Dogs, Food and History

For thousands of years, dogs roamed the ancient world. They made their homes on the savannahs of Africa, the plains of India and the forests of Europe, Asia and the Americas. Packs of dogs swirled through every type of terrain in every climate. They ate what they could wherever they could.

Their food came from three sources: prey, scavenged and grazed items. Prey would be mainly herbivores, for example rabbits, deer, sheep or antelope. Scavenged food was that which dogs, acting as nature’s cleaners, devoured from the scraps left over from the meals of big, messy carnivores such as lions, bears and pumas. Grazed food included apples, berries and other wild fruits and nuts in season, and formed a small but significant part of a dog's diet, especially during summer. Coprophagia (eating of faeces) offered dogs even greater nutritional scope.

Dogs hunted in packs. They devoured their prey completely: nothing would remain of the carcase. The soft organs, or viscera, were the first things to be eaten, followed by the gut contents, which, in herbivores, would be full of chewed and partially digested vegetable matter. Cereals were also present, but only as a small proportion. Then the muscle (meat) would be eaten. The bones, skin and hair composed the final course, being nature's way of cleaning the teeth after a large meal.

Man has been feeding dogs for about forty thousand years. The canines helped with the hunt and man rewarded them with some of the leftovers, which the dogs were only too happy to consume. Life was easier for both species under this arrangement: man: got a useful hunting companion; the dogs got a pack mate who fed them a broad-ranging diet without them having to do too much work.

Commercial Diets

In the 1950s, food producers in the United States came up with a novel idea to sell the large amounts of left-over, poor-quality meat, gristle, viscera and cereal by-products that they could not hide in sausages: they put it in tins and called it ‘dog food’. For the first time in history, people could buy food specially made for their dogs. The idea caught on, and soon people forgot that they used to simply feed their dogs raw meat and bones and vegetable scraps – a broad variety of foods which, being minimally processed retained their nutritional value.

Today we find ourselves bombarded with pet-food advertisements for ‘this’ tinned brand or ‘that’ dry brand, or ‘this’ sausage preparation or ‘that’ super-chew. There are so many processed dog foods to choose from that we don’t know where to turn. When I was at college, one of my lecturers said, ‘If there’s more than one answer to a problem, then they’re probably all wrong’. Is this the case with pet food? I believe so. I think we’ve forgotten about the basics in our drive for convenience. Admittedly, we all try to buy the best for our wonderful dogs, but ask yourself the following:

• If this food is as great as they say it is, why aren’t they giving it to people to eat – astronauts or prisoners, for example? And
• Would I eat this stuff?

The answers to these questions, as we all know, are (a) No, they do not and would not use such food for people, in any extreme, and (b) No, I wouldn’t eat it if you paid me!

Convenient Disease

So why do we feed processed food to our dogs? In a word, convenience. But how convenient is it when, because of eating processed food, your pet develops a persistent itch, eczema, dental problems, smelly breath, an inhalant allergy, colitis, food hyper-sensitivitaminy, lethargy, a dull or scurfy coat, kidney disease, or rheumatoid arthritis – to name but a few?

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