"Breakthrough" dog food?

[Dibdib]

Last week Blu and I went to see a local dog trainer to talk about his reactivity around other dogs, and how to help him work on greeting other dogs in a friendly way. I'm pretty happy with a lot of what she recommended, and we talked about how a lot of what I've been doing already is already along the same lines, but one thing she recommended left me a little unsure.

She's suggested a special order food called Breakthrough, which apparently acts in a similar way to an SSRI in controlling seratonin levels, leading to a less stressed (and hopefully less reactive) dog. It's pretty pricey at £70 for a 12kg bag, nearly 2.5x his current food, and I'm not sure if this is snake oil or genuinely worth a try. FWIW, she doesn't sell it directly which makes me think it can't be that shady.

Have any doggy folk of yacf heard of or used this stuff before?

[pcolbeck]

Never heard of it and it smells like snake oil to me.
I buy pretty expensive food for Tilly (£50 for 12kg) but thats because its grain free and garanteed not to be just mechanically reclaimed rubbish not because it makes claims about chnaging a dogs behavior. She had a lot of tummy issues before we switched her to it.
If sounds like Blu just needs more socialisation with other dogs. What exatly do you mean by reactivity ? Does he just want to play with them or is he growling and snapping ?

[Dibdib]

Largely it's barking and lunging, although we've made some progress already and the lunging has largely been replaced with just looking and barking. It looks aggressive but I'm fairly confident that the underlying issue is fear, and he needs to learn how to communicate it more politely with other dogs.

He definitely needs more socialisation with other dogs, and among other things we're using some techniques from BAT to do that. The food suggestion was really just a way of helping him take those lessons on board more easily, and from my own experiences of SSRIs it doesn't sound completely implausible. I'm not against spending £50-70/month on dog food for a while if it'll help him sort this out because other than this he's pretty much a perfect dog, but I'm just looking for some other opinions

[Mrs Pingu]

Smells pretty strongly of snake oil to me. Think you'd be better served carrying on with the training. I note there is a link to some behaviourist organisation on the website, your trainer wouldn't happen to be a member of that per chance?
I'm not saying for a minute your trainer has a financial benefit from this, but people can get evangelical about all sorts of stuff with no basis in fact.
If you were to do both things now (training plus food) you wouldn't know whether it was the training giving you the benefit or the food anyway.

[Mrs Pingu]

Also, you can probably get some sort of tryptophan cocktail for dogs at a fraction of the price, if you decided you do really want to try it later.

[pcolbeck]

If you want to try better dog food give Simpsons a go.
There are a few others that are similar but most of those aee imported from the USA which seems mad for dog food.
It muched improved Tilly, no more poorly tummy episodes plus her breath doesnt smell bad anymore and she doesnt fart all the time now. Cant say it had any effect on her behavior though.
You can spen neafly as much on things like Royal Canin or Eukanuba (which was what Tilly was eating when we got her) but if you do a bit of research you discover that basically its the same people who make IAMs and the like with much the same ingrediants and a fancy price.

[peliroja]

Never heard of Breakthrough. Our Tilley was on Arden Grange when we got her, which is a really good quality and affordable (£27/12kg) dried food from an ethical British company. We switched her to the adult version and she got on very well with it.

She's now fed Natural Instinct, a 100% raw food which has definitely helped her poorly joints. We did notice a change in her behaviour, however - she's bossier and more reactive to other dogs. It's the price we've decided to pay to help her joints, however.

If I were you, I'd just put Blu on a high quality dried food and continue with the excellent training you're doing.

[Dibdib]

If I were you, I'd just put Blu on a high quality dried food and continue with the excellent training you're doing.

I think that's my plan, for now at least. Food-fettling is always an option later if I think it's needed.

Blu is currently on Gelert Country Choice, which seems pretty decent quality for the £25/12kg I paid for it. I'll stick with that unless I need to switch because of something else.