I'm not concerned, certainly yet. I can neither fathom that grains are needed in dog food nor that 590 dogs out of the 80 million in the US is a number to worry about. Not to mention that it only would make sense that people feeding high end foods would be more likely to bring their pets to a veterinary cardiologist in the first place. Is anyone out there changing their dog's diet based on this?

I have been reading about it, of course. Then, again, I have heard not-so-good things about grain-free diets for a long time now, long before this latest report from the FDA and the accompanying stories. I've also heard of the possible connection between lack of taurine in the diet and DCM.

I am not changing the food I feed. I currently am feeding one of the brands on that infamous list (and have fed others on there, too, over the years), but I do not feed the grain-free formulas. I also don't just feed dry kibble. My own personal preference is to feed variety. I don't want to trust my dogs' life-long nutritional health to just one company. So they get a variety of things added to their kibble, canned food, Honest Kitchen dehydrated, or just plain old "human" food.

One thing I can tell you is that I called my veterinary cardiologist a couple of days ago, wanting to get my senior guy in for a one-year follow-up. They are booked out for three and a half months! I can't get an appointment until late October. They were very apologetic, stating they have never, ever been this busy before. Of course, they would see me right away if it was an emergency, but that's not the case with my dog right now. (Although I suppose it could be before three and a half months go by!) But you can bet that I will be asking my vet for his opinion about the dog food issue, what he is seeing in his practice, and whether that has something to do with how long it takes to get an appointment with them now.

I feed well over 80% raw, but when I do incorporate kibble, it's Orijen or Acana, which were both on the list. Some of the local vets are even sending out newsletters advising their clients to stop feeding grain-free. Which almost inevitably means these people are now going to be feeding a worse kibble. Probably a great time to be a veterinary cardiologist and a terrible time to be a higher end dog food seller.