As we all know, prices of everything have been rising sharply for some time now. I’m not sure where the government was getting their 10% inflation from because that is not what we have been seeing. From small increases in livefood to 100% increases in some seed products and of course a 600% increase in energy for commercial properties. All fuelled by post covid adjustments, war in Europe and around the world and of course good old corporate racketeeering (looking at you oil and gas producers). That’s why it came as a very pleasant surprise when we were informed by our supplier that Orijen is actually going down.
Following on from this we have noticed other prices starting to fall and other suppliers, such as our APL manufacturere promising no further increases in price this year. The price reductions we are seeing range from a couple of pence on smaller items to really quite large drops of several pounds on larger bags or bulk items. on Hopefully these are early signs of an end to the spiralling price increases we have seen over the last year or two.
As a retailer we have very little control over prices. Our suppliers tell us what the increase is and we see how much of that increase we can absorb before passing any residual onto our customers. As an example the last increase in our dog food to our customers was around £4 a 12 or 15kg bag but to us it was actually £8. So although we charged more, we made less. Such is life. With price reductions however we like to pass on the entire saving to our customers as soon as we can.
Orijen prices have already been put down and some other products, such as dried mealworms have also been reduced in store and on our website. As, hopefully more reductions come through, we will pass these straight on to our customers. We know that people notice (and certainly comment) when prices go up but don’t notice when they go down so forgive us if we point it out when it happens!
We have stocked Natures MenuRaw Feed for a number of years. In our opinion “Raw is Best”, closely followed by grain free kibble for those without the time and sadly in my case, memory to defrost food daily. The domestic dog’s closest relative is the wolf, not the chicken, so food containing wheat and maize should be avoided (most supermarket brands). It is put in for the manufacturers’ benefit, not the dogs (a filler that keeps costs down) and if the packaging mentions “meat and animal derivitives”, well, best put it in the bin, it is not meat as you know it.
This week we took delivery of a further two raw food freezers and moved our old freezers out the back, effectively doubling our stock holding of frozen dog, reptile and fish food. The new freezers are also display types so it is easier to see what we have in stock (and for us to find it!).
Our reasons for investing in new new equipment are mainly because, as more and more people see the benefits of feeding their dog a more natural diet, our sales of our ranges of raw and grain free foods continues to grow at pace and we just need the extra storage to keep up with demand. It also allows us to expand the raw feed ranges even further in the future.
If your dog has issues around food senitivity, either skin or digestive and it is more common than you may think, do pop in for some advice from our trained staff. It is amazing how many itchy skin, recuring ear infections, paw licking and loose stool problems are down to feeding food filled with wheat and maize. Just hink how much you can save in vets bill for repeated visits and how much more comfortable you dog will be.
We also have some FREE Natures Menu Raw Feed freezer bags for the next few customers that purchase from our new Natures Menu Raw Feed freeezers.
May has started well, nice weather and at least the hope of an end in sight for the lockdown. Fingers crossed. We now have our monthly offers for May available in store, for telephone orders and online. Please remember to call us at the store on 01452 501882 if you require FREE local delivery. You can order on line for courier delivery or to collect in store but you need to call us for FREE delivery to Gloucester and Cheltenham. We can also do delivery to nearby areas like Stroud and the Forest for a small charge (£5).
As always our monthly offers can prove very popular and can sell out in store or at the wholesalers quite quickly so do order early to avoid disappointment. Also the FREE local delivery is getting busier so please get orders in early for same day delivery. We are at the point where we may have to defer late orders until the next available slot.
Happy New Year to all our existing and future customer. To kick the new year off we have a great set of offers available until the end of January. Have a look at the list and click on the link to buy (where available online). Better still, pop in and see us in person in our Gloucester pet shop or call 01451 501882 to place and order.
Our ever popular supplier’s offers for October are now in store and on line in our webstore. This may be the last time we post these offers here as we are making some changes to our websites. More on that soon. In the mean time have a browse of this months fantastic offers.
It seems a bit harsh but I am afraid it is true in all but a very few cases. Wild animals have the ability to respond to changes in their environment. If they feel cold, they will move to a more sheltered or warmer spot, if they are afraid, they will run away, if they are thirsty they will find water and if they are hungry, find food. Each species evolves and adapts to eat a particular type of food and retains this ability to respond to changes in and around it. It has response-ability. Put an animal in a captive environment and you have removed this ability to respond. Now if it is thirsty it can only drink if you provide the water. It can only eat if you provide the food. You have taken on its response-ability. If you are not a responsible pet owner then it’s the animal that suffers the consequences.
So a dog can only eat the food you provide. It will however retain its natural instinct to eat whatever it can, whenever it can, as in the wild it does not know when it will find another meal. The expression to “wolf it down” comes from the ability of a wolf to eat huge amounts of food in one sitting (then to spend days resting with a distended stomach whilst it digests its massive intake of food or regurgitates some for its pups and other pack members). If the owner presents the dog with too much food or inappropriate food, the dog cannot be blamed for eating it. It will not stop when it has had sufficient, it will keep going until it cannot fit more in and will usually still eat treats if you, the leader of its pack offers it some. Offer a dog poisonous food such as chocolate or grapes/sultanas etc. and it will eat it, to its own detriment because you gave it to him.
So you are in control of your dogs food intake. Yes they will scavenge things you would rather they did not but in the house and garden you control that. If the dog eats the Sunday joint off the side then I’m afraid it’s your fault for leaving it exposed. If the dog eats some Christmas cake and ends up at the vets. (at best) then, well you guessed it. What a lot of people don’t realise is that some foods that are suitable for humans are not suitable for dogs. Chocolate, grapes, avocados are all poisonous to dogs.I was explaining this to a customer once and a lady interrupted and told us that her granny had fed her dog a bit of her chocolate every day for years and the dog was fine. I explained that my mother in law is in her 80s and has smoked 20 cigarettes a day her whole adult life and is still going strong, I wouldn’t however, recommend it as a lifestyle choice. Some foods are just poisonous to dogs, it’s a question of the dose and the individual dog but they are poisonous.
So you have a dog and you don’t feed it human foods, You go to the supermarket and get dog food and dog treats so you have done your bit and if the dog gets fat now it’s not your fault is it. Wrong. Firstly, do you follow the feeding guidelines on the food? Are you reducing this amount if you give the dog a treat? Do you even know what is in the food you pick off the supermarket shelf? If you did you would probably realise you are giving your dog chicken feed.
There are rules for the terms used on dog (and cat) food packaging. If it says “fresh” chicken, then that is what was used to make the food, fresh chicken meat. If it says chicken then its still chicken but it may have been previously frozen of dried for storage. If it says chicken (or poultry) meal then that is the rest of the carcass, after the meat has been removed, ground up into a bone and cartilage meal (a necessary part of the food, it’s where the glucosamine, condroitin and calicum are found). If it says meat and animal derivitives then you might want to reconsider using this food. This term is for what is left when you have taken away the meat and the bones, ie not a lot! You will find that for foods that list this, the first ingredient on the ingredients list is nearly always cereal, or wheat, or maize. The protein content of the food will not come from meat as there is too little in the food but from wheat and maize gluten. In other words it is a bag of cereal with a bit of nondescript meat product mixed in – chicken feed, not dog food.
The other thing about these foods is that whilst they don’t have a lot, if any, meat they do have a lot of carbohydrate. The one thing that is guaranteed to make a dog put on weight and get fat is carbohydrate. A dog needs very little of this, if any. It gets its energy from fat and protein. High levels of carbohydrate get converted straight to fat deposits. Some of the worst foods even have added sugar, totally wrong. It is not added to improve pallatability, dogs have far fewer taste buds than us and don’t taste much, it’s all smell. It is there because a lot of these foods are made from waste products from the human food processing industry, which already have sugar added and we know what a problem we have with high sugar content childrens’ cereals. Where do you think the waste from this industry goes? Who owns the leading supermarket brands of dog food? Do they also own the largest supermarket brands of childrens’ cereals? Hmmm. Would you feed your child meat paste sandwiches and cake every meal for the rest of its life? No of course not but people are feeding this to dogs all the time and this is usually where the problem is.
If you feed your dog the correct, appropriate food and treats, follow the feeding guidelines and obviously give it plenty of exercise, you can be confident that you will have a healthy and fit dog that will live longer than a dog fed on supermarket food. However you will also probably have to deal with people telling you your dog is skinny. It isn’t but we are all so used to seeing overweight dogs that when we see one that is as it should be we think it looks thin. It is just perception. Most (around 90%) of dogs are overweight. A lot are obese, we just don’t notice any more. Unfortunately as with humans, being overweight greatly reduces the dog’s life expectancy and introduces a host of other conditions that make its later life uncomfortable and expensive..
To avoid all the problems associated with a poor diet, feed your dog on proper food. We sell frozen meat, bones and vegetable mixes. A raw food diet is probably the best, it is certainly the most natural. However we all live busy lives and I know for sure that I would forget to defrost the food in time, be in a rush during preparation etc. For this reason I do not use this option (although they do get it occasionally). Instead I feed a good quality, grain free, high meat content kibble. Obviously meat is expensive these days and the higher the meat content of a food, the higher the price of a bag. However the amount fed is lower, so cost balances out somewhat. Also as a side benefit the dog will poop less and the poops will be of a better consistency and easier to deal with. This alone is often reason enough to change food.
Alfie, the Jack Russel in the photo would cost 32 pence per day on APL grain free turkey. 32p a day! That is it. He doesn’t need anything extra. If he has a treat then he has less food that day. My dog, Venus (below) would cost £1.20 a day. She is a staffie/lurcher cross, weighing 31kg. If you can’t afford 32p a day to feed a Jack Russel it would be better not to have one, rather than buy supermarket food and own a little barrel. In any case it would still probably work out the same or more for supermarket food anyway. As for wet food, unless you have been advised by a vet. for very specific reasons then forget it. You are just buying a tin of water (check the packaging, most wet foods are 70-80% water, sometimes disguised by terms such as “aqua” or “moisture”) with poor quality ingredients That’s why people used to add mixer, which is just wheat biscuit. I worked it out for my cousin once, for his dalmations which he fed on the cheapest tinned dog food I was able to source for him. It still worked out cheaper per day to switch to the most expensive, highest quality grain free, high meat content (85%) dry dog food we stock,. Unfortunately, even though I worked it all out for him, listed all the benefits and showed him how much he would save, he could not see past the price of the bag of Orijen, versus the price of one tin of Breederpack wet food. Ho Hum.
So how do you know if your dog is overweight? Sadly if you don’t already know then it probably is. But as a rule of thumb it goes like this. Looking from the side you should see a definite difference between the chest and abdomen areas on the underside of the dog. The line should swoop down from the neck, around the chest, rise up significantly to the abdomen and back down where it meets the back legs. you should be just able to see the outline of the vertebrae above the hips. Just, they should not be protruding. Looking from above the sides should curve in behind the chest and flare out again at the hip and you should be able to see the outline of the ribs under the flesh (obviously this is more difficult on long and wire haired dogs). Observe the outline, not see ribs poking out, the difference is obvious. Now these rules are general, a greyhound has a much more pronounced line on the underside than a labrador but it still holds true. If you look at your dog and its chest line to abdomen look straight or from above has no “waist”, your dog is fat and could do with losing a few pounds. This is not anything to do with looks. It is just that a healthy, fit dog is going to live longer and have fewer issues as it ages than a poorly fed, over weight one. It is not a judgement. Yes you are responsible for it but that in a way is a good thing. It just means you are able to do something about it. Don’t feel bad or “judged” because it is the case, there are that many over weight dogs around it has become the norm and we have become inured to it.
Where I come form the phrase “fit as a butchers dog” is much used. There is a reason for the phrase existing. The butchers dog was getting the right diet whilst the rest were eating the scraps we throw away. Now we just allow others to put the scraps in bags and sell it back to us in supermarkets.
May ‘s offers are now available in our Gloucester Pet Shop. Most are also available on line in our webstore. As usual these offer prices are always popular so don’t delay, or risk missing a bargain. I have added a price comparison where I can. Not all products are stocked elsewher locally though. It is always useful for us to do this as it shows us that often our normal price is less than our competitors, let alone our monthly offers. I mean, check out the price of Johnsons IGR House Flea Spray below. We are only a little family run shop and we do not get the discounts for volume the big companies get and yet they still decide to charge the customer more than we do. Go figure!
We can’t compare these to other Gloucester pet shops as they don’t seem to stock the grain free varieties but the cheaper “with rice” varieties are £1.39 at PAH and £1.49 at Pets Corner.
We can’t compare these to other Gloucester pet shops as they don’t seem to stock the grain free varieties but the cheaper “with rice” varieties are £1.39 at PAH and £1.49 at Pets Corner.
Spring is here, although as I write this the temperature is dropping again after the warm end to February. Ho hum. Our March offers are now in store and also available on line. Last months offers proved very popular so make sure you get in early before we run out.
2019 is upon us and we have some great offers to start the year. Our regular prices usually beat our competitors anyway but with our monthly offers you can save even more. We’ve included a price comparison where possible to show you how much.
Felix Multi Variety Pouches in Jelly 96 x 100g pouches for only £19.99 saving £8 on RRP Couldn’t find these packs locally but the cheapest I could see was two packs of 40 pouches for £20 in ASDA. You get an extra 16 pouches with our offer.
Angell Pets July offers are now avaiable in store and on line. Some great offers again including flea treatments for dogs and for cats. Which is handy because the little so and sos are going to be breeding and maturing like crazy in this weather!