There is a very large, clumsy, drooling monster of a dog that belongs to me. Almost daily I am forced to choose two things to wear in the morning as often, by the time I get in my car, the first ensemble I have chosen is covered in what appears to be glistening snail trails. These trails are of course drool from my absurdly salivascious dog (and yes, I know for most of you that is not truly a word, but sometimes the language needs to evolve to adequately capture the essence of a thing, and my dog is truly salivascious).
I call the dog Duke or alternatively Big D, Big Dog, D, Double D (for drooly duke), Dummy, and the ocassional four letter word when he has managed to soil a freshly laundered and recently ironed shirt.
D has his fair share of quirks. A few years ago he was poisoned by neighbor who I subsequently threatened with extreme bodily harm should I haver catch him on my property again. As a result the Big Dog has his moments. These moments are characterized by him standing and staring blankly off into space at apparently nothing, often in a trance soo deep you can not stir him from it except by giving him a good shake.
The other of D's quirks is his stomach. The dog has a thyroid problem for which he takes medication. One of the side effects of having a thyroid problem (at least in the Duke's case) is that he also has a pretty sensitive stomach. As a result, for the last 3 years he has been on Hill's Science Diet sensitive stomach dog food. Its not the cheapest food you can buy for a dog but it is supposedly easily digestible and has premium ingredients to support D's health.
Today I went to the pet store to buy dog food and for some reason had a compulsion to check the ingredients on the bag. The first 4 ingredients were Corn Gluten, Corn Meal, brewers rice and wheat meal. The first "meat" ingredient was dehydrated chicken byproduct. What the fuck is that? Now I could be wrong but I could have sworn that dogs, and all of their wolf, coyotee and fox ancestors are STRICT carnivores. Since when does a dog need "whole grains" and a "complete serving of vegetables"?
So I started to read the labels and covers of all the other brands. The poor girl at PetSmart must have thought me insane as several times she came over to ask if she could help me find anything specific. I politely told her no, and that I was looking for a dog food that didnt have some moron in marketing as their highest paid employee. She didn't quite know what to think of that. In my searching I discovered that many of the premium brands (of which I was under the assumption Hill's was one) had some form of meat as their primary ingredient. All of them however advertised such things as "lamb and rice formula" or "chicken and vegetable" prominently on their cover.
It is a true testament to the marketing machine that people willingly and in fact enthusiastically seek out grain and vegetable filled foods for their canine companions, despite the fact that their pets do not process these ingredients and in fact just pass them through. For a period of time I fed my dog a raw meat diet. While he was on it he had more energy, a better coat and best of all, his leavings did not smell, at all. In fact, while on the raw meat diet I did not once pick up after D. The reason for this is that dogs are so efficient at processing meat that their feces on a raw meat diet turn an ashy gray after a day or two and disintegrate into nothing. Thats right, you read correctly. Not only does your dogs shit not smell like shit, you dont have to pick it up if you so choose.
I have a roommate who is a vegetarian. She likes to feed her poor dog quinoa, carrots and barley mash. Her dog limps so she feeds him vitamin paste to support his joints. He is also pretty lethargic so she feeds him some vegetable concoction for energy. I have tried to tell her that dogs are carnivores but there is no reasoning with vegetarians, whats good for them must surely be good for fido.
The truth of the matter is dog food companies put all that useless plant matter into dog food because it is cheap filler, thus serving to increase the manufacturers' bottom line. It is then the job of the marketing departments to sell this crap to you and they do! As a testament to how useless these ingredients are for your dog, consider this; when feeding my dog raw meat, by weight he ate less food on a given day. Not only that but he would rarely eat two days in a row as a serving of a chicken drumstick and a beef rib was plenty enough to sustain him through two or more days. By weight he hate about 1/3 as much meat/bone/fat as he did dry dog food.
It is appalling that marketing is so effective that people will buy food that is bad for their dog and that they will completely ignore everything they learned in school about the difference between carnivores, omnivores and herbivores and feed their dogs "a complete serving of vegetables" every day.
To everyone out there that honestly believes their carnivorous companion craves quinoa, your fucking nuts! Im sorry, but you are.
