Hi everyone, we just adopted a rescue springer spaniel and for the week we've had him been giving him half the pets at home complete dry on a morning and half naturediet on a night.  He has had quite soft stools for the past few days which am thinking may be the naturediet if he's not used to wet food.

Am also reading the "It's Me or The Dog" book which says that protein should only be about 10%. 

Looking at the dry food it says 26% protein where as Naturediet is 10%.  Was also looking into Burns dry food after reading on here that it is a good food and this is 18.5% protein - I don't understand!!  Is it that the dry foods are more concentrated?  Thanks for any advice.

I have found with Naturediet that the stools are firm and much smaller than when my dogs were eating dry complete foods (and that's from a large breed and a giant breed )

Maybe you could try feeding exclusively one or the other (I would strongly recommend the Naturediet ;) ) to see if the consistency of his stools improves.

Hopefully someone else will be able to explain the protein issue for you.

tohme 11.07.04 11:52 BST  [Misc] [Reply]  

For those of you who wish to compare Naturediet protein levels against Burns and are unfamiliar with the protein and moisture content, the latter do several varieties which contain 18.5/20/21/24% protein and the moisture level of Burns is 9% Therefore:

18.5/91 x 100 = 20% protein
20/91 x 100 = 22% protein
21/91 x 100 = 23% protein
24/91 x 100 = 26% protein

So you can see by these calculations that the highest protein levels in Burns (26%) is still lower than any of the Naturediet varieties.

Hope this is of help to those of you who are comparison shopping for protein levels

This is a direct quote from TOHME, I trust she doesn't mind. :)

Dawn R.

Thanks for the reply and sorry if I'm being stupid but I still don't understand - the Naturediet says 10% protein so how is the burns lower and why are the levels so much higher than recommended in the book I'm reading?

I think you're saying the 10% protein in Naturediet doesn't take the amount of moisture into account so therefore it's actually a lot higher than 10%...I think??!!  :-)

Go to the Naturediet website (www.naturediet.net) and they have a NATUREDIET FACT SHEET - COMPARISON OF PROTEIN LEVELS IN DRY FOOD AND MOIST FOOD which explains. Hope this helps.

Thanks :-)

26% protein sounds good to me.  I feed my springer Autarky which is similar I think.