What's for dinner?

Since this is my little soapbox, I thought I'd write about food, specifically, dog food.

But first, a short digression. I like to cook. Even though I live alone, I cook large meals at least twice a week then eat the leftovers for lunch. On nights when I don't cook, I have a bowl of cereal with fresh fruit. I'm not necessarily an organic fanatic but I rarely open packages or cans for my meals. In fact, I eat very little processed food. If I have veggies with dinner, I clean and cut them up myself. I cook rice the old fashioned way. I'll go vegetarian as often as I eat meat.

Cooking is a relaxing hobby for me. While I bustle about in the kitchen, I can review the day's work in my head and think about what I need to do the next day, or I can listen to the radio, or I can have a glass of wine or two and not think much at all. Selecting the ingredients for my meal, then preparing and eating it with deliberation is a way for me to relax and just live in the moment.

So what do I feed my dogs? Mainly, they eat kibble. But because I like to think about food and how it nourishes the body, I have thought a lot about what my dogs eat.

I feed kibble because it is easy (product plug: I feed Solid Gold Hund-n-flocken and Innova green bag, rotating every 80 lbs or so). Yes, I know there are purists and raw feeders who would be horrified. More on this below. And to that kibble I always add fresh fruit or fresh veggies or yogurt or some savory bit of something because there are micronutrients in fresh food that just aren't present in kibble, no matter how good that kibble is. And I like to think that my dogs appreciate that bit of variety. I imagine them thinking, what special goodie is going to be in my bowl tonight?

In truth, my dogs would eat sticks and pebbles if I put that in their food bowls and presented with a flourish. And we can't forget that dogs eat shit and dead things when they get the chance. But that's not the point.

Just as with my own meals, I take a few minutes to prepare my dogs' meals with thought and deliberation. It is a way for me to express how important they are to me.

And since this is my soapbox, I'm going to finish by talking about what dogs should be eating. Let's think about this little fact: dogs are not wolves. Yep, that's right. They are thousands and in my opinion tens of thousands of years from being wolves. A dog generation is, what, two to three years in length? We've been practicing animal husbandry on dogs, overriding the slower pressures of natural selection and changing their genes, for many thousands of years--hundreds of thousands of dog generations. Dogs evolved right alongside humans. Oh, we haven't changed all of their genes. Just the ones for behavior, breeding, temperament, size, color, and eating.

Dogs are opportunistic omnivores, just like humans. Like our ancestors, they would eat whatever presented itself, including carrion, fruits, nuts, and roots. For thousands of years, dogs have been eating whatever we ate. In fact, as recently as 50 years ago, before the dog food industry became the international industrial complex it is today, dogs were still eating what we ate. And back when I was a kid, back when my dad was a kid, we didn't eat much meat at all. It was expensive and reserved for special occasions. We certainly didn't go out and buy meat just for the family dog. True working dogs (herders, hunters) might have had an opportunity to eat more meat but it would have been situational and still not a daily event.

I do not feed grain-free or high-protein kibble to my dogs. Dogs did not evolve to eat solely protein. (Cats, on the other hand, have a short intestine that cannot process grains properly. They do better on high-protein diets. We have modified cats extensively as well but their genetic makeup started out very different from dogs. We've meddled with size, temperament, etc., but none of that changed the fundamental fact that, relatively measured, cats have a shorter intestine.) Dogs evolved to eat what humans eat. Indeed, I think their ability to eat what we eat is one of the reasons we have been affecting their evolution for so long.

I purchase the best quality kibble I can find and make sure that the manufacturer reports sources and processes. I review nutrition information. Dogs do need a variety of vitamins and micronutrients to stay healthy. They need them in different amounts than humans so you can't create a "balanced" dog diet by basing it on your own. I have read many books and articles on home-made and fad dog diets and am comfortable with adding a bit of this and a bit of that to my dogs' bowls. After all, hundreds of thousands of generations of dogs got along pretty well with eating just that for dinner.