[Larkspur]

@kluharper Good luck finding a food that works. With a dog that young, it can be hard to balance medical needs vs needs for proper growth. Hopefully it's just a short-term, once-off thing with your pup. I'd hate if your pup ended up getting the short end of the genetic stick from being poorly crossbred.

Generally speaking, I would always opt for a higher quality food (including and especially PMR or whole prey raw) over pop-commercial brands like Hills, Purina, Iams, etc. There's nothing "hype" about the higher quality brands; they simply are actually healthier, more nutritional, and better for dogs. I will never have any animal on those brands (and more) ever again, mostly due to the fact that many contain a particular ingredient that has been proven to contain Pentobarbital (the drug used to euthanize animals) so you can only imagine where that unnecessary flavoring ingredient came from (regardless of whether it was simply farm animals or euthanized pets sold to processing plants by shady vets, I plain and simple don't want my animals ingesting a drug used to kill).

Sure there are stories that float around where people say the higher quality foods made their dog sick when they switched from a low quality food. That isn't surprising. If you had been living off of McDonald's your entire life and suddenly started eating an actually healthy and balanced diet, you would get sick too because your body isn't used to the food you are now taking in.

 

[Larkspur]

@kluharper Well I'm not a supporter of designer breeding myself, but that's a whole other can of worms. Health problems can arise from any generation. It honestly just depends on if the parents, purebred or not, have hereditary health problems. I don't know specific problems for Goldens and Poodles, but if both parents are carriers for or have heritable health problems then they can and will pass it on to offspring. That's why health tests exist and are SO important, especially when you're breeding mutts.

A word on cranberry. It's an old wives' tale. The thing (the name escapes me) that they contain makes it difficult for specific bacteria to attach themselves to the bladder. However, cranberries, juice, and supplements do not contain enough of it to actually do anything. Take it from someone who has a chronic UTI problem... the only reason drinking cranberry juice seems to help is because you're constantly drinking and peeing, and therefore flushing more bacteria out.

 

[Larkspur]

@kluharper That honestly just depends on where you get them. If a designer breeder health tested their dogs for the breeds' individual problems and they came back negative, the puppies would likely be healthier than the puppies from a breeder of purebred dogs who did not test (or tested and came back positive) and bred their unhealthy dogs. Same the other way around. The sad truth is that most breeders of mixed dogs do not health test... rescue dogs can swing either way. Some are healthy and some are riddled with problems.

It won't hurt, but it doesn't really help. I grew to love the bitter, unsweetened cranberry juice... but you have to be careful with juice in general because even the natural sugars can make the infection worse. I generally just drink a ton of water now. I tend to get UTIs at least five times a year now and I have permanent kidney damage from an infection a few years ago... I'm in constant pain because of that. Not fun.