There have been many instances in the news lately of dogs dying because of the commercial dog food they have been eating.
This dog food was given to them by their owners without them realizing how sick it could make their precious pets over time.
This is a horrible scenario, but what can you do about it? First of all, all pet owners (if this is happening to dog food, you can bet that other pet food is not as healthy as the advertising suggests!) should carefully read the labels on the pet food products, to see what is actually in the bag or tin.
This means that they also need to become aware of whether an item is good or bad for their pet.
Now, this reading of labels does not only apply to pet foods, it applies to the food humans eat too.
There are preservatives in foods that would be better left out, but many people do not realize this.
In fact there are a great number of products which have zero nutritional value for us, yes, you've guessed it, lots of the snack foods! We buy products without knowing whether they are good for us or not.
If they are advertised on tv, then we expect that they are safe to eat, but this is not necessarily so.
The same applies to commercial dog foods.
There are some great advertisements on tv for commercial dog foods that make you think you are harming your dog if you don't feed it to them, when in fact just the opposite is true.
Preservatives are used to make the shelf life of products longer, but these very preservatives can be dangerous to our pet's health.
So what is the best thing to do? Well, you can always make your own pet food.
This way you know exactly what goes into it, but this is time consuming, and you have to make sure that your pet receives all the nutritional goodness he needs from it.
But this approach is not always feasible.
For busy parents, it can take us all our time to get food on the table for our children to eat, never mind having to start cooking for the dog as well, no matter how much he is loved.
The next best thing is to research which products are actually good for your pet, and which you definitely should not give them.
Then make sure that over time the ingredients do not change as ideas on how to best produce them change.
For example in human food, we never used to have soybean oil as an ingredient, but now it is in so many items, in fact it is hard to get food products without soybean oil.
So, basically, educate yourself about the best foods to give your dog or other pets, but make sure that whether it is commercial dog food or not that your dog is getting enough nutritional value every day.