Although most veterinarians will be selling highly processed, packaged, pricey foods for a long time to come, the saavy public who questions this conventional thought and diet routine for their canine companions is growing.
The most common alternative to commercial dog food diets is the raw foods diet and the good old fashioned leftovers from the table diet. Vegetarian and vegan diets have also garnered more and more advocates over the past decade. The place to start is probably with the debunking of certain myths and the establishment of certain facts.
Myth: Commercial diets are monitored by the governent to insure their quality: The fact is that the American Assopciation of Feed Control Officials are not making sure the dog food sold to consumers is high quality. They only enforce a minimum baseline standard. The fact is, commercial dog food is food that you and I would never choose to eat ourselves and yet if it is all that we had, we could survive on it. In countries where people are starving, dog food would be a godsend. That doesn't mean it is quality food. Dog food can coast as little as 50 cents per/lb. What food do you buy in the store that are 50 cents per/lb? The highest grade commercial dog foods are much more expensive but the quality is only slightly higher. All you have to do is look at commercial dog food to know it's not "fresh" and it's certainly not identifiable.
Myth: Dogs need meat to survive. Dogs and every other animal need protein (we'll talk of other nutrients in our next posting) to survive. Protein is misleading, it should be proteins. There are many proteins that do different metabolic jobs in the body from breaking down food, building bone, muscle, soft tissues, carrying oxygen in the blood and more. Dogs don't "eat" protein. They make it from amino acids that are in the food they eat. Proteins are different chains of amino acids and all amino acids are found in a healthy, diverse diet. Although different animals have different digestive systems, they all use proteins as the building blocks of life. Consider a horse. A horse needs a LOT of protein and it gets it from what?
Myth: Companies that make dog food have experts who help them. True, but, it's about politics and money, just like....well, politics. There are low level standards in place by the AAFCO and all manufacturers try to make a product that is profitable and "sellable" to the public.
Myth: High quality commercial diets try to mimick the dogs original diet. False. If we folloed a dog around in the wild years ago, we would probably be able to identify everything they ate...without a label to tell us. This is simple logic.
Homade diets are the best way to care for your canine friends and we'll discuss these further.
