Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wow, what a disappointment. Make that a shock, after reading the product details and watching their video. The first shock was opening the bag and finding a pretty pale looking block, with no fresh hay fragrance at all coming from it. Maybe the mini-bale I got was one that got forgotten somewhere for months? Next shock: it' turns out to be almost completely unusable, putting out pieces that aren't big enough to actually serve up. A mysterious mini-brick of hard stuff that you get to fight with to unpack into - a mega-mess. So all in, a waste of money - and time. Because make no mistake the clean up of the mega-mess is a major hassle, and a real health hazard for vacuum cleaners - as well as for any being that breathes. Which isn't actually a joke. Inhaling those fine particles even if they're organic ones is seriously not OK for any species, including not for us! So much for "low dust" hay. I first thought maybe I didn't know how to work with the compressed hay. So I tried to figure this out before I wrote a review. This is what I found. When I eventually pried apart one the superglued slabs (I can't see these as "flakes": they're good and solid wads, nothing flake-like or " Soft-Textured Formulation" about them) and tried to "fluff" it like in the video, I ended up with a pile of tiny fragments and itty-bitty stalky bits with some flattened and broken up seed heads, and.... a whole lot of dust, I mean a LOT of crushed into powder leaf etc. Then I tried to see if I could get better results, meaning more actually usable sized pieces and also less powdery fall out, by gently, slowly teasing the wads apart, and NOT bashing the "flakes" up like in the video. That's when I saw with certainty that the reason I was ending up with itty-bitty stuff wan't because I was crushing it up trying to get it apart, but because the wads themselves are made up of really little bits, fragments, and powdery stuff all compressed together. That's also pretty much, what my eyes were warning me when I watched the video. But I wanted to believe what the nice demonstrator said, that it's really "nice long pieces". The video also says their way of packing hay is designed to reduce mess. Which is true - so long as you don't take the hay out of the bag to use it. Maybe some critters could decide to eat this like it was a giant gnawing block or giant food pellet. I thought of trying that. But I dropped the idea because that seems like literally letting them shove their noses into wads of stuff that is going to release rounds of fine particles right into their faces as they gnaw. Not OK. My takeaway is really wanting to know what exactly their "patented hand sifting process" is - and why it's not actually producing what they tell us they're producing, and if it's going to if they get it right. Because a handy, safe, and also fairly cost-effective compressed - low dust AND organic - pack of Timothy hay IS a really great idea! Meanwhile I just don't get it. They don't say that they're starting out by chopping up regular bales of hay into little bits and pieces. Short of doing that, the only part of a regular bale of first cut, and a more mature second cut Timothy hay you can "hand sift" is the itty-bitty stuff that falls out of the regular or big hay bales as they get handled and stacked/moved around. Cutting up, and/or handling super dried out hay bales both generate a lot of bits and pieces and powder level crushed stuff. Maybe they will work out a better "process" to get that. Maybe I got a bottom-of-the-barrel one and they need to work on better quality control. Maybe they make enough profit doing it this way that they don't need to do anything. Meanwhile it's back to reading reviews for me. I really appreciate the many other people who share their experiences so I can try to make more informed choices.