Is Your Dog Eating McFood?

Is Your Dog Eating McFood?

The canine corollary to talking about religion and politics is discussing dog food.  At first glance, it might seem silly to get emotional about what you feed your dog.  You feed kibble, I feed canned, the guy down the street gives his dog leftovers—  what’s the big deal?

But on a deeper level, food is about love and nurturing. For someone to sug-  gest that we are not giving our dog the best possible nutrition is to suggest that we  are not the best possible dog owner. And as the options for feeding our dogs in-  crease, so does the defensiveness of many people about the decisions they ulti-  mately make.

So before you go any further in this chapter, it’s important to know that there is  no universally “best” way to feed a dog. There is only the best way to feed your dog.  The decision you ultimately make about what and how you feed depends not only  on the food itself, but other factors, including your own resources. You may not  have enough time to commit to home cooking for your dog, or may not have the budget to afford free-range chicken for yourself, let alone your dog. If you have  small children, you may not feel comfortable feeding raw meat (one of the options  discussed here) because of concerns about salmonella. (Concerns for your chil-  dren, that is, not your dog. Canine digestive tracts are well-equipped to handle  most microbes that would level us bipeds.)

These are valid points, and you should not feel bad about yourself because they  factor into your decision-making. Remember: A holistic approach is all about  evaluating the entire situation, not getting fixated or stuck on one area. And life is a  fluid, changing process. A year from now, your circumstances may change, and  you may be ready to try a new approach.

Do your best to do what’s best.

A RAW DIET

Raw food diets for dogs have become trendy these days. There are books, e-mail  discussion groups, even bumper stickers devoted to what has come to be affec-  tionately referred to as BARF—short for “bones and raw food.” While veterinarian  Ian Billinghurst of Bathurst, Australia, ignited the most recent interest in raw feed-  ing, other advocates include Richard Pitcairn, Wendy Volhard and Kymythy  Schultze.

WHY DO THEY CALL IT BARF?

As acronyms go, BARF isn’t the most elegant, but that hasn’t mitigated its  popularity. According to veterinarian Ian Billinghurst, the BARF nickname was  coined by someone who disagreed with the diet and referred to those who fed it  as Born Again Raw Feeders. “She then tried it herself, became convinced and  changed it to mean Bones and Raw Food,” says Billinghurst, who also interprets  the acronyms to mean Biologically Appropriate Raw Food.

Each offers slightly different methodologies. Some advocate including cooked  grains, others recommend different supplements. But the basic theory behind all  their diets is this: Domesticated dogs are not markedly different from their progen-  itor, the gray wolf. Indeed, up until less than a century ago, before the advent of  commercial dog foods, most dogs ate as wolves did—fresh, oftentimes raw meat,  usually scavenged or tossed to them as a leftover. What raw feeders advocate is  not a radical departure from the norm, but a return to how dogs were meant to eat  in the first place.

Science bears out the dog’s close relationship to the wolf. Studies of mitochon-  drial DNA—the DNA passed down directly from mother to offspring that changes  only in the relatively rare occasion of a genetic mutation—show that the genetic  difference between domesticated dogs and gray wolves is about 1 percent. (By  comparison, the difference between wolves and their wild cousins, coyotes, is a  whopping 7.5 percent.) This minute degree of separation from the wild is the cor-  nerstone of the nutritional theory behind raw food: Dogs, like wolves, need raw  meat to derive crucial enzymes and nutrients, which are destroyed during the cook-  ing process.

Take a look inside a dog’s mouth. Those big teeth are not there for show. They  are there to rip and tear and crunch flesh and bones. And dogs have short digestive  tracts with powerful enzymes for dealing with harmful bacteria, such as salmonella.

Billinghurst’s book Give Your Dog a Bone helped drive the current renaissance  of raw meat diets. In that raw food guide, he explains that dogs don’t just need to  eat what wolves eat, but how they eat as well. Consider Mr. Wolf on a given Mon-  day. He and his pack have managed to bring down a deer, and he greedily eats the  innards, including the stomach, which contains half-digested plant material. He re-  turns on Tuesday to eat some choice muscle meat, then chomps on the remaining  bones on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, he may come across a nest of quail  eggs and have a raw omelet. On Saturday, dumpster-diving is on the menu, and he  snarfs a half-eaten Big Mac. Sunday might bring slim pickings around town, so  (appropriately, perhaps), he fasts.

Billinghurst points out that this dramatic variation in a wolf’s diet—from day to  day, week to week, month to month—is entirely natural, and depends upon what  he calls “balance over time.” This is antithetical to the way commercial dog food  delivers its nutrition, which is basically the same percentage of nutrients, in the  same form and of the same quantity, day in and day out. This is also the reason,  Billinghurst suggests, behind the dramatic improvement many dogs show when  their owners switch brands of dog food. It’s not that the second brand is neces-  sarily any better; it’s just that the dog’s system is responding to the change in  ingredients and sudden variety of nutrition. But once the dog has been eating the  second brand for a period of time, that effect will wear off and the dog will begin to  show the same problems again.

The staple of the BARF diet is the raw meaty bone—ideally, one that has a 50-50  ratio of bone to meat. Chicken wings and backs fulfill this equation handily, as do  turkey necks. These poultry bones are non-load bearing, meaning they do not carry  the weight of the animal’s body, and therefore are soft and can be easily chewed  and swallowed raw. In addition to raw meaty bones, raw feeders give their dogs  pulped vegetables, raw muscle meat, offal such as liver and gizzards, nutritional  supplements, and other goodies such as raw eggs, yogurt and the occasional left-  over lasagna. 

The key is to make the raw meaty bones the majority of the diet so that the dog  derives benefit from their enzyme and calcium content.