TowerNetWeb

What goes to make a dog’s dinner? The phrase implies a mess, but most dogs’ dinners these days look fairly appetizing – a bowl of pleasant-smelling biscuits or half a tin of something that seems like cold meat pie filling.

It all looks very lovely to us humans. And that is the whole purpose – dog food is sold to humans on its appearance and aroma.

We don’t really know what the dog thinks of it. We only know that they wolf it down, but then so would you if you were hungry and you knew that the chance was that that was all you would get offered.

The fact is that a dog will consume almost anything if there is sufficient sugar or and salt on it. I had a collie-cross that would eat anything I gave her except Brussels sprouts (she would take them politely and throw them around, but she would not eat them).

It stands to reason that you cannot get a can of good pie filling for a dollar, so whatever is in there will not be best beef. Yet it has to be fit for human consumption, so what is it? Well, to begin with, the gravy is almost certainly manufactured of carcass scrapings and blood, thickened with flour.

That would make it quite nourishing, but not as appetizing as it looks. The ‘lumps of meat’ are probably not meat. They are most probably offal and soy or something comparable. Again, not a bad thing, but not what it is intended to look like to us and the dog will absolutely know that it is not meat.

So what ought to constitute a dog’s dinner? In the wild, a pack of wolves would bring down, say, a deer and rip its stomach open. The contents thereof are the first course. Since wolves by and large eat vegetarian animals, the stomach contents will usually be grass, leaves and other plants.

Then they will move on to the internal organs like heart and liver. The stomach and organs are the best bits and only the top dogs get them. When they are gone, they rip the carcass apart and devour the meat. Later they chew on the bones.

Those are the guiding principles for making a dog’s dinner. if you cook your own evening meal, cook a bit extra for the dog. Liquidize the vegetables to imitate the chewed food that would be in the deer’s stomach. Most decent butchers will have ‘pets’ mince’ or a mixture that they use for producing faggpts (meatballs).

This pet mince usually contains off-cuts, offal and bits of internal organs, some skin, stomach lining and arteries – all the bits they could not sell to their modern customers. That takes care of the dog’s natural second and third courses.

The butcher will also set some bones aside for his best customers, which you will become if you purchase your own and your dog’s food there. Feed the meat raw mixed with the liquidized vegetables. Add an egg and some dry porridge oats to bind it all and provide fibre and you have the ideal dog’s dinner.

This type of meal will vary on its own because you do not cook the same vegetables every day. You could add an apple or other fruit and celery is good as well.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with researching Emergency for Dogs. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at What To Do If Your Dog Eats Chocolate.

Have you ever wondered what goes into dry dog food? I don’t mean the biscuits, although the same applies to them too really but they are usually quite expensive. I mean the dry dog food that comes in big sacks and proclaims to be a complete dog food. What is in it? The Truth.

Wheat seems to be the largest element, so how can you buy this stuff for $1 a pound, but a decent, two-pound loaf of bread costs $3 or more (in the UK)? The goods in the dog food have to be second-rate, don’t they? Dog food has to be safe for human consumption in the UK, but that doesn’t say much either.

The majority of of this dry dog food, especially the cheaper brands, have to be full of ground bones, fish heads, feathers, sweepings off the granary floor and syrup to boost the calorific value. Surely, it is the canine equivalent of junk food?

I fed my collie-cross almost exclusively on dried dog food for eight years, because I could set the food down in the morning and it did not go off whilst I was at work. She finished up with canine diabetes mellitus.

I took her to the vet one day because she had gone blind ‘overnight. She had advanced cataracts due to diabetes. From that day on, I had to collect some urine in the morning, test it, and then inject her with insulin. Sometimes she had a fit.

I carried on feeding her dry food and over the next months, I had to escalate her insulin often. Soon it was nearly a full syringe and I did not want to give her two shots a day, so I looked for a solution on the Internet.

A vet on a pet forum said that it was ‘common knowledge’ that the high sugar content of cheap dried dog food frequently caused canine diabetes after prolonged use. Maybe, it is common knowledge, but I didn’t know.

Another forum member told me the same and suggested a raw diet consisting of 1 lb green beans, 1/2 lb carrots, 1 lb raw mince meat, 2 raw eggs, calcium powder, bran, multivitamins and 8-12 cranberries. Liquidize the green beans and carrots, mix everything except the cranberries together and partition into four. My 45lb dog had one portion and 2-3 cranberries two times a day.

The very first day I gave it to her she had a fit. I had measured her blood-sugar with the old food in her. The new food did not contain as much sugar, so I had given her too much insulin. The next day her insulin requirement was around 35% of what it had been the day before.

My dog lasted a further two years with the new diet, which my vet said was unusually long, because animals do not get the same degree of after care as humans.

I experimented with the diet during the years and discovered that adding an apple or two or a couple of Brussels sprouts did not affect my dog’s blood-sugar. Ever since then, when I see someone heaving a large bag of dry dog food into the trolley, I feel sorry for their dog.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on quite a few subjects, but is at present involved with researching Emergency for Dogs. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at What To Do If Your Dog Eats Chocolate.