Searching for a new dog food

Since the end of December 2005, we’ve been hunting around for a new dog food for Nala. Most people would think "dog food, simple. Just pick up a bag of dog chow at the grocery store". Sure, if you want to feed your dog junk food and crap. Most people don’t think to look at the ingredients of the dog food they buy though, and is something most people should give more consideration to.
Choosing a Dog Food: Guidelines
Understanding Commercial Dog Foods
We’d been feeding her Diamond Large breed Lamb & Rice up to then, and decided to switch to something else until the recalled food problem blew over.
Nala’s breeders had switched to Premium Edge Skin & Coat (a salmon/sweet potato based food) and recommended it to us to try, so we started her on that at the beginning of January. She was doing pretty well on it up until we got to the end of the bag, when her poop started to get really soft and runny (all dog owners seem to eventually turn into hard core poop monitors). Vet said everything looked ok; no worms or anything like that, and she was otherwise normal. So we switched to Wellness Fish & Potato to see if maybe it was the salmon. No change in her poop, so I think maybe Nala’s just not a fish food kind of dog. It’s a shame, because both foods have a really good looking list of ingredients, and her coat was looking really fantastic on the fish based foods too. Adding fibre to her food helped firm up the poop, so I suppose we could have gone that route and stayed on the Premium Edge or Wellness.
We decided to switch Nala back to lamb & rice and try a new food we saw at PetSmart, Blue Adult Lamb & Rice from a company called Blue Buffalo. I was really impressed with the list of ingredients, with lamb and lamb meal as the first two (like with people food, dog food ingredients are listed in order of their amount in the food). Whole grains fill out the last three ingredients in the top 5, which should provide plenty of fibre for nice firm poops. Hopefully Nala will do well on this food (I think she will). It’s a little pricier than the Diamond L&R, but considering a month’s supply costs about as much as we might spend on dinner at a restaurant, it’s not bad. At 442 calories/cup, we might have to add more high fibre veggies to her food just to fill her up stomach though!