I feed my dogs tinned Cesar mixed with Bakers complete dry?

Just because a food seems expensive doesn't mean it is good.

Cesar is low quality because it used bad meat sources, along with chemical preservatives. The same goes for the dry food. It has the bad meat along with mill sweepings and other fillers like corn that your dog can't digest.

With all of this undigestable food, your dogs body has to work harder to leach out the unnatural vitamins added to make the food somewhat healthy. This can affect your dogs immune system and make them more prone to sickness.

Since you have small dogs, I would suggest Canidae. It has good protein levels (not too high) and it has no fillers, and contains good, high quality meat ingredients.

Its also better to feed a food like Canidae because you actually spend less because you feed less.

I DESPISE these brands of food I'm afraid, along with Butchers, Winalot and Pedigree Chum - these 5 are without a doubt the brands most likely to make dogs fat, even if they only eat a small amount.

I'm a vet nurse, I run weight clinics for animals, and seriously, 90% of the obese dogs I see are on either one of the above brands or a supermarket own brand - sometimes they're not even eating a particularly large amount of it.

I'm not saying every dog who eats one of these brands WILL get fat, because every dog's metabolism is different - but you're definitely increasing a dog's chances of overweight by feeding these. If your dog ever starts to look a bit podgy, change the food.

If you have a look at the ingredients on these, I think you'll see a few artificial colours and flavours, as well as something like 'various sugars'. The percentage of fat and carbs in them is often comparable to any other brand, but I think due to the ingredients it's a high percentage of saturated fat sugared carbs. Not good quality foods.

Chalice

Baker's Complete Tender Beef & Country Vegetables

Ingredients:

Cereals, Meat and animal derivatives (minimum 4% chicken beef and minimum 4% fresh meat in the soft moist kernel), Vegetable protein extracts, Derivatives of vegetable origin (1.1% charcoal in the dark brown kernel), Oils and fats, Various sugars, Minerals, Yeasts, Vegetables (minimum 4% vegetables in the green kernel). Contains EC permitted colourants, antioxidants and preservatives.

All I can say is Holy Cow! This is one of the worst foods I've seen in a long time.

One of the big red flags is that the ingredients are so vague..."cereals" could be anything (and grains of any sort as the #1 ingredient is not good). "Meat" again can be anything, including road kill and euthanized pets and zoo animals. Not having a specific source of meat named is a red flag for sure. Full of sugar, not to mention the artifical coloring, flavor, and preservatives to keep the pieces soft.

You can feed both dry and canned foods, but make sure they are both high-quality.

The foods you listed are NOT high quality. In fact, they are some of the worst foods. Here are the reviews:

Bakers dry - http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/sh...

Cesar canned - http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/sh...

Whether you're feeding dry, canned, or a combination; feed a high-quality food. Check out 4, 5, and 6 star rated foods at: http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/dog_food_reviews/

Information about dog food ingredients:

http://www.dogfoodproject.com/

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The key is to check the ingredients. The first 2 should be actual meat, not meat by product. By product and fillers are not good for your dog, its somewhat equivalent to a human eating McDonald's twice a day 365 days a year.

I would suggest you check out the raw diet. It is complete species appropriate nutrition for our beautiful carnivores! I have included many links for you to check out.

I have toy dogs and also dogs with no teeth who do extremely well on the raw diet and are even able to crunch bone, despite lack of teeth, because it is jaw strenght they use and not actually teeth.

Hope this helps,

What are the first 5-10 ingredients.. If it has allot of wheat,soy,corn and by-products it is a bad food.

edit: Bassetnut, said it perfectly.

What kind of Terrier is your Maltese mixed with?

www.dogfoodanalysis.com explains why.