Dog Food Ratings
Dog food ratings, especially online, are a tough system to understand. While they can certainly be helpful in finding a better type of food for your pet, they can also be extremely misleading when it comes to actual real evidence of a superior pet food. Naturally, your own experience is the best, but with so many different pet foods out there, from so many different sources, which are all made with different ingredients and have different manufacturing methods (organic versus traditional), you need some guidance to get started towards finding the best food for your pet.
Online, you’ll find lots of list on many different websites. Most of these are determined by users and include comments as well as 1-10 rating systems or some star rating system. These are all very arbitrary and don’t really mean much. Furthermore, the quality of the voters is only determined by the people who can find the website in the first place. In other words, it’s not a good overall sample of the people using the dog chow being rated in the first place. Finally, most people who go online to give their opinion usually do so in a negative manner. This can skew most results of any rating system towards the negative.
Companies are much of a help either. Instead, these companies will definitely be looking to endorse their brands rather than give an accurate sample of how good foods compare overall. It’s best to usually not trust these at all.
Finally, humanitarian organizations or consumer magazines usually have the most variety as well as the most balanced rating. These groups test for certain quality indicators and do so over a long period of time. By far they are the best companies and organizations to go through to figure out what is best for your pet.
However, it should be noted that personal comments that go with ratings (common on large commercial sites like Amazaon.com) are often extremely helpful if browsed. These are great places to see trends such as ‘bad flavorful’ or ‘ingestion troubles’ crop up over the long run. These are minor troubles that may be missed by major agencies and can only be spotted by thoughtful pet owners.
The best way to get a general sense of dog food ratings to be best for your pet is to combine all of these methods. This will give you a lot of information and you’ll have a good idea of the range of quality for a given food.
