Hey Iowa, You Might Be Storing Your Pet’s Food Wrong

If you're storing your dog food like this, you supposedly are storing it incorrectly. I'm not accusing you of being a bad pet parent either. When my wife and I got our little puppy, I needed to look this up after a week because I wasn't sure if it was safe or not. Before you start wondering if you need to change the way you store your dog's food, there are some disagreements I've found online that both support and are against this topic. Shocking, I know.

If you have a dog or a cat that you feed kibble, supposedly you should not store the kibble directly into a plastic container. At least according to the website PurrsMcBarkin. According to Purrs, this can make your dog/cat sick.

How Can A Plastic Container Make Your Pet Sick?

According to PurrsMcBarkin, once the kibble makes contact with the walls of a plastic container, it starts oxidizing.

Over time, the residual fats and oils that have settled along the inside of the storage container start to grow rancid and develop invisible molds that can wreak havoc on your pet’s health. Each new batch of food poured into the containers also grows rancid due to not washing the container.

Purrs recommends keeping the food in its original bag, keeping the food in the bag and then placing it inside a plastic container, switching to a glass food storage container, and being sure to wash it regularly, don't buy a bag larger than a 30-day supply for your pet.

Before you sprint to your pet's food storage container and immediately switch it out, Katy Nelson is a veterinarian for Chewy, and there are ways to pour kibble into a container and keep it fresh.

Using An Airtight Container

If you're dead set on keeping kibble in a plastic container, you need to keep it in an airtight container, according to Chewy's Dr Nelson. You can use plastic, glass, or stainless steel, as long as the cover has some type of locking lid to keep the air out. Once the food is gone or your food has been stored for 1 month, empty out the food, completely wash the container, and replace it with a new fresh bag of pet food.

Using the original packaging or an airtight container is also recommended for your pet's favorite treats.

We used an airtight container for our family dog for close to 13 years and never once had a problem. The food never went bad and she never had an upset stomach because of it. We always made sure to wash the container when the food was gone or had gotten old and it worked fine for us at our house.

Supposedly, depending on which internet expert you want to ask, we probably "did this wrong for 13 years."