Fellow dog owners - what food do you feed?

[sorraia]

Note: I'm snipping quotes to the relevant parts I'm replying to, so as to keep this post as uncluttered as possible.

I just wonder where the scientific data is at, that's all.

Dogs are NOT little people, no matter how the media tries to portray them. Dogs are also (contrary to popular belief) not carnivores. The very makeup of their dental arcade proves that; they have molars and premolars in copious numbers. Cats only have one set of molars, and they are vestigial at best. This makes cats carnivores.

The presence of premolars shows that dogs were designed to be omnivores. In the wild, dogs are more like bears actually; they will eat many berries and other plant-based items.

This difference is also seen in the severity of infection from dog vs cat bites. Cats, being carnivores, are more likely to cause severe infection in their bites. Dog bites, on the other hand, are less prone to these deadly septic infections.

There's more to the herbivore/omnivore/carnivore diet than just teeth. You need to look at the whole package. Teeth are just the beginning of the whole digestive process. There's a whole organ system that go along with them, and for each type of feeder there are variations in the digestive system to deal with the ideal diet for that type of feeder.

Dogs are carnivores. They can be opportunistically omnivorous, but that does not make them true omnivores. They do not have grinding teeth like an herbivore or true omnivore, their teeth are designed for chopping. A dog cannot digest the course plant matter that a true omnivore can. As an opportunistic carnivore, dogs can consume some plant matter. Looking at wild canines closely related to dogs (i.e. wolves, coyotes), those plants are mainly limited to simple, easy to digest parts such as berries and fruits. Those wild canines aren't munching on leaves and grasses (or if they are those leaves and grasses are coming out undigested, I'll collect some scat for you next time I'm in the field if you want proof), they typically aren't digging up roots and tubers, they aren't shredding bark off the trees, all things that omnivores and herbivores can and will do.

So what about a dog that makes it a carnivore? Their whole digestive system. They lack true grinding teeth. They have a large stomach designed to consume as much food as possible, since true carnivores are typically hunters and need to consume large amounts in one meal, because they may have to wait days for their next meal. Dogs also produce a highly acidic stomach acid - something common in true carnivores, but not so much in herbivores and omnivores. Dogs lack a caecum, appendix, chambered stomach, or other digestive features that make it possible to digest plant matter. These organs found in ominvores and herbivores are designed specifically for digesting tough plant material. Chambered stomachs (most often found in omnivores, off the top of my head I can't think of a true omnivore with a chambered stomach, but since I don't know everything I'm not going to say they don't exist right off the bat!) contain microbes that help the animal digest tough plant material. These chambered stomachs also allow the animal the opportunity to digest and "redigest" its meal multiple times in order to get as much nutrients as possible out of it. The caecum (and our vestigial appendix, although some studies actually show the appendix may have some purpose even now) also contains microbes that help digest tough plant material, and helps to absorb the last bit of nutrition from plant material. Dogs also do not (normally) practice copraphagy, as many herbivores and some omnivores do. Copraphagy is another "method" of achieving maximal nutrition from tough plant material, by reingesting and redigesting the meal after it has passed through the digestive system once. A dog's digestive system isn't quite as long as that of a true omnivore, and certainly not nearly as long as that of a true herbivore.

If you want to use the phrases loosely, yes, dogs are omnivores. However, biologically it is not so simple. Within the realm of biology, there are far more divisions than simply herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore. And there are more intricacies that simply what an animal "can" eat that determines how it should be grouped. As stated above, dogs are carnivores but opportunistically omnivore. This ability to eat SOME plant matter does not make them a true omnivore in the sense that a human is. To give another example of how these categories are actually more complicated than they seem... Norway rats, those we feed to our pythons, are classified as granivores, which technically would mean they are herbivores, since grains and seeds are in fact plant material. However we all know that's not the case, they are in fact omnivores despite their grouping into granivores.

true; however i'll use a simple analogy to convey my point.


In many LEGO sets, there are yellow bricks. I have yellow bricks in my Star Wars ones and in my moon landing one.


If my dog required yellow bricks for nutrition, would it matter if I got them from the moon landing set or from the star wars sets?

It does matter when it comes to nutrition. Not all nutrients are equally bio-available. Bioavailability is what determines how much of a nutrient is actually utilized by the organism consuming it. A particular food may contain 80% of nutrient A, but if that nutrient is only 20% bioavailable, the animal eating that food is really only going to be able to utilize 1/5th of that 80%. When a nutrient is tied up into a highly undigestible food, then that nutrient essentially has a low bioavailability. This is true across all species and all feeding groups. Cellulose and lignin contain some vital nutrients, but those nutrients are largely unavailable to most organisms because of the digestibility of cellulose and lignin.

For dogs, their carnivorous classification means the most bioavailable nutrients will come from animal sources. While dogs can opportunistically feed on some plant material, the nutrients found in plants are less bioavailable to a dog than those found in animal sources. Also many plants (such as leaves, grasses, stems, bark, etc) can't even be digested by the dog and come out very much the same way they went in. If a food isn't even being digested, then the dog certainly isn't getting any nutrition from that food.

That being said, I recognize that the good points in corn may be overshadowed by the bad. However, what many people (most of the veterinary field included) do not see is that if they would look at the NUTRITIONAL value of a food over the ingredients, and feed accordingly, even Ol Roy could keep a dog healthy.

I just see/hear too many people putting their dogs on these weirdo health freak diets, and I see the dogs suffering for it later. Oh they don't have a corn allergy, but they have almost every immune disease there is, improperly formed bones due to lack of minerals, lack of eyesight and hearing because of amino acid imbalance, etc.

This is assume the nutritional value of a manufactured kibble (or even canned) diet has high bioavailability. If those nutrients are not highly bioavailable to the dog, the dog will not be getting full benefit from that food.

There's also another problem with manufactured dog feeds that I haven't yet seen mentioned (or if it has been I've missed it)... We are also assuming scientists know everything there is to know about not only nutrition in general, but also the nutritional requirements of the dog (and not just dogs in general, but all life stages, activity levels, and health levels) and how to provide full nutrition using largely synthetic sources (and let's face it, many of the nutrients in manufactured dog food ARE synthetic because many natural nutrients are destroyed in the cooking process to make kibble in the first place). Many people put full faith in this system and believe it. Personally I don't, and I say that not only as someone who has done a lot of research on my own, but also as someone who is a scientist by trade and training. Just look back at history. At one time carbohydrates, fats, and proteins were the only nutrients known, and scientists thought they knew all there was about nutrition. Turns out they were wrong... then they discovered minerals and vitamins. So then they though they knew it all. Oh wait, they were still wrong. There's also omega-fatty acids. So then they must have known it all. Um, not quite. Antioxidants, micronutrients (including those required in such small amounts they may be almost imperceivable), enzymes, and goodness knows what else. There are constantly new studies on nutrition being done, and some of these studies show we haven't even come close to knowing it all. If we did, people wouldn't even need to eat food, we'd be able to encapsulate our daily required nutrients into a single pill, and be set for the day. Why waste time shopping, cooking, and eating food when we can just take a pill with full nutritional value? Simple answer is because we DON'T know that much yet. Look at how often nutritional studies change (or better yet, how they change depending on who is funding them!)... meat is good, meat is bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad, caffeine is bad, caffeine isn't really that bad, alcohol is bad, but red wine is good, chocolate is bad, but some dark chocolate is good, soy prevents breast cancer, but it also causes breast cancer, etc etc etc etc on and on into infinity. If we scientists really knew all that we proclaim to know... there wouldn't be so much contradiction and doubt.

Now verging from science and research and jumping into the realm of personal opinion... MY personal opinion is that nutrition is best achieved from as natural sources as possible, preferably whole, minimally processed foods. No one is perfect, so none of us are going to eat a perfect diet, nor feed a perfect diet for our pets. The best we can do is decide what we believe to be the best for ourselves and our animals. If we choose to put our faith into imperfect scientists and potentially-corrupt nutritional studies, then so be it, that's our individual choice. But some of us do a little extra research and decide we don't put that much faith into scientists. Instead we choose to feed natural diets that resemble what an animal would actually eat if it were fending for itself in a wild or at least semi-wild state. As long as there's enough personal research to back that choice, I wouldn't call that a "freak diet". It is certainly no more a "freak diet" than choosing to feed kibble, especially if you choose kibble the way most people do, based on commercials and what the pet food company is claiming. There certainly is a WRONG way to feed a whole, minimally processed diet, just as there is a WRONG way to feed a processed manufactured diet. Those animals who were fed the wrong way are the ones who end up suffering for it. Unfortunately those are the ones who stick out in memory because those are the ones you see. If an animal is fed a raw diet and doing very well with no health problems, why would a veterinary be seeing that animal very often, except maybe for a routine check up?

and really, many of our domestic breeds have been altered so much they don't want a raw diet

That's like saying people have been altered so much they don't want to eat fruits and vegetables any more.