Junk Food For Dogs

Have you ever stumbled across a big scandal that nobody seems to care about ?

This article is just one story of many similar cases I could have chosen.

As I write, it has been less than an hour since I put the phone down at the end of a call back from a lady who has a puppy from the same litter as mine. Our puppies are now 25 weeks old. Only a couple of weeks after she collected hers from the litter, it developed diarrhoea and for fifteen weeks passed almost nothing solid, raging diarrhoea plagued its life and cost it's owner many expensive trips to the vet. Elaborate blood tests were done but led nowhere. The puppy started to become bad tempered and was incapable of attending more than three of the puppy classes which are so vital to the socialising and training of any young dog.

She started off feeding the puppy on a well known dry puppy food and the vet recommended her through such an array of further dried foods in vain attempts to solve the problem that she said that her garage looked like a pet shop. Two weeks ago, she got my number from somewhere and in final desperation rang me for advice. I say final desperation because the inference was that the dog probably wouldn't be living to a ripe old age.

I was horrified. I and many other trainers hear this kind of story so often.

The cause of the problem was the dried food. There are many dogs which simply cannot take many - and in some cases, any - of the dried dog foods that you see on sale. Believe it or not, some of the worst offenders are the ones you see on sale in places you'd be likely to trust for dog food advice.

Two weeks ago, I recommended to the owner that she should change her dog over to Nature Diet or Nature's Menu - both simple, meat based dog foods with no additives, preservatives, E-numbers or industrial waste. I told her that these two products are whole foods and she didn't need to add anything - no mixer; no just-a-handful of the dried food. The call back was to say that the dog's problems had cleared up. Gone!

So what is going on here ?

The answer is that the dried dog foods contain a whole lot of stuff you simply don't want to hear about. Occasionally you will see words like "science" or "scientifically.." on the packets. This proves nothing about the contents but encourages people to think that lots of exacting research by dog experts has gone into formulating the product. Trust me; they've done research alright but not the sort you're thinking of ! Those words are just there to encourage you to buy them.

There are enough skilled, qualified and experienced people (plus websites, newspaper articles etc. etc.) campaigning to make the public aware of the problems with dried dog foods that many vets are now well aware of the problems with them but there are still some that aren't. If you have a dog or puppy with any of the problems described here and you want to change to Nature Diet or Nature's Menu (or BARF) then you might run into some questions or even opposition from your vet.

There are two interesting statistics here; both of them "one-in-five":

Roughly one in five people who come to the first lesson of a new series of classes with us have a dog which is suffering from some gross and obvious problem caused by dried food (I'll describe some of them later). The problem always goes away when they stop feeding dry food.

Roughly one in five people who come to the first lesson of a new series of classes refuse to believe us at all when we tell them about the problem with dried foods and here is the reason that these products are still on sale; The fact is that actually, a high percentage of dogs seem to be able to take these products without any easily visible trouble. Opinions vary on whether they cause long-term conditions that eventually (possibly) shorten the dog's life but there is no doubt that the majority of owners who use dried foods do not see any problems (or don't recognise them as problems if they do see them) - and that is why they are still so widely used.

What about the ordinary canned foods and the special prescription canned foods ?

They too contain a lot of that same stuff I said you wouldn't want to know about but, on average, I have heard of less dogs reacting badly to them. In the case of the lady I mentioned above, the dog had already been put on one of the special prescription canned foods and it didn't help.

So, what kind of problems do we see ?

Dogs can react to dried feeds with any combination of the following, diarrhoea is not always present.

• Continuous diarrhoea / constipation
• Fretting (continuous pacing and panting and/or whining and barking)
• Excessive drinking and peeing
• Inability to concentrate / hyperactivity / snappiness / bad temper
• Proneness to repeating infections, especially skin allergies, itching and red eyes

We have come across others but these are the common ones.

The bottom line is that dogs are principally carnivorous; you should be feeding them what nature designed them to eat - meat with all the extra material that they would normally get from a carcass plus a few extra things they might scavenge if they were living wild. The two products mentioned above, "Nature Diet" and "Nature's Menu" (plus a third, "Forthglade") are now being recommended by many trainers all over Britain in preference to dried foods. You can buy them in most pet shops; they are a little more expensive than ordinary canned food.

"Puppy Diet" is the puppy version of Nature Diet.

With Nature Diet and puppy diet, beware of the recommended portion sizes written on the packs; they are too large for many dogs. In some cases, if you over-feed, you can actually cause diarrhoea or internal blockage instead of curing these things. On average you probably need to feed around two thirds of the recommended portion.

If you feel inclined to try home-cooking for your dog then the so-called "BARF diet" could be what you are looking for. You may need to do a bit of research to get it right but there is plenty of information and support available on the web and in books. See The UK BARF Club for details.

Whether you believe all this does not matter one iota to me, you or your vet. It only matters to your dog. At the end of the day, all anyone can do on this matter is lay out the facts and the evidence as we, the trainers, see it with our own eyes and leave people to make up their own minds.