Our vet was quite literally floored when we started describing to him what we gathered from this thread and began to suspect. The vet feels terrible because he’d had us giving our dog allergy medication, acid-control medication, and probiotics, not realizing that the only thing those meds were doing was allowing our dog to tolerate the Acana that may have something wrong with it.
After the Kentucky Ancana, not only did our lab start vomiting up the food (and eventually wouldn’t eat it), but he had also started drooling excessively and having a runny nose.
Turns out the dog quite literally needs none of those medications or dietary supplements. Those meds were merely masking the basic problem. Perhaps some owners would’ve switched foods earlier (and we would’ve if the vet had even hinted at this being related to the food in any of the many times they looked at the dogs for any of these snowballing symptoms), but we had fallen for all the marketing, etc. indicating that Acana was one of the best foods out there. And it remains the best-selling food carried by our local pet store.
When the lab refused to eat the food, one of our other dogs (a small dog who is fed a science diet brand food) grabbed several mouths full. Isn’t it fascinating that the small dog threw up later that day. Different dog, same result. Hmmmm.
As it turns out, the lab would’ve been better off eating any grocery-store brand than the Acana. We now have small bags of three different high-end foods (not Acana or Orijen) that he is currently testing. We have not seen this Labrador this happy and perky in years. No meds or supplements. And seems to be completely symptom free.
Without the science, though, we cannot definitely blame this on the Acana. But the coincidences and the severity of the symptoms on the Acana are too great. If there is something wrong with that food, we can’t just let people feed it to their animals.
My fear is that even if the science says that there are elevated levels of something bad in the food, we will be told that the ingredients are within industry-accepted levels. But it sure seems like there are some dogs not tolerating it and that it is actually causing injury or worse to others. That? Is not ok. But it could be that dog food manufacturers may shrug it off. After all, there must be thousands of dogs in the U.S. eating this food.
But we shall see. The university scientists have already jumped on board to get to the bottom of it, and they themselves will be doing the reporting to the FDA if the tests turn up something untoward.
Someone asked where they could send their dog food to be tested. I believe that Caroline C listed the name of the laboratory that tested her food.
