Our little girl Molly comes home next Sunday - can't wait. Her breeders have their, admittedly gorgeous healthy looking dogs, on Skinners dry food. They are a working dog environment but Molly, although very active, will not be a working dog as such. Is Skinners a good food for an active 'pet' lab? Any opinions would be much appreciated.
I don't think there is any such thing as a food for a 'working' dog - certainly as far as puppies go. Perhaps for older dogs that actually do work, then you might have a preference for, say, a higher calorie food. Your young puppy is not going to be working for a good while, and certainly shouldn't be doing more exercise on unformed joints than any other puppy. Skinners Field and Trial puppy food is a chicken meal and rice based food and looks about typical as a mid range kibble - it's also VAT free but I don't know how the end price compares. My new show line bred puppy came home on a VAT free 'working puppy' food which I've now switched to a large breed puppy kibble because I wanted one that claimed it had the right balance of calcium to calories etc and that information wasn't available for the brand my puppy was eating. The brand she came on also had to be feed in incredibly high volumes, which my puppy struggled to finish (even though she is a very enthusiastic eater).
The advantage with 'working dog' is that it is V.A.T free. Otherwise I think it compares favourably with other good kibbles.
My Lab was brought up on Skinner's, it's a good food on a par with the likes of James Wellbeloved, but much cheaper as it's VAT free. You could find much worse.
So this got me interested...what is it about Skinner's food that allows it to be VAT free? Well, the answer is here - in HMRC-v-Roger Skinner Limited. It appears that the reason is the marketing of the food that determines the matter, not the composition of the food. Apparently the issue has been challenged before in a case about maggots. Laddie J thus considered that sales of maggots did not involve the supply of “animal feeding stuffs” even though the maggots could have been used as such. In deciding whether something was to be seen as “animal feeding stuffs”, it was necessary to “look not just at the nature of the material but the way in which it is supplied”. Whether or not an edible substance is “animal feeding stuffs” is “in large part answered by the way in which it is sold or supplied”. It seems to me that it is similarly important to “look not just at the nature of the material but the way in which it is supplied” when deciding whether dog food is “pet food”. The fact that a food could be fed to pet dogs is no more determinative of that issue than the fact that maggots could be used as a foodstuff was of whether, in Fluff, they were “animal feeding stuffs”. I therefore agree with the FTT that a food suitable to be eaten by pet dogs will not necessarily be “pet food” and that whether such a food is “pet food” depends on how it is held out for sale. http://www.tribunals.gov.uk/financeandtax/Documents/decisions/HMRC-v-Roger-Skinner.pdf
Could someone precis that for me please There are several other so called V.A.T free dog foods on the market.
Some dog food is VAT free and some is not..? Agree that the nutritional needs of puppies isn't determined by what they'll be doing as an adult. A factor for me would be achieving small poos. Foods that are more nutritionally dense are going to produce smaller poos - usually these are also the more expensive, higher quality foods. It's exciting that you're getting your puppy so soon
As far as I can tell, from a quick look - so anyone with more knowledge feel free to put me right - 'animal food stuffs' for farm animals etc are VAT free. In determining whether a food is an 'animal food stuff' (VAT free) or a pet food (not VAT free) a key factor is who it is sold to and how it is marketed, not what it is (because, as I understand the argument above, anything edible could be animal feed).
A I can add is Coco enjoys Skinner Field & Trial, it agrees with him & it agrees with my purse. Winner. Most important is it agrees with Coco's tummy.
