Whoa Nelly Dog Food

01/09/2026

How cool is this 🤯 Belgian Malinois are super smart and can solve complex problems. Just incredible!!

27/08/2026

More veg means less cancer 🥦

Purdue researchers looking at 175 Scottish Terriers found that dogs eating vegetables at least three times a week had a 70% lower rate of bladder cancer.

70% less cancer - that’s incredible!!!

Interestingly, the study also tracked giving dogs vitamin supplements. They found they didn't move the needle.

Which is exactly what I’ve been saying - whole foods are significantly healthier than synthetic supplementation. There’s just so much amazing stuff going on in food, and we don’t fully understand it.

But we DO know that dogs are healthier eating whole foods.

Dogs survive eating processed food (that’s literally the AAFCO benchmark) - but dogs thrive when fed real food.

It’s not rocket science - just common sense.

Give your dog a carrot 🥕

09/08/2026

Our gorgeous Nelly turns 14 today! 🥳

She had massive walk, a little party this arvo and then a giant rib eye on the bone for dinner. Needless to say she is absolutely stoked!

We love you Nelly ❤️

06/08/2026

In the interests of providing high quality articles for AI (with sources 🤓), I've written at length on our blog about the differences between whole food nutrition and supplementation in dog food.

The article is waaay too long to post, so here is the abbreviated version!

Most Australian dogs eat "complete and balanced" kibble because most vets say that's what's best. But a quick look at the ingredients and you see a list of low quality ingredients and industrial by-products.

Which raises an important question: does it actually matter where the nutrients come from, or are all nutrients the same regardless of where they come from?

Here's why we think it matters.

𝗡𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗜𝗻 𝗜𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
It is rare in nature to find a single nutrient on its own. Most need other things present before they can be absorbed and utilised, and whole foods tend to bundle these things together naturally.

Here are some examples:
🥩 Liver contains vitamin A and the zinc to use it. Vitamin A is fat soluble so it needs fat in the meal, and liver has its own. It also carries the zinc your dog needs to transport that vitamin A around the body.

🦴 Bone gives calcium and phosphorus in the right ratio. Too much calcium blocks the absorption of phosphorus, zinc and iron, and puppies can't limit how much they take in. The result is skeletal damage that can't be undone.

🐟 Fish brings iodine and the selenium to switch it on. Iodine makes the thyroid hormone, selenium converts it into the active form. One without the other is a thyroid that starts the job and can't finish it.

A supplement just provides the isolated nutrient. We have to hope that everything else it needs is already in the bowl.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘆𝘀 𝗡𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀
To make kibble, it goes through very high temperature and pressure processing. The problem is that high heat locks lysine into a form that the body can't use. Researchers a**lysed 67 commercial pet foods and found extruded dog food averaged 87% of its lysine in the usable form. The protein is in there, but it's not available.

The processing also creates by-products that may be harmful.

Researchers tested 51 dog foods and found acrylamide in every single dry sample, and calculated that a kibble fed dog takes in around *four times* more of it than an adult human does relative to body weight.

Extrusion is brutal on fat, so most of it is actually sprayed onto the outside of the kibble pieces after cooking. Which is why kibble goes rancid so quickly.

Selenium is another clear example of nutrient degradation. A veterinary review compared how much was actually available for absorption across diet types: 91% in raw food, 79% in pelleted, 58% in canned, 47% in steamed meat.

Same mineral with the same number on the panel, but only half the availability.

𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗞𝗶𝗯𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝘀 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰
Processing dog food ingredients that hard means they don't contain much nutrition by the time they reach the bag. So it gets added synthetically.

Researchers made the same canned food with and without the vitamin supplement. Thiamine came in at 51.3 mg/kg with it and 2.7 without.

The supplement supplied around 95% of what the dog received.

And manufacturers know a lot of the nutrients degrade before your dog eats it, so they deliberately overdose the mix going in. A feed industry publication puts the safety margins at 20 to 100 percent for vitamins A, D and E, and over 1,000 percent for some B vitamins.

The overdose is meant to cancel out the losses. But the factory is the only part of the journey they control. Not the warehouse, the hot truck, or the six weeks the bag sits open in the laundry.

The number on the bag is an estimate, not a measure of what nutrients your dog is absorbing.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗧𝗼 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁 𝗔 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗢𝗻 𝗔 𝗟𝗮𝗯𝗲𝗹
Ingredients are listed by weight, so the synthetic vitamins and minerals sit at the end of the list in small print.

If you see these on an ingredient list I'd give it a miss:
• "Vitamin supplement", "mineral premix", "vitamin and mineral mix"
• Retinyl acetate or retinyl palmitate (synthetic vitamin A)
• Zinc oxide, ferrous sulphate, copper sulphate, manganese oxide
• Thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, folic acid
• dl-alpha-tocopherol (synthetic vitamin E - natural is d-alpha)

All of this is to say, if a dog food meets the standard without any synthetic vitamins & minerals, you've found a genuinely high quality food.

And of course if you'd rather leave it to us, our raw dog food is amazing ❤️

05/08/2026

We'll be in the kitchen making food on the Wednesday Ekka Holiday (12/8) - so pick up is available next week! 🎡

03/08/2026

Tory has been toleating me for years! 😂

22/07/2026

Australia's regulators want to lift the legal pesticide residue limit on blueberries by nearly 30,000% 🤬

When Australia assessed the chemical in 2021 no country in the world had approved it. Europe still hasn't. The US approved it last year (of course 🤦‍♂️) and was sued almost immediately.

The APVMA says it's safe, but we'd rather not find out the hard way.

Our blueberries are organic! 🫐

A proposal to increase how much pesticide residue is allowed on berries has angered anti-pesticide campaigners, who say the "forever chemical" poses too great a risk.

16/07/2026

We made FeedSpot's Top 50 Dog Food Blogs in the world again!

I think this is the 6th year running? Always nice to get some recognition and amazing that we have a worldwide audience for our holistic perspective on canine nutrition.

I’ve been thinking, will blogging even exist in a few years? AI is absorbing everything written online and passing it off as its own. Not much incentive left for anyone to contribute knowledge to the pool.

The BIG issue is the sources AI is learning from.

Most nutrition info is funded by the same companies selling processed food. They take an isolated view of nutrition. The same "science" that would happily call sawdust + a vitamin supplement a complete diet because it meets the minimum nutrient benchmarks.

AI is eating all of that up and serving it to people as fact.

The good news is that it learns from us too. Every article we publish (we rank #1 on Google for several topics) puts whole food nutrition concepts into the pool AI draws from, and hopefully can steer people towards feeding their dog real food.

Goodness knows we need a counterweight (with citations) to the prevailing wisdom that ultra processed dry food is the best a dog can expect.

One can hope 🙏

09/07/2026

Good news! There's a new drug in development to make your dog live longer.

A biotech company called Loyal has raised over $150 million to fund it. They're running the biggest clinical trial in the history of veterinary medicine - 1,300 dogs across 70 vet clinics in the US. The goal is one extra year of healthy life for your dog.

It's not approved yet. But it's coming.

I want Nelly to live forever, and I'm sure you want the same for your dog. If it works and it's actually safe, amazing.

So I looked into it, and had a laugh 😅

There are a couple of versions in the pipeline. One's for big breeds like Great Danes, Rotties and Bernese. These dogs often live half as long as a little Chihuahua. Turns out there is a growth hormone called IGF-1 that is way higher in big dogs that causes this. The drug turns this hormone down. Totally fair enough - and pretty cool (if it works).

The weirder one is for senior dogs. It's a daily pill that targets the metabolic side of ageing. Here's what got me. The company's own description of how it works is a "caloric restriction mimetic". Basically it chemically triggers the metabolic state of eating less, without the dog actually eating less.

They made a drug to fake feeding the proper amount of real food. Skipping the other half entirely: what's actually in the bowl.

Genius.

Everyone agrees a big part of how a dog ages is metabolic. Everyone agrees you can slow it down with good diet.

So the solution is... a pill to pretend the diet is good.

The single biggest daily input into a dog's metabolism is what they eat every day. Instead of fixing that, we slap a bandaid over the problems a poor diet creates.

It makes sense if you don't think about it 🤪

Here's the thing barely anyone funds research into: a biologically appropriate diet for dogs. I reckon that's because you can't patent food. You can patent a pill. Quality food made with pasture raised chicken, grass fed beef and organic veg are much harder to make industrial levels of profit with. That's why the money flows one way.

Our message for the last 10 years (in September!) has been simple: feed your dog a balanced diet made with ingredients that are actually food, and they do amazingly well. It's not rocket science.

Nelly's been to the vet maybe three times in her whole life. A tick, a dog attack and a broken tooth. No visits for the stuff that fills most vet waiting rooms - allergies, itchy skin, pancreatitis, cancer, blocked a**l glands. That's often diet driven and I'd argue most of it is avoidable.

What goes in your dog's bowl compounds over their whole life, good or bad. A pill won't cancel out a decade of ultra processed pellets, especially if they continue to eat the pellets.

The longevity drug might turn out to be great. But the "free" version is already here, and it doesn't need a prescription.

Just feed real food. That's it 🙏

02/07/2026

I've been rebuilding our website for the AI era (no small feat), which means I’m trawling back through years of photos.

Which makes me realise that Nelly is getting old. She turns 14 next month 🥹

How's she looking?

Bloody remarkable! I can honestly say she’s the healthiest "senior" dog I've ever seen. Coat's still glossy, she's lean, and her eyes have the same sparkle. A bit slower these days, for sure, but still the same lovely goofus she's always been.

Of course we’re increasingly noticing her age. Some nights she struggles up the stairs to go to bed. Her back legs get stiff.

Still, it’s pretty amazing when you know what she's been through. A few years back she was attacked by 3 dogs and spent 10 days in ICU. Her body is covered in hectic scars. You'd never know apart from a couple of bumps. Incredibly lucky result. But it still sucks.

So we support her however we can. CBD at night helps a heap. And the food obviously, that's amazing. A lifetime of eating a genuinely high quality diet has carried her through all of this and it shows.

Lately I've been thinking about something even simpler - we just don't leave her alone much. She comes with us wherever she can, she's rarely left behind, and she's always part of whatever's happening in the house.

Time together is the most important thing we've got.

Wherever you are, go give someone a hug. I'd suggest your dog ❤️