What motivates you when you purchase pet food?

I’m just wondering what motivates you to buy a certain pet food?  Is it cost?  The store is close to you?  You can pick it up where you get your groceries?  Your vet recommended it?  Your pets like it?  It has ingredients you like?  See, motivation has been on my mind, lately.

A friend has been trying to get me to try products that she sells in her home network marketing business (I won’t mention the name).  I have steadfastly refused to try anything until today, and then she hit my hot button.  I am training to run a marathon, it’s my first one, and it’s massively important me because I’m not running for myself, I’m running for someone who has leukemia. 

Well, she read some of my blog articles and saw that I was struggling on these long runs and was trying to figure out what to eat to give me sustained energy, and told me about an energy bar her company sells.  I read about it and wanted to try it.  That was it.  My motivation was that if it could possibly help me with my endurance struggles, I wanted it.   I didn’t want the business and I didn’t want the discount, I just wanted those energy bars and I want them in time for my next long run.

As motivated as I am to run this marathon, I’m a thousand times more motivated to protect my pets.  I do a bit of rescue work, my pets get their vet visits and medicines even if I have to cut out something that *I* need.  They’ve eaten only the healthiest pet foods for upwards of 10 years.  No kidding, because of my rescue animals, I have a $600 per month pet food bill!  I could do it on the cheap, with donations and discounted regular food, but I refuse to feed corn, by-products, and chemicals.  (And guess what?  There are a lot of people like me!)

So why am I so determined to feed the highest quality pet foods?  What is my motivation?

Two short stories:

Well, about 14 years ago, when I lived in Texas, I was feeding the so-called “premium” foods that you get at the vet clinic and the discount pet food stores.  I only had two cats at the time.  One was a 17-year-old black cat named Kitty and I loved her like she was my own baby. 

I went out of town on a business trip.  My roommate ran out of cat food so she ran over to a big discount store,  bought a brand that everybody seemed to recommend, and fed that to my cats.  My old Kitty immediately became sick.  When I got home a few days later, she had lost all her fur and was near death.  The vet said she was in acute kidney failure, probably caused by something she ate.  After several days in the veterinary hospital and hundreds of dollars later, Kitty pulled through.  She was sickly but she lived to be twenty.  But the vet educated me on healthier pet foods and that’s when I switched to “natural” foods, no by-products or chemicals.  For me, at the time, corn was okay.

Cut forward several years.  I’m now in Colorado.  I now have three kitties.  There is a new “natural” food at the veterinary clinic, natural and with real meat but with three corn ingredients in it.  It sounds tasty so I take it home to my cats. 

Within a few weeks I had to euthanize the two older cats.  Whiskers was 10 and Hoover was 17, he had come with me from Texas.   Their intestines were fatally blocked.  Nobody truly wanted to blame the corn, but quietly, yeah, it was the corn.  “Gluten” is “glue”, and without adequate water intake, the older kitties couldn’t run it through their digestive system properly.  I wouldn’t have suspected it if only one cat had died.  He was old and when his belly bloated and he couldn’t move, I thought it was his time.  It was when the second cat had the same symptoms that I got suspicious and spoke with the vet about it. 

That’s my motivation for feeding my cats very high quality foods that were made for their systems.  For me, it’s emotional.  I want the best for my family, and my family happens to include some beautiful cats.

What’s YOUR motivation?  I’d love to hear your comments.