Quote Originally Posted by VolvoRottie View Post
Very true, when I was a kid in the 1960s, my first dog Daisy ate Alpo nearly exclusively along with my mom's then terrific home cooking. We would look into the ALPO can and it looked just like Dinty Moore Beef Stew sold today for human consumption; our dog got real beef and yes it had veggies in there along with the fat and gravy of cooking it, it smelled pretty good and that dog loved it to pieces. Today ALPO Is crappy dog food and isn't at all what it was back then. Daisy lived until she was 15 but she was a small Wire-haired Fox Terrier and a maniac her whole life.

My next door neighbor had a hunting dog reject, a Pointer named Ben who was fed the cheapest crap from WalMart his whole life; he was 19 yrs old when he died.

I think our dogs lived a long time back then due to not only better food but genetics and maybe less horrendous chemicals in the environment.

I feed my 11 yr old Rottie kibble now, but when she arrived here as a shelter save/rescue, she was 2 yrs old and a living skeleton. Her fur was dull and flaky, and she had a lot of goo in her eyes. She not only was fed good food immediately , she was fed human food for a year as I was really worried about her health. Turns out she was young and bounced back, and has great hips if not shoulders. Then in yr 2, I transitioned her to Candae kibble [before they changed the recipe and lost many customers due to reactions like diarrhea, and I mixed in home-cooking like baked chicken/veggies and brown rice and my own good broth. I made that once a week in my oven and soon, Zev looked like a million bucks and frankly had the energy of 5 dogs. She's been eating either Candae or Chicken Soup for Dogs mixed with my home cooked food for 9 yrs now and the dog is never sick; she is lame unfortunately due to old age and bi-lateral Shoulder OCD from too much jumping off our 5 ft. tall deck into the grass in our yard [bypassed the stairs for yrs.] chasing squirrels. She was a 99 lb dog and top loaded like many Rotties and of course, her weight is in the front, so her shoulders took a pounding for yrs. If you follow my links in my profile you can see her picks. She looked great until she was 10 yr old. Now she looks and acts old sadly. I'm heartbroken thinking about it.

I also used to take her hiking in local forests here for hours at at time multiple times a week; and she was off leash running in a local park when we didn't hit the woods/state parks daily as I was SAHM. Exercise kept her lean well until 9 yrs old and she only gained weight in the last 2 yrs as her shoulder OCD got worse; I feed her 10 caps of 1200 mg. Fish oil a day for that arthritis and pain per my vet. I don't like to use Rimadyl or similar drugs if I can help it.

I hope the exercise and good diet prolong her life but I'm realistic if dreading the idea that cancer still statistically kills most of her breed and many others as well. Diet mainly can't stave off cancer caused by environmental factors despite our efforts.

She's my oldest dog so far; most of the others died of cancer around 9 yrs old.
my malia was a five week old rescue who emerged from the georgia woods....she was dying, for real and we never expected her to live...her skin was so thin that the immune boosters would leak out....so we just comforted her...
when she turned ten, the dog who could outrun a lizard in georgia couldn't outrun anyone anymore....

we put her on raw and now she is trotting again....her physical appearance...while grey in some areas is that of a younger dog.....she is muscle bound as the vet said on saturday...her teeth are pearly white and she no longer limps.

she runs circles around the three year old pug, whose beginnings were also suspect....

both are doing so much better than they did on home cooked, on better kibble, on anything....

i don't know if it will extend her life, but she's a damned sight more lively today and that's what counts, for me.....