Hi Gwen J, welcome to DFA, and yes, you’re in the right forum.
First of all let me say that your friend is blessed to have so many apparently healthy dogs who live to be 12 to 15 years old 😉
Health and longevity in dogs, like in people, is related to a combination of genes and environment. So, while your friend’s dogs appear healthy and live to be 12 to 15 years old on what you call a below average kibble, I believe that with all other things being equal, those same dogs would have been a little healthier and might have lived a bit longer if they had eaten a less processed, more species appropriate diet than a below average kibble.
That was the easy part, the difficult part is figuring out exactly what a healthier more species appropriate diet is and how you can achieve that within yours or anyone else’s financial and other constraints.
One way is to add approximately 10% lightly cooked meat to a dog’s diet. I would stick to a meat that is already in the food your feeding. Another way is to rotate between 2 or 3 different kibbles that don’t have overlapping proteins. Most companies now have a red meat, a lamb or a venison, a fish, and one or 2 poultry formulas.
The reason for adding only 10% lightly cooked meat is that the kibble is probably balanced as far as vitamins and minerals go, and if you added more than 10% of anything, you could unbalance that diet over the long term. The reason to rotate is that it helps expose your dog to a variety of proteins and nutrients and helps a dog have a more diverse population of healthy bacteria in their gut, and a diverse population of bacteria is very beneficial to a dog’s immune system.
Transition between foods s l o w l y. The longer a dog is on the same food the greater the chance of problems when switching foods. Try a 3 week transition to begin with. Add 10% of the new food to the old food, then every 2 days go up another 10%, so that it takes 20 days to fully transition.
Hopefully things will go well and then every 3 months or so you can switch to a new food until you find at least 3 foods that don’t cause any problems, and that your dog enjoys.
I know I wrote a lot of stuff, but in reality I’ve only scratched the surface. For now I’ve told you about 2 things that I believe will improve the health of yours and your friends dogs.
Good luck, keep us updated, and in the future if someone replies to you in a manner you don’t like, just IGNORE THEM, you’ll have a much better experience here if you do!
