It’s very common for people to make claims that a certain diet is natural for dogs, based upon what wolves eat.
Here’s my question: Why is fur never listed among those natural diet ingredients?
See what I mean?
I have seen dog scats from dogs that have been fed whole deer carcasses. Nothing but fur!
Glad that we were able to view it without having to smell it! So, wolves are wild and dogs are domesticated. Is a dog’s digestive system the same as a wolf? …or has it evolved over the years. Also, which one is healthier? All that bone, hoof, and cartilage must be high in glucosamine. I wonder if the fur serves some useful purpose…
I found an article that claims that the dogs digestive system has evolved. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/dog-domestication-tied-to-starch.html
Dogs can digest starch much better… Links to article about dogs adapting to a starch rich diest : The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7441/full/nature11837.html
In the 1980’s I visited a tribe of Indians in the Xingu National Park in Brazil. These Indians still lived off the land as their ancestors had. Their dogs spent most of their time hanging around the mens hut in the center of the village waiting for scraps of discarded food. Mostly the leftovers were sweet potato, bananas, manioc, and fish. Occasionally they might have got a bit of monkey or tapir meat clinging to a bone. When the food scraps were tossed onto the ground the dogs squabbled over them.
There were no romantic scenes of dogs hunting alongside their masters. These dogs would have been lucky to have the strength to keep up with the men as they hunted down a tapir. The dogs were extremely malnourished, their ribs and other bones sticking out everywhere, almost like walking skeletons. Had they been treated for worms a couple of times a year they may have been in better condition. It wasn’t a pretty sight. In a developed country these dogs would have been confiscated by the authorities and the owners prosecuted for cruelty to animals. But the Indians were not cruel to their dogs, it is just the way it is in the forest.
Sure, these dogs were probably well adapted to digesting starch, but it didn’t come about because they were well fed on sandwiches. For the dogs it was a matter of life or death.
Seems odd to me that these dogs did not hunt to fill in their nutritional needs. >>>You cannot equate their diet with kibble.
The Indian dogs seemed to be totally dependent on handouts and too weak to hunt in any case.
As for kibble, I doubt the dogs in ancient Mesopotamia where grain cultivation began got much kibble. They were probably no better off than the dogs I described above.
Check out this book by Gary Taubes “Goods Calories, Bad Calories” and let me know if you think the amount of carbs we feed to dogs in kibble is a good idea. The amount of carbs in kibble isn’t even healthy for humans.
You can’t use Indian pariah dogs as an example of what dogs were originally like. This is the big fallacy in Coppinger.
I didn’t read Coppinger.
However, this is the kind of selection pressure that leads to the proliferation of multiple copies of genes like the amylase gene. From what I have read dogs can have over 30 copies. Omnivorous humans on the other hand have no more than 16 copies.
Just because dogs have adapted to cope with a diet high in starches doesn’t mean it automatically follows that a high carb diet is actually good for them. It is false logic.
One thing the archeological record is clear on is that the transition of human populations from hunting and gathering to agriculture and a grain based diet is an overall decline in human health. I can’t see that it would have done dogs any good either.
I agree with that second paragraph entirely. Not all dogs have the same number of copies either, which may explain why some dogs do so poorly on grain-based diets.
I do agree with you on grain-based diets. If I try to live on that diet, I get fatter than a little piggy and don’t have any endurance or energy.
“The finding of these diet-related genes is “very surprising and very exciting,” says Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not connected to the study. “It hints that there are a lot more [genes] to be found” involved in domestication, she adds. As more researchers compare wolf and dog DNA, Ostrander expects more genetic differences between dogs and wolves to emerge. “We are really going to figure [dog evolution] out.””
http://retrieverman.net/2013/01/23/dogs-have-evolved-to-eat-grains/
I don’t think we are, actually. Dogs and wolves have continued to exchange genes, still do so now, and I don’t think we’re going to find clear genetic differences between the two that can allow us to make such claims.
This is one subject where the more you know the less you realize how little actually is known.
Oh, I had missed this post and the great responses… I just read down what you wrote. I am not clear on what you are saying. Are you saying that dogs gained the genetic ability to eat starches to coexist with humans but that it may not be the healthiest for many dogs? It would be interesting to see if a domesticated dog does well when fed whole animals and eating not on a schedule meaning there would be some “lean times” when food was not as available… I used to own a farm house in Massachusetts and someone dropped off a young German Shepard. He lived wild for a couple of years until the neighbor coaxed him in and took him to the Vets for a rabies shot. We grew many vegetables and Shep killed a woodchuck who was digging in our garden and carted him off somewhere (huge heavy animal) Shep was very human friendly but he lived off the land. He was a great looking dog and never looked mangey like many strays. — I also had a neighbor who had a spaniel mix who would dig up carrots out of the garden.
I have no answer to that question.
But my main contention is that this finding isn’t any more significant than finding out that Europeans usually can digest lactose.
Does that make Europeans a different species from Native Americans?
Gotcha…
What I take from it is that those of us who do not feed raw should not feel guilty about depriving our domesticated dogs.
I don’t either.
I’m an agnostic when it comes to raw feeding.
I need more evidence.
I just found a white paper that discusses the evolution of the human digestive system and how we have changed along with our agricultural abilities: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v39/n10/abs/ng2123.html
So do people who feed raw, eat raw?
I used to know two that did as much raw as they could safely, although I know more people who are vegetarian or vegan that do raw dogs. I think it tends to attract people with a certain mindset about food.
I was vegetarian for 17 years. A lot of that required lots of fruits, veggies and grains, esp in the form of lentils. I gave that up last year. I eat meat, but I do try to eat grass fed, fish, leaner meats like deer and quail, and enough Omega 3s. I have no qualms about it.
There are vegetarians who care about good nutrition for whatever animal they are feeding, and then there are the really screwy ones who make their dogs and cats vegetarian.
So given all this, which mindset are you referring to?
I mean, a bag of fritos once in awhile won’t kill you, but nothing wrong with caring about what you put in your body. It DOES matter. Not many medical or health professionals who would deny that.
You do see reference to fur and feathers in some people’s writings online, especially when it comes to discussions about fiber in diet. Some people I know online with smaller dogs or ferrets will get whole prey animals from the folks that supply reptile owners and feed those. But most people don’t have access to whole deer so they improvise. Also, my dog can’t figure out what to do with a whole broiler chicken that’s already been plucked but not pieced out. I can’t imagine she’d ever figure out what to do with one with feathers, for all that she will chase birds much more readily than rodents.
My dogs after eating deer with the fur on? Bone chips wrapped in fluff came out the other end.
My dog eats the dust bunnies her own shedding produces.
I have heard (and seen) in reference to bits of bone – that the fur will wrap around and protect the intestines.
Many raw feeders do feed prey with fur. I wonder if WE ate fur when we killed mammals?
I’m sure we did eat some raw meat before we learned to cook, as did every other meat eater.
As was pointed out here in a previous blog post, neither dog nor modern human is as robust as wolf or ancient dog or ancient man, respectively. But for all that robustness we all died much sooner, as wild wolves do now, from a variety of things, some of which perhaps were from the wild diets.
Hydatid infestations found in wild wolf carcasses today come to mind as an example.
But we can control for that now. We can get the best and leave out the worst of raw diets, or at least cooked fresh food diets if need be.
Tons of human nutritionists say eat whole foods, not pre-made pellets. The day that pellets are better for all dogs than real food, is the day something is REALLY wrong with the dogs, not the food.
As for nutritional ignorance and not giving dogs the right amounts of htings, I see a lot of humans eating poorly but no medical group is suggesting we all force ourselves to eat formulated pellets to counter this, for our own good. It’s a matter of learning about foods and needs.
Some people do eat some raw foods. Raw eggs, sushi, steak tartare, etc.
My admin guy at work is afraid of raw spinach. People have gotten sick from it. It was on the news. That doesn’t stop me from eating raw veggies. I’ll eat them raw OR cooked, depending on outdoor temperatures, my mood, what form makes them most digestible, and more.
Just my two cents.
I feed whole chicken, goat, deer, & rabbit with the fur/feathers still on all the time. I’ve also been lucky enough to acquire a whole pig once, which I also fed with the hide on. They usually pluck the larger feathers, & will tend to leave behind bits like goat/deer tails that are basically just hair & bone, but otherwise they eat most of the hide, fur/feathers & all. And poop gray fuzz. I could probably find some furry poop in my yard & take a pic of it if you want. It’s indistinguishable from the coyote scat we find on backpacking trips except that the CAS deposits are somewhat larger.
Juliette deBaircli Levy actually does mention hide/fur in her diet for dogs. She says they provide roughage and cushioning for bone shards as they make their way thru the intestines. She recommends adding some bran to the raw diet to make up for this lack in prepared meat.
I would feed the fur as well, if I would get it more often. If I get whole animals, they are Heidschnucken lambs, and they have such beautiful hides… Way to soft to become dog food. So I have them tanned instead. The dog still gets the fur on the legs, and she loves it! ;)
Dobermann’s comments are interesting. I wonder if they support the dogs as scavengers domestication theory?
My thoughts though are that those village dogs did not start out as scavengers.
Maybe they started out as hunting dogs but environmental change meant they were no longer an asset, so they became scavengers.
Or maybe the people did not historically have dogs and these dogs were just stray/feral dogs that weren’t that good at survival and hooked up at the village.
I have certainly observed dogs eating fur when given the chances.
Adam
That would be my suspicion.
Dogs are older than villages and massive piles of garbage.
A lot of dogs will eat grass –probably this fills the same function as fur did — a fiber that also “wraps” around some dangerous parts like bone shards. You’ll see LOTS of vets telling folk NOT to feed their dogs whole chicken, etc because of small bones that might shatter. I suspect more than one wolf DID get a perforated stomach from eating the wrong bone a the wrong time. It may well be that fur or grass helped keep those shards from being as dangerous as they might be. On the other hand, the video makes clear that this wolf was killed by a car, so it may well have been eating road kill rather than having a diet more like that of a healthy member of a pack. When an animal is really hungry it gets a lot less choosy about what it eats.
I don’t doubt it serves that function too, though dogs that eat dog food or real food seem to seek grass a lot.
Monica Segal who works as an animal nutritionist for dogs has a theory that dogs who get supplemented with alfalfa powder tend to cut down the grass-eating. Maybe not ALL dogs who get it, but many. I think it’s an observation on her part, not a study. But I would have to check.
http://monicasegal.com/newsletter-september-2012.html
There is more info and opinion from her about alfalfa in her book K9 kitchen. I don’t have it with me right now.
There are some raw-food suppliers who sell “whole prey” and ground whole animals. This one in particular sells whole or ground cavies, mice, and rabbits – http://hare-today.com.
Whole prey feeding is certainly a minority; lots of people keep prey animals as pets and/or live in apartments. Guess there’s such a thing as being *too* natural : )
I live in an apartment and I’ve ordered their whole ground cavie and whole rabbit. I’m not like a lot of the “refined” city folk though. I draw the line at anything larger though. I don’t have the space for a whole goat or deer! People will see me carrying out large carcass leftovers and think I’m an axe murderer! :)
The big problem I have with a lot of raw suppliers is that they provide too much bone. Even the hard core raw feeders that stick to 80% meat, 10% organ and 10% bone should admit that there is way more than 10% bone in what’s suggested to those interested in raw food. Chickens and rabbits, if bled out with fur or feathers removed, are way more than 10% bone. Stools get far too hard and can cause damage over time. Someone needs to own up to this in that raw supplier world and guide people before some dogs get hurt.
The purists that find it “simple” are not considering these things. Some dogs may get by with a lifetime of this over-boned food but others don’t.
Two relevant and somewhat related thoughts here:
1) When speaking of natural diets for a carnivore we need to be very careful in how we define the word carnivore.
Canids in general are hypocarnivores, i.e.,meat is the mainstay but various forms of vegetation are also regularly ingested. Thus its not surprising to hear of dogs eating peas or melons off the vine, raspberries off the bush, carrots and lettuce out of the garden, etc. And in general, these foods, as w/ humans are at least not harmful, if not directly beneficial. However, in both canids and humans, grains, especially those high in glutens, can cause problems. Add to that that many of the grains found in pet foods are GMOs such as Bt corn*, and you have the potential for problems.
(*Note, that although Bt does not directly hamper digestive metabolism in vertebrates, it does appear to hamper the metabolism of some of our beneficial gut fauna, thus indirectly impairing both our digestive and immune systems.)
2) Its my understanding that hypercarnivores such as certain raptors and big cats, usually pluck the hair or feathers from their prey before ingesting them. I’ve certainly observed this behavior among local hawks (although owls would appear to eat their prey whole, regurgitating the hard remains in furred or feather-wrapped pellets.) Many of these same hypercarnivores don’t eat the bones of their prey. This would suggest to me that the fur/feathers ingested by canids do play a role in digestion–perhaps as indicated, to act as protection for the intestinal lining. I suspect that a comparison of the digestive systems, semi-digested food and scat of some of these hypercarnivores w/ those of scavengers, i.e., hawk w/ vulture; lion w/ hyena, would be very enlightening.
I like these “hypo” and “hyper” carnivore terms. They may catch on better than “Facultative” vs “obligate” carnivore for a lot of people.:)
Re grass eating, many prey species are grass eaters so when the dog or wolf catches them they have semi digested grass in their stomachs. Maybe this is were it comes from?
Re village dogs. In that settlement it seems that the food was in such short supply that the dogs could only just survive. I doubt a wild wolf would bother giving up being able to survive quite well for just struggling along!
Adam
“Re grass eating, many prey species are grass eaters so when the dog or wolf catches them they have semi digested grass in their stomachs. Maybe this is were it comes from? “”
My dogs have never eaten the stomach contents of any large carcass. They sometimes eat the stomach itself, but they invariably rip it open & thoroughly shake it out (& then sometimes roll in it, bleh). They often remove the stomach contents of small critters like rabbits, too.
A lot of purist, religiously-fervored, whole-prey-feeding enthusiasts refer to David Mech’s study of wild North American grey wolves and how they do not eat stomach contents, per his study and observation. I own his Ecology text but don’t have it with me right now.
However I contend that this is one man who has only studied so many wolves. I also consider that the subspecies he studies is:
A. A subspecies especially designed for hunting VERY large prey that should have more choice options of meat and organ available at a kill.
B. That the subspecies he studies lives in very cold environments and when you hunt in such environments and lose a lot of hunts, you don’t want to waste stomach space with any foods that are not as rich in fat and protein as possible.
C. NONE of the species available for study now are the same as the ancestral wolves that led to our dogs; and if any wolves WERE to come close, it certainly would not be these North American grey wolves.
So I consider the case for why dogs eat grass to be wide open; not closed. A well-cared for domestic dog’s choice to eat grass is the choice of a dog that has the luxury to make that choice, regardless of other reasons.
The question this blog posts is regarding a “natural” diet for the dog. Dogs are related to wolves but they have been domesticated to the point where science shows that they have adapted their systems to eat grains just as humans have adapted their systems as science shows that our systems also changed to adapt to eat what we grew when we started getting into agriculture… So, it’s tricky to determine what is “natural.” It seems that “natural” today means eating a combination of meat and grain since that is how a dog’s system has evolved.
Are youe referring to the studies in NATURE that came out saying dogs have more genes for making amylase? There was something that came out after that study, that said many wolves too, have varying copies of the genes that make amylase.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350913/description/Now-extinct_wolf_may_be_ancestor_of_modern-day_dogs
This is a short of the actual study. I need to find the full study. What I read here says wolves have “extra copies” and not HOW many extra copies. I’d like to know just how many. But I do recall that the study that made fame for finding extra copies, said that it varied by dog, from just two extra to many more ( sixteen more?). I also recall that it used far fewer wolves than dogs but this large discrepancy in study animals was factored by…..etc.
Personally i’ve never trusted “adjusting for numbers” as much as actually having large sample sizes of each subject.
This summary I posted of another study that was made public since, says dogs like huskies have fewer copies than some other breeds. It did not account for “modern” huskies or the years that have passed since domestication.
The jyst of the story is that the case is not closed on the amylase digestion capability of Canis lupus…familiaris or otherwise. I’m good with that. One big breakthrough study tends to get a lot of press and it gets people excited, but it’s often a mistake to get settled too soon on the findings.
And for all of our years of becoming modern man, there are still people who have not adapted well to eating things many of us take for granted, such as gluten, lactose, and other more recent additions to the human diet evolutionarily and culturally.
The word “natural” is a loaded word too. Are dogs “natural?” They didn’t come to be the way wild animals do. However, humans are products of nature, and humans made dogs. For that matter, humans made cars and parking lots. There is a line of logic some contend with that technically, those are natural since they were made by a biological being born of nature; and that to see “nature” as just of the trees and wind etc, is a slang term of “nature” at best.
If “natural” is what dogs were “meant” do eat, I guess they were meant to eat whatever allowed them to live with people and form a bond. If we couldn’t use dogs, if we didn’t want them around, they wouldn’t have succeeded.
My feeding tends to revolve around “natural” food, with my own criteria of not highly processed and re-invented, But if for any reason any dog does better on processing because he has such a weak system that it’s easier on him to eat dog food, then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
They are attributing the findings to wolves interbreeding with dogs.
I think the answer is that we clearly adapt to a certain degree and we are “meant” to eat what is available to us. Our world is largely “unnatural” in that humans have changed the ecosystem so thoroughly. Good example is the lack of clean unpolluted water in our country and all of the flora and fauna that has come to our country from other parts of the world, many of which are taking over vast areas. I used to always dream of going off into the wilderness to live a clean, natural life. Too bad that wilderness is now affected by fracking and other pollution creating activity. Is raw meat that is full of antibiotics, growth hormones, and whatever better then a kibble? Humans ate meat, we were largely carnivores and our bodies adapted as we grew more and more crops. I have a number of friends who have become vegan and feed their dogs raw. I think it is weird to have the dogs eat extreme the one direction and the humans eat extreme the other direction. My grandmother who had 11 siblings and who all died in their late 90’s or 100’s always preached moderation. Of course they also lived during a time where there wasn’t so much junk in the food such as pesticides, growth hormones, antibiotics….
I guess unnatural is natural today.
They are saying that some wolves are interbred with dogs “Posted June 4 at arXiv.org, the new study finds that interbreeding between dogs and wolves after domestication has made wolves in certain locations seem more closely related to dogs than they actually are.”
That’s the most insane headline I’ve ever read. It makes no sense. Like something out of the Old Soviet Union. If you derive from “interbreeding” you’re related to that which interbred!
I copied that from the article that UrbanCollieChick was citing.
It was supposed to be in response to what she wrote… I hit the wrong reply button
I know.
We actually do have a large n study that looked at a lot of DNA markers on a wide variety of wolves and a large number of domestic dogs. It turns out that Middle Eastern wolves are more closely related to dogs than other wolves are. I don’t think this study, which has a very low n, is all that useful.
Though it certainly does make the headlines.
Also because it uses “species” in the headline, it gets all the dogs are derived from Canis x numbskulls out there bloviating.
Whoops. Between them saying three BREEDS of dog and not just three dogs, plus “More wolves” further down the paper ( which sounds like a lot more than 3), I guess I missed the obvious.
Boo on me.
On a completely separate line of thinking, I want to check references used in Pukka’s Promise with relationship to the insulin factors he cites when feeding dogs a lot of starch.
Although I would bet almost anything that all such items really boil down to eating too much of one thing, or too much, period. That’s definitely a new “natural” issue. We are naturally being pigs! :)
Three breeds isn’t enough.
Agreed. But at least it seemed like more individuals to me at the time than there really was. Still, you’re right. I clearly skipped a few things that day. My bad.
That study is 3 dogs and 3 wolves. That’s the epitome of low n.
Science by press release too.