hi everyone. i have a 11 week old gsd who is scratching like crazy on purina pro plan. the problem is, he loves the stuff. i've got a bag of "chicken soup" and a bag of "innova" and he's pretty much passing on both of them but he did stop scratching so i am sure the problem is the pro plan. today i tried mixing some pro plan in with both individually and he's eating the mix with the innova with a little more enthusiasm.

am i on the right track mixing them and then gradually decreasing the amt of pro plan?

Switching gradually is a good thing and I would say you are on the right track.

I am sure you will get some replies on allergies and what to look for and do to try to pinpoint what the dog may be allergic to, that is not one of my strongest areaa so I will leave that to them.

Have you thought about the raw diet at all?

If not a raw diet...stay away from supermarket mass produced foods.

Bruce if you only have one dog , go raw if you can .Especially that your pup is showing signs of allergies, I doubt it will stop going from one dry food to the next, most of the dry food out there have very simular ingredients: crap(sorry).
I have had my share of itching dogs and no dry food has ever made a difference but when I went raw 100% it made a huge difference on the level of itch and the skin damage due to the constent scratching.Yours is still young , I would switch to raw IMO but what you are doing with the swith with your new dry food is the right way.Good luck...
http://s141.photobucket.com/albums/r77/cadogancna/

I'd say you should be okay with the Innova... Don't know much about the Chicken Soup. But keep in mind that the dog doesn't need to decide what he eats.

You buy what has the best ingredients, for a price you can afford (or better still, go raw) and you feed it to him. He either eats it within 15 minutes, or it gets picked up until dinner time... Believe me, he won't starve himself. Within a day, two at most, he'll eat the food. There's no need to free-feed, even puppies.

Remember, just because kids PREFER McDonald's to home cooking, doesn't mean they get to decide that and have it all the time. Your dog likes the Pro Plan because it's loaded with flavour enhancement, likely in the form of discarded grease from restaurants. The Innova lacks this crap, so is less palatable.

Edited to Add:

Once you decide which food he will be eating (with YOU being the operative word there) you can either mix to prevent digestive upset, or not. Personally? I wouldn't mix. He's scratching. That isn't good. I'd fast him for a day and switch cold turkey. Some people don't like the idea of fasting pups, though, so you will have to decide whether gradual switch or fast and then cold turkey is more your style.

 Quote: Jennifer Ruzsa

Once you decide which food he will be eating (with YOU being the operative word there) you can either mix to prevent digestive upset, or not. Personally? I wouldn't mix. He's scratching. That isn't good. I'd fast him for a day and switch cold turkey. Some people don't like the idea of fasting pups, though, so you will have to decide whether gradual switch or fast and then cold turkey is more your style.

I agree with you, Jennifer, about the OP not letting the dog make the decision on what to feed.

I was wondering if you could explain why you'd rather go cold turkey with fasting over gradual change? It's been my early experience that some pups can have explosive diahrea on a sudden swich, espeically if the formula is very different (sometimes in the crate UHG).

I'm assuming you mean that the fast would make him extra hungry and less picky, but even if the dog was scratching, wouldn't a gradual change have the same effect since there would be less and less of his preferred food?

 Quote: Amber Morgan

 Quote: Jennifer Ruzsa

Once you decide which food he will be eating (with YOU being the operative word there) you can either mix to prevent digestive upset, or not. Personally? I wouldn't mix. He's scratching. That isn't good. I'd fast him for a day and switch cold turkey. Some people don't like the idea of fasting pups, though, so you will have to decide whether gradual switch or fast and then cold turkey is more your style.

I agree with you, Jennifer, about the OP not letting the dog make the decision on what to feed.

I was wondering if you could explain why you'd rather go cold turkey with fasting over gradual change? It's been my early experience that some pups can have explosive diahrea on a sudden swich, espeically if the formula is very different (sometimes in the crate UHG).

I'm assuming you mean that the fast would make him extra hungry and less picky, but even if the dog was scratching, wouldn't a gradual change have the same effect since there would be less and less of his preferred food?

Hey, nope, I always fast and then switch food cold turkey. That avoids the explosive diarrhea IME and allows me to get a dog or pup off whatever crap they came to me on! I don't really do a gradual switch, mostly because I often don't have the luxury of the original food the pup or dog came with.

Fasting will make the pup less picky for sure, but should also prevent the diarrhea. You can always feed half the recommended food the first day of feeding too, to make sure. Some probiotics powdered on the food doesn't hurt either.

Well sometimes there is a benefit for not switching cold turkey when you get your dog from someone else.One, is that you can see if your dog came with a normal stool or not and have it looked at at the vets asap to see if it has any parasites from the place it came from ect.. I always wait 2 weeks to see how the dog is without me changing anything.Then I make the switch.My male Yaggo when I got him he had the runs like water and shooting out 10 feet away I had his stool looked at by vet ,blood test ect.. We ruled out everything possible medically.Had I switched him right away I would have assumed it was the switch of food, I could have missed a medical problem, it wasn't but I could have been..Long story short, he produced normal stool only when I switched to raw 100%. True.

I've switched food a couple of times and found that my dog would vomit if I switched too quickly. So I got to where I was making the switch over the course of 4 or 5 days, mixing the old with the new, increasing the proportion of new over the course of time. That avoids the vomiting.

I'm wondering if this has to do with the fact that I switch FROM kibble TO raw that I don't have these issues? IMO, if a dog (any dog) is vomiting or experiencing the runs from a food switch, that doesn't say much about how biologically appropriate that food is for that animal... Sure they CAN adjust to it....

That being said, the times I have switched from one brand of kibble to another, fasting for 24 hours helped make it a perfect immediate transition. I find it interesting that a raw fed dog can have chicken one day, pork the next, beef the next, rabbit the day after and NEVER experience symptoms of what would otherwise be attributed to a food switch had it been kibble...

I mean, if you're using a natural kibble, why should it/would it cause problems, you know? Curious thing that...