, with Venison Meal and Chicken Meal as the first two ingredients. Some people don't like seeing meat meals in their dog food- I prefer it to whole meats, because the meat meal is processed and dried, meaning that when it is counted, it is at the amount that really ends up in the product, rather than as a water-laden whole meat product that gets dried out later. Having two meat meals as the first ingredients means that a lot of the protein in this food is from meat rather than other sources. Other than that, the food is grain free and contains no ingredients that I object to feeding my dogs.

About 1/2 cup of food in a teeny tiny metal food dish. 

Opening up the bag, the food doesn't have any strong smell, which I appreciate. I always feel like the strongest smelling kibbles tend to be low quality ones that are sprayed with flavoring on the outside before being bagged up. The kibbles themselves are small and flattish, making them a good size for my 10 lb dog and my 40 lb dog. I think kibble can be too big for a dog to eat easily, but not really too small, at least for my dogs. The size means that it can be used as a training treat easily as well, since there are a lot of them in a cup of food. They are not greasy and don't leave that weird gritty gross dog food feeling on the hands if used as treats in training.

Compared with a quarter, to show the size of the kibbles.

And of course, always important, the dogs seem to enjoy the flavor of the food. My dogs aren't exactly picky, but they do seem to really like this food so far.

I will be posting a few more times as we continue trying out this food, letting you know how the dogs are doing on it over the course of the month.

As always, all opinions shared here on the blog are entirely our own. We were not compensated in any way other than with the product we are reviewing.