Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul is a strange name for dry dog food. But it’s good stuff. My dogs think so — of course they will gobble up all kinds of junk, too — but more importantly, I am pretty happy with it as an affordable dry dog food.

Let me explain. When we lived in Mexico for several years, we could get some American dog food. Most of it was quite conventional, as was all the Mexican dog food I ever saw — most of that was brands you would recognize. The best of what was available was a Diamond brand lamb and rice, so we used that in combination with homemade dog food I made based on recipes from a terrific book by veterinarian Dr. Richard Pitcairn and his wife. That link takes you to my blog entry, complete with a Youtube video I made, about that approach.

Well, now we are back home in a rather remote town in Colorado. I haven’t been able to find that Diamond dry dog food or anything else I really wanted to feed my dogs within our usual shopping range of about 50 miles. So of course I went online. I found all kinds of exquisite dog food, some of it organic, grain-free, and otherwise really good stuff. Expensive but hey I was going to give it a try.

I tried several different online dog food retailers but once I got to the shopping cart, I gagged at the shipping costs, at least half what the food itself cost. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that kind of money.

So then I went to Amazon, famed for its free shipping. Now some of the retailers that sell through them do not offer free shipping so you have to watch out. Anyway, I eventually settled on Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul Dry Dog Food, which comes with free shipping.  That link takes you to the page where you can read the reviews,etc. I’ve reordered a couple of times. Sometimes I still do some homemade food, sometimes not.

Besides being economical, its ingredients do not start with a grain, something I always try to avoid. Here are the first few: Chicken, turkey, chicken meal, ocean fish meal, cracked pearled barley, whole grain brown rice, oatmeal, millet, white rice, chicken fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols), potatoes, egg product, tomato pomace, duck, salmon, flaxseed, natural chicken flavor, choline chloride, dried chicory root, kelp, carrots, peas, apples, tomatoes, blueberries, spinach, dried skim milk, cranberry powder, rosemary extract, parsley flake, yucca schidigera extract, L-carnitine…

If your thought processes are at all like mine, go check it out!