There’s a couple of reasons for this really. The first is that we have 4 pretty greedy dogs and Poppy in particular has famously ate a variety of things over the years, Paperclips, Christmas decorations, rubber bands and even her own poo (sorry if you’re having breakfast). We do get asked regularly to review a brand of food and they will send us a bag. I realise it’s a way of promoting their product but I always turn it down because the only review I could do is ‘They ate it’ - most probably the result of any food or ‘They didn’t eat it’ - a really bad outcome because it must be awful if our gang wouldn’t touch it.

Poppy knows there’s food prep going on in the kitchen.

The second reason is that I feel the only way to really assess a food is to look at it over a period of time and this doesn’t work with most companies as they understandably don’t want to supply six months of food to two Newfoundland’s and two greedy spaniels.

The exception to this as hinted at in the title is to review the food that we do use. Now we are far from experts but we do take a long time researching food before we would ever give it to the fab four. Whilst I’m well aware that good doggy pawrents do the same this may be helpful if people are looking for food for a new arrival or maybe looking for a change for whatever reason.

I realise the feeding of dogs can be a contentious subject so I just want to pre-empt any Raw v Kibble discussions by saying that I have nothing against raw and know a lot of people who have great results but it’s just not for us. For this piece however I’m just focusing on what we feed our own dogs and the results.

Recently Cookie had a pretty serious kidney problem, it’s in some earlier blog posts if you missed it. When she was diagnosed one of the first thing we needed to do was look at her diet and get her on something that would help. It was at this point I turned to The Land of Holistic Pets for advice. I had met George, the owner, at the Dog Lovers Show in Glasgow and was really impressed with their range of food and his passion for their products. I also remembered they did a kidney support diet.

I spoke to George on the phone and decided to get Cookie onto Robbie’s Holistic Brown Rice and Egg kidney support. It arrived the next day and it was an instant success. The difficulty sometimes with kidney problems is that the sufferer can lose their appetite and many prescription diets can be bland which doesn’t help. Her new food was a dry food which is soaked in water for around 30 minutes before feeding. As soon as we added the water the aroma filled the kitchen and Cookies reaction was very positive. In fact she loved the food and throughout all of her treatment until her tests came back as normal she never stopped enjoying meal times.

It was a big part in her recovery because she kept eating and it was all really good natural food which I’m sure helped with her as she fought the disease. The trouble was that all of the other dogs loved the aroma and you could see a sense of disappointment when they were served up with their normal food. When Cookie had recovered I decided to change all of the dogs over to Robbie’s Holistic Chicken and Rice and to cut a long story short we haven’t looked back. The dogs absolutely love the food and when the water is added we always have 30 minutes of extreme excitement and drool in anticipation.

The proof as they say though is in the pudding and it’s the long term effect that is what we go on. The dogs really love the food but they are also doing extremely well on it. Poppy is 12, Bailey 10, Monty 9 and Cookie 8 so they are all at that stage of life where they are supposedly slowing down. Though Monty and Cookie have a few joint issues they are all active, healthy and happy and long may that continue.

I’d absolutely recommend The Land of Holistic Pets and their food. They are excellent to deal with, have great knowledge and passion about their products and always ready with excellent advice. The food is nearly always with us next day which is also a really important feature of ordering online. All in all certainly 5 stars from me and more importantly the dogs. So if you’re thinking of a change or new diet and you want to support an excellent independant business I’d certainly give them a call.

We never do dog food reviews...well almost never.