Fellow dog owners - what food do you feed?

[anatess]

The BS blanket statement that dogs do not benefit from fruits or vegetables is just that - BS. Cats don't, dogs do.

You're not paying attention. Nobody here says dogs don't benefit from vegetables. Quite a lot of raw feeders follow the BARF (as opposed to PMR) that includes vegetables. But many here are telling you that dogs DO NOT NEED vegetables. You can eliminate veggies completely out of their diet and it will not harm them any. On the other hand, if you completely eliminate animals out of their diet, they will be unhealthy dogs. And even - if their diet consists mainly of plants more than animals, they will be unhealthy too. Yes, that's why Science Diet changed their formula to have meat as the first ingredient. No, that did not make them quality food. It's still a scummy food for many other reasons.

Dogs - as do many members of the order carnivora - will eat anything they can in the wild. Dogs may not have amylase in their saliva, they secrete it from their pancreas - something that cats cannot do. Amylase is the enzyme that digests starches. Again, come to the argument with facts, not blanket statements, and certainly not your individual preferences.

Dogs have evolved/adapted to eat plant material - period. They can extract nutrition and sustenance out of it.

Yes, Americans have evolved to eat McDonalds and can extract nutrition and sustenance out of it. And your point is?

I have had dogs lead long and healthy lives on kibble and I know people who have had dogs lead long and healthy lives on proper raw diets. I have fed my dogs raw in the past and have been honest that I saw absolutely no difference healthwise.

Sure, and nobody here... .NODOBDY... said your dogs are going to get sick on kibble. Everybody here is saying there are better kibble than Science Diet... or gasp!... Purina! (Yes, a vet tech just claimed in this here thread that Purina is just as good as Blue Buffalo).

All of this talk about allergies and other problems with digestion has less to do with canine nutrition and more to do with the epidemic of inbred and functionally deficient dogs that dominate the landscape. Food allergies and environmental allergies are issues in which diet can play a factor, but which poor genetics is an undeniable cause. Most food allergies in canines centers on intolerance to proteins - not grains. Talk to someone who tests dogs for food allergies and ask them what the number one food allergy is for dogs.......hint - it involves proteins - not carbs.

I mountain bike with my patterdale and hunt with her 9 months out of the year. Like most patterdales, she comes from stock not burdened by out of control line breeding, or by fads that promote physiological mutations that favor form over function. On her grain free kibble diet, she can hunt on a 90 degree day, digging into den after den for 4 to 8 hours, or run along a mountain bike for miles. Your pugs, bulldogs, et al cannot do that on a raw diet, a kibbled diet or on any diet.

AMEN. I have 2 English Bulldogs. I'm not sold on grain free. I'm on LOW CARBS. Or as low a carbs as possible. Grain Free food is useless if you're just swapping rice for white potato unless your dog is allergic to rice. But, grain free food is corn free so you have one good thing about grain free - GMO ingredient is highly unlikely.

For all of you that think that being a carnivore means only eating raw meat - what is a bear classified as? How about a bamboo eating panda bear?

And you don't even stop to wonder... not even a smidgen... why Panda bears sleep for most of the day? Or why they have a very hard time pro-creating?

Here's some info for you from http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=379:

Why Do Pandas Eat Bamboo?

Why do pandas eat bamboo? It seems bizarre that a creature whose ancestors were carnivores would turn towards an almost exclusively vegetarian diet, and in particular to a nutritional source as poor as bamboo. It has to spend more than half of every day sitting and eating just to extract enough calories. [Source: Henry Nicholls, The Telegraph, September 28, 2010]

When you think about it objectively, though, the prolific growth rate of these hardy plants, their year-round availability and widespread distribution (until humans appeared on the scene) actually made bamboo a pretty attractive snack. And the panda goes about extracting what little nutrition there is in great style: a sixth digit fashioned from its wrist bone allows it to grasp at stems and strip off leaves; its hefty skull and strong teeth provide the means to crush through the tough bark to the goodness within; and its digestion is aided by an intimate symbiosis with some very powerful gut microbes. So effective are they that Japanese scientists were able to use bacteria extracted from panda faeces to achieve “the complete digestion of kitchen refuse” – a finding for which they rightly won the biology category in the 2009 Ig Nobel awards for improbable research.

Interestingly, when geneticists sequenced the panda’s entire genome in 2009, they found a messed-up gene that means they probably can’t taste flesh, which may explain why they don’t seek it out that often. But when the opportunity presents itself, pandas will happily tuck in. Researchers carrying out the first proper fieldwork in the 1980s found droppings that contained hair from a golden monkey and the hair, bones and hooves of a musk deer. The panda genome still contains all the enzymes needed for digesting meat, and these rare lapses into carnivory might be crucial in providing important trace nutrients that are absent from bamboo. They have also helped researchers, who have baited traps with goat heads and pig bones to lure and then collar their quarry.