Had a couple of comments here...
First off, the whole conspiracy theory about vets and Hills and euthanized animals in food (?!) is just ridiculous. I do all the food orders for a veterinary hospital, and if I'm supposed to be getting kickbacks, they're waaaay behind in their payments.
I think the thing with vets recommending Hills or Iams or the other bleh foods out there is due solely to the fact that for 20 odd years, those brands have been on the market as quality foods-- and they ARE better than, say, Ol' Roy or a lot of the other crap that people feed their dogs. It isn't anything malicious or crazy; many vets have specialties other than nutrition, have been recommending those brands for a long time, and continue to do so. Our vet feeds Canidae to his dogs, and when people ask, we tell them that. But there are a lot of folks out there who have been using Hills or Iams for years and believe in those brands. It isn't some sort of evil conspiracy; it's just the line between older thinking in veterinary nutrition and newer ideas.
Anyhoo...
I feed my yorkie a cycle of foods. There's a lot of nutritionists who believe that keeping a dog continuously on one food will make them more susceptible to developing food allergies. I rotate what I feed; currently, we are on a cycle of Burn's Mini-Bites (a holistic chicken and rice food), Canidae PAWS (original formula, which has several protein sources), and California Natural's Lamb and Rice Puppy. I buy small four or five pounds bags, and switch her when the bag begins to run out, changing the food over gradually in the course of five days in order to avoid tummy upset. She always seems happy when we switch; it renews her interest in her food to keep new flavors rolling in.
I don't feed any of my animals Hills, Iams or Eukanuba. I believe that all of them are overpriced and generally are low-quality foods. I do have one pet that requires a veterinary diet due to serious food allergies; he is on IVD, which is the veterinary diet line of Royal Canin. Royal Canin has its drawbacks, but at least it doesn't use ethoxyquin (a potentially carcinogenic preservative that is in a shocking number of pet foods, including some Hills and Eukanuba formulas).
Read the label before you feed anything to your animals. If it contains a lot of corn, don't feed it. If it contains by-products, avoid it. If it contains ethoxyquin, stay well away from it. If it is full of chemicals whose names look unpronounceable and it seems suspicious, it probably IS suspicious. A good rule of thumb is to avoid foods that sound like something YOU would never want to eat, because odds are good that your dog shouldn't be eating it either!