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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

I also have a good friend who is a vet who laughs at people spending 5x as much on hippie dog food brands that either don’t do anything good or make things worse. He has had 4 dogs all live past 15 and only fed them the cheapest big brand name pet foods.

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Sometimes it’s an enterprising vet at fault: oh, your pet has ______ and needs a special diet containing _____, which we just happen to sell and you can’t find at a big box store.

Now the vet has turned your pet into a recurring revenue source beyond labour-intensive checkups.

It’s kinda like Luxxottica: a lot of their brands are only available through brick and mortal clinics. You can’t buy them through an online provider because they won’t sell to them.

Every vet will tell you that Hill's Science Diet is an excellent brand that they don't give to their own pets because it's too expensive.

The "prescription" version is even worse. You need a "prescription" from your vet to buy it for authorized retailers, but it doesn't actually have any drugs in it that are regulated in a way requiring a prescription. They've been sued over this (but I think they won).

My vet told me to put my cat on it after he had stress-related urinary problems. The problems went away, but the food is stupid-expensive, I'm a little peeved at how the system is taking advantage of me, but I don't know what to switch to other than starting to give my cat tryptophan.

Take your pet to a different veterinarian for a second opinion. There has to be at least one that doesn't shill for corporate product and can give you grounded, practical advice.

That sounds like a really shitty vet. I would stop going to one who is peddling products to me that I can’t find anywhere else.

There are quite a few online shops selling Luxottica, it is that they use their brick-and-mortar presence as a front for their online business.

I've got a lab mix who used to have horribly itchy dry skin. Since his coat is black, this also led to visible dandruff in his coat.

I tried several different types of shampoo (and a lack of shampoo), along with a spay on solutions. None of those helped. My vet suggested Iams, but that didn't seem to change anything, so I started using grain free dog food (at first Diamond Naturals) and he quickly improved.

Of course this was nearly 6 years ago, maybe now that he's older he'll be less sensitive.

Did mostly the same, went to Taste of the Wild and the food helped but not entirely. Vet recommended Apoquel and it does a much better job of controlling itching. It does have a usual list of major and minor side effects but so far, so good.

Our dog had wildly differing faeces, in color and consistency. It wasn't healthy. Switched to grain-free feed that's just a tad more expensive than normal feed and she has been healthy ever since, more energetic too.

I have a friend who has done the "just get the cheapest thing" for the past few years. Unfortunately, the cheapest has been Rachel Ray Nutrish in the clearance bin, which is on the list.

Our vet has been just fine with us feeding our cats Friskies wet food and I believe uses that himself, which while not quite the cheapest thing out there is half the price of a lot of other brands. Interestingly a lot of the formerly considered-expensive or medical-suggestion brands are now actually cheaper than the bulk of the available foods, just because their prices didn't change as new brands came into the market.

Following up a bit for context and using Petsmart as an example, in 5.5-6oz cans there's a store brand at $0.46, Friskies at $0.56, the gourmet version of the store brand at $0.56, Simply Nourish and Authority (another store brand) at $0.89, Evolve at $0.95, some Simply Nourish grain-free options at $0.95 (which likely contain the pea protein that's part of the article's coverage), then you're headed up towards the $1.20 and higher range for the larger cans. Notable at $1.25-1.29 is Science Diet.

If you're looking at the 3oz cans instead, they start around the same $0.45-0.55 range then migrate upwards quickly, so you're typically paying the same as Science Diet for anything except the cheapest of wet foods. At both sizes there are plenty of options that move up into the $2+ range.

It's remarkable to think about the profit margin there has to be on these, particularly when you look at the ingredient lists and find all the "meat by-products," "chicken by-products," "turkey by-products," "fish meal" and the like. For the price per pound of this stuff I might as well be buying them fresh fish, boneless/skinless chicken and the occasional New York strip steak or even a nice filet.

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