I have in the past couple of months changed my dog's food to James Wellbeloved Lamb & Rice. I had slowly introduced it and he seemed to love it. However, I have noticed over the past couple of weeks that when grooming him, he seems to have a lot of dry scurfy skin cming out in the brush. This has never been a problem before. Could it be the food??? Has anyone else had a similar experience?? I don't want to change his diet again unless really necessary. Would the fish & rice JWB be better for his skin if indeed it is the food that could be causing this - or can someone recommend a food that would help to combat this.

What was the oil (fat) content of the previous food and what is the content of the current diet?

It is usually a lack of oil in the diet that leads to scurfy skin, look at this first and also what was the protein source of the previous food?

You could add some tinned sardines/pilchards/mackeral to the food twice a week or give Vitamin E and FBO supplements plus Starflower (Borage) oil.

I would suspect that the new food has a somewhat lower fat content than the previous food the dog was fed.

Either you will have to add some oil (1t or so) to the daily diet or look for a higher fat content in another food.

You can mix what you are currently feeding with a new food. My dog lives on a blend of 3 or 4 different foods, some puppy, some adult and he is 10 months old...

Do you not have any problems mixing i.e. loose stools

What is FBO supplement

>What is FBO supplement

Taken from a Raw Feeding site here:

There is one supplement that many raw feeders use: Fish Body Oil. This is used to supplement Omega-3 fatty acids lacking in grain-fed, domestic meats (grass-fed, free-range meats have an appropriate Omega-6:Omega-3 ratio).

I've deleted large parts of this extract so you might want to look at the original text, it specifically mentions dry skin.  However it's worth noting it relates specifically to raw feeding rather than kibble

Hope this helps :)

no problems with mixing foods, you just add the new food a little at a time until the pup gets used to it.
If its an adult dog you probably can do it faster.

I've had exactly the same problem with foods that have Lamb as the meat.  Both on Burns and on JWB Lamb my dogs had scurfy skin.  I swapped to chicken and it went away again :) 

I just avoid Lamb based foods, and they have lovely coats and skin :)

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to try switching flavours of the JWB to a poultry one. I have looked at the analysis and its only 10% oil. His previous food was 16% but this was Pedigree complete and he didn't like it hence the change. I'm going to supplement the lower oil content with some oily fish to see if this helps.
Thanks again everyone for the great advice. I always know I can rely on Champdogs!!!!

Hi Twinny
I put my pug on JWB and had exactly the same problem. She is back on hills science dry maintenance and it actually cleared up within one week!

Thanks Olive. Was actually thinking after reading some other threads that it may be the JWB. Gonna try just by adding some oily fish but may have to look at changing his JWB if that doesn't work. Trouble is - he's such a fussy monkey and JWB is the only one I have come cross that he will eat. Have to confess, have not tried Hills. There's so many foods out there to try!!!

I would change to a base diet that the dog got on better with.  The Arden Grange (my prefered food) is a similar price and the fat content is higher.

There are many others, compare the nutritional breakdowns.