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Biologically Appropriate Raw Food Diet
About Commercial  Dog Food		 Home  |    Riley    |  Indy 

There are certainly many excellent commercial dry food diets on the market 2 whose manufacturers use high quality human grade ingredients if you are not comfortable with a raw food diet. With the raw food diet gaining popularity, there are also pre-made BARF diets available. These are certainly convenient and a good stepping stone for people who want to transition into a more economical and "true" BARF diet. If you do feed kibble, please, read labels and understand what is in commercial dry foods. We often see brands such as Science Diet in premium pet supply stores and veterinarians' offices, and the assumption is that it must be the best. However, is it really?

Corn meal or other grain products are the first ingredients in many brands of dry dog food because "carbohydrates provide an economical source of energy in the diet of dogs," 3 not because it is necessarily good for them. Dogs cannot digest some substances in grains as well as other plant materials. In part, this is because dogs have short digestive tracts, unlike herbivores that have enlarged digestive tracts to allow microbial digestion of fiber. A shorter digestive tract is advantageous to scavengers like dogs, and this is why they can eat all matter of decaying foods usually without serious consequences. The short digestive tract also affords them the ability to handle bacteria that can be harmful to us, such as salmonella. Given these facts, we can assume that grains that are difficult for them to digest mostly pass through the dogs system as it does not sit in the gut long enough for the dog to utilize its nutrients. This is why consumption cheap dog food consisting largely of grains, often leads to large, soft, smelly excrement. If you dog's excrement is compact and formed, you are feeding a diet that is highly digestible, and your dog is utilizing the nutrients in his food efficiently. Of note, the National Research Council's, Nutrient Requirement of Dogs, page 9, says that "although data are unavailable for the dog, it should be recognized that inclusion of large amounts of fiber in the diet may adversely affect nutrient availability."

Remember, when you are looking at pet food labels that oftentimes you can be deceived by the way ingredients are listed. Many times different grains are listed separately towards the end of the ingredient list, showing a meat product as the first ingredient. Meat may or may not be the largest portion of the food as adding up all the different grains may put the grains as a whole as the single largest contribution to the food.

Also be aware of what the terms used on labels actually mean!4 For example, AAFCO's definitions of meat by-products and meat meal are:

  • Meat By-Products - the non rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low-temperature fatty tissue and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hooves.
  • Meat Meal - the rendered product from mammal tissues, exclusive of blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.

And what does meat mean? Beef, pork, poultry? Horse meat? Dog meat? Cat meat? "Rendered product  from mammal tissue"?  What kind of mammals?  There are many allegations of rendered dogs and cats being included in pet foods. An article appearing at KMOV.com (St. Louis Channel 4 News) reported an FDA study on pentobarbital in pet food 5, and says, "The FDA says the pentobarbital likely came from disabled or diseased [my emphasis] horses and cows, which are euthanized and rendered and allowed to be used in pet food products." 6  


Though the FDA's report states that dog and cat meat were not found in the foods they tested, pentobarbital is routinely used in animal shelters to euthanize these animals. And, even though the FDA asserts that the amounts of pentobarbital found in the foods would not cause any adverse effects on our companion animals, do you really want to be feeding this kind of toxin to your pet, even if they are found in small amounts? The FDA was quoted by KMOV.com as saying that the manufacturer is not required to disclose how much if any pentobarbital is in their food since only things deliberately added to pet foods must be included in the ingredient list.		  
1998 AAFCO president Herschel Pendell has stated on the news that, "If the ingredient say's meat or bone meal, you don't know if it is cattle, or sheep, or horse, . . . or Fluffy." The interview is available for viewing at http://home.att.net/
~wdcusick/deaddogs.html

Again, let me state that I do believe that there are high quality commercial dog foods out there even though I belive that a raw food diet is best for our dogs.   Please read labels carefully, and select a food for your dog that will assure a healthy long life!

 

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