In my mind any animal should be fed what it would natuarlly eat in the wild, people tend to use commercial food for convenience sake, after all you can grab a bag of dry dog food in your local supermarket when you do your shopping.

As a child I remember our dogs being fed on table scraps/left overs and bones, they were healthy, so this is how I feed my dogs now. My oldest Newfoundland is over 12 and when we bought her we were told if she got to 10 we had done well. She has out lived the rest of the litter, and it was a litter of 10 or 12... Can't remember now.

I don't have a problem with giving my dogs a small amount of a good quality complete dog food... One you can't get in the local supermarket! Because I think then they are getting a good balanced diet, but their main food is meat, fish, eggs, bones and left overs. I would never feed tinned "meat" because of the fact there is actually only the tiniest amount of meat in that tin, and I know what animal derivatives are!