Would you feed your family a meal made with condemned beef? Or spray the children’s tea with rancid fat collected from a deep-fat fryer? Or serve biscuits made with empty grain hulls swept from a factory floor?
Because that’s what we do to our dogs.
The unpalatable truth is that if you give your dog processed dog food – dried, tinned or in a pouch – you may be feeding them substances that cause them serious, possibly fatal, harm.
In a Channel 5 documentary this week, I am one of a number of canine nutrition experts who accuse the big dog food manufacturers of knowingly shortening the lives of millions of dogs a year.
The big businesses selling us processed dog food use ingredients unsuitable for human consumption – and unsuitable, in my view, for canine consumption.
They make vast profits from something that would otherwise be thrown away. It is a consumer scandal waiting to happen.
We all know there is a connection between our diet and health. The same applies to dogs, and every other species on the planet. But what is the best, most biologically appropriate diet for dogs?
The diet your dog should be eating is that of a grey wolf in the wild. If you dissect a dog and a grey wolf you’ll find that their digestive systems are identical. The two animals are essentially the same species and so closely related that they can interbreed.
Grey wolves live on prey such as deer, rabbits and mice, and eat everything including the bones, from which they get about a third of their nutrition. They also eat fruit and vegetables.
In short, their diet consists of raw meat, raw bones and raw herbage. This, then, is the diet that allows dogs to achieve optimum health and longevity.
