Japanese pet food: The best dog food name, bar none.

If ever there was the perfect name for the dry food my dog eats, the Japanese brand SMACK most certainly is it. Smack. SMACK! The very name conjures fond memories of obedience training, back when my much maligned pooch didn't know the difference between furniture and chew toys.

For truth in marketing, nothing can beat Smack's proclamation of "Enough Nutrition", and the dogs on the bag certainly look happily enough. Of course, my dog seemed to know what was in store and was somewhat nonplussed when I took these photos. Apparently it looks better than it tastes.



























































Postscript: As a general rule, my dog lives exclusively on the cheapest dog-food I can find. It's not that I don't care about her--she was expensive enough to warrant to least some nutritional concern--but dog food is really just filler; conspiracy neatly packed in colourful bags and cans.

For eons, dogs did just fine eating human table scraps. Then along came some marketing geniuses who proclaimed, with the help of a few influential and well paid-off vets, that table scraps are no longer good enough for our dogs. Within a few years, a multi-billion dollar industry was born and dogs in developed countries started eating better than the majority of humans on the planet.

No, selected table scraps are just fine for dogs and they always have been. But if the scraps coming off your table aren't fit for a dog, perhaps it's not the dog's food you should be concerned about.