Pet food challenge!

So, I'm not sure this particular project has been done before. At least, not in public. Not that anyone will admit to. You might think I'm gross. Or crazy. Or crazy gross. I just wanna know one thing: what's my dog eating every day?

We went to a pet expo downtown in Sarasota the other day, and got a whole bunch of sample packets of dog food, and it occurred to me that a lot of claims were being made about nutrition and palatability, and organicness, and earth-friendliness and the like. Now, nutririon can be quantified, to some extent. Calories, protein and fiber content, vitamins... yeah, yeah. And purity of ingredients can be claimed. We use 70% real chicken and no byproducts! Ok, great. But palatability? Who's actually quantifying this variable?

My dogs think just about everything is tasty. Dog food? All about it. Cheese? Like, OMG! Dead fish, decaying on the beach? That's so tasty they not only devour it, but want to roll in it to take the scent home. I've even seen dogs eat poop. POOP, people.

Now, I'd like to say I'm not one to judge, but come on. We all judge. So, I'm here for you and your dog. I consider myself a bit of a conisseur of people food. I'm not exactly a snob, but I do judge my food rather critically. Bland. Too much salt. Dry. Overcooked. Not enoughh salt. Trying too hard. Not trying enough... so I'm going to take the hit on this one. No, I'm not about to try some poop or dead fish for palatability. But I figure, I feed my dogs out of a giant bag of dried food chunks every day, and they seem to like it quite a lot.so here goes...

I'm going to try each and every one of these dog foods. Then on to the next. I'll be judging on several loose criteria, with overall flavor being the holy grail. I'm assuming, for all intents, that nutritionally these foods are all comparable. The specifics, as they stand, may be the subject of future debate. In the scope of this comparison, however, flavor will be king. I rarley rave over how nutritious a meal is. I do rave oer flavor. So here goes.