Am I Boring My Dog? (14 page)

In theory, treats should be reserved as training aids or as pet sitters. That is, foods that take a long time to consume—for example, peanut butter stuffed into a rubber Kong cone—are the canine version of popping your kid in front of a video when you need a bit of quiet time or when you’re away from home.

In reality, it’s tough to resist a hang-dog look or the urge to reward your pup for sheer doginess. Healthy snacks are a good way to resolve the dilemma. Dog biscuits and other cookielike products with little nutritional value—and huge price markups—are designed to appeal to
you
. Dogs don’t associate apple slices, raw carrots, string beans, dried chicken strips, and other pooch-paunch deterrents with deprivation. So don’t tell them.

Along with monitoring their nutritional content, you should dole out nontraining treats according to a set routine, the better to prevent free-floating begging. For example, Frankie gets something to nosh on whenever I sit down to eat—which makes me aware just how frequently this occurs. And my best friend Clare gives her dog Archie a snack whenever she opens a bottle of wine. As a friend of hers observed, “When Archie is obese, we’ll know you’re an alcoholic.”
²⁹

Not really. If you became a vegetarian to avoid cruelty to animals, why practice it on the one you’ve chosen to share your home with? Your dog could survive on a nonmeat diet, but she wouldn’t thrive. That doesn’t mean meat has to comprise the bulk of her menu, or that you have to handle uncooked hunks of it; leave the raw food diet (see question 45) to the carnivores.

It depends on your dog—and on your budget.

Dry food or kibble is generally more economical than wet food and better for dental health because it’s abrasive. Kibble is not necessarily as nutritious as wet food, however (which isn’t saying much, in many cases of both varieties; see the following question). The canning process allows for the inclusion of a higher percentage of meat and the exclusion of chemical preservatives.

And wet food tends to be more palatable. Many dogs aren’t wild about unadorned pellets—would you be?—so lots of people liven them up with anything from chicken broth to cottage cheese or wet food. This reduces the convenience and economy of kibble.

Smaller dogs and older ones with diminished appetites are often prime candidates for wet food, and big, young lugs usually do fine with kibble. In short, consider such variables as the size, health, and activity level of your dog—and your gag reflex. Dogs often love canned food but they love garbage, too. You may have a tough time dishing out a morning repast that looks and smells repellent to you.

Let’s start with what you can ignore when trying to decide about both varieties: terms such as “premium,” “gourmet,” “natural,” “sensible,” “scientific,” and “holistic” are all meaningless buzz words designed to push your “I’m-a-good-dog-owner” buttons. Don’t bother paying attention to the pictures, either; that nice-looking steak on the package or can bears little resemblance to any meat form that might be inside. Nor does the name of the product provide much useful information. Something called “chicken formula” only has to include 25 percent of chicken products—not chicken meat—by weight. “With chicken” means only 3 percent chicken in some variation needs to be present.

For a better sense of what you’re buying, go straight to the ingredients list, arranged in order of weight. Even here, you’re on shaky ground. The ingredient specifications outlined by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), which regulates the pet food industry, are a canine Da Vinci Code. The “crude protein” requirement, for example, says nothing about digestibility, so the protein source could be old shoes. For additional information—including details on the limitations of AAFCO,
³⁰
which has close ties to the industry it’s designed to police—see The Dog Food Project,
www.dogfoodproject.com
.

The best practical guides to what to feed your pup are the
Whole Dog Journal
’s (
www.whole-dog-journal.com
) annual reviews of dry and wet dog foods. These not only explain labels and provide formulas for calculating nutrient levels but also recommend and pan specific products.

So with the caveat that this is just a rough outline, you want a wet or dry food that …

Having meat or another protein source as the first ingredient should be enough to ensure that the product is indeed primarily protein. But some manufacturers are sneaky, breaking down less desirable ingredients into component parts to get around putting them at the top of the list. For example, they might cite chicken first, followed by ground corn, corn gluten, corn bran—which, in combination, outweigh the chicken.

The protein source should have a recognizable, not generic, name. That is, it should be “beef,” “lamb,” “turkey,” or “chicken” as opposed to “meat,” “animal,” or “poultry.” That’s true too for the “meals”—for example, “chicken meal” as opposed to “poultry meal.” Avoid by-products and especially unnamed ones, altogether. In spite of their grainy-sounding appellations, meals are not undesirable—under AAFCO definitions, they’re required to include meat, skin, and possibly bones in dehydrated form, but
not
feathers, hair, innards, and other, even more disgusting things (appetite spoiler alert: for example, tumors or euthanized dogs).

Fats and oils, essential for skin and coat health, should have specific names, too. So you want “chicken fat” rather than “animal fat,” “herring oil” rather than “fish oil,” “sunflower oil” rather than “vegetable oil,” and so on. Avoid anything that contains mineral oil altogether, because the “mineral” from which it’s derived tends to be petroleum.

Look for whole grains like brown rice (as opposed to brewer’s rice), oatmeal, and whole ground barley, not “fragments” or flour. Corn is not always bad for dogs—though many are sensitive to it—but it has little redeeming nutritional value when in its most common pet food form: as a filler. Similarly, ingredients such as soybean meal, beet pulp, and cereal food, while not necessarily unhealthy on their own in small amounts, are cheap by-products of human food manufacturers that often turn up in pet products produced by the same companies. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, peas, and other starches that tend to turn up in higher-quality dog food are fine as carbohydrates sources.

You’ll want derivatives of Vitamin E and C, including the former in its “mixed tocopherols” incarnation, the latter in forms like rosemary-, sage-, and clove extract, ascorbyl palmitate, and ascorbic acid. Avoid the scarier acronyms: BHA, BHT, and TBHQ, along with ethoxyquin and sodium meta-bisulphite.

Dogs don’t care about the hue of their food, so avoid anything that contains “numbered” dyes such as Red 40; they’re designed to make greyish meat products look more genuinely meaty. Caramel coloring is probably the least noxious of these cover-ups.

Dogs do, on the other hand, fall for the unhealthy sweeteners that often turn up in poor-quality food to make them more palatable. They include cane molasses, corn syrup in any form, sugar, sorbitol, sucrose, fructose, glucose, ammoniated glycyrrhizin (the name alone should be enough to warn you off), and propylene glycol.
³¹
Blackstrap molasses and honey are fine when consumed sparingly in treats; you just don’t want large amounts of them in anything your dog eats on a regular basis, lest your pup start jonesing for sweets.

The same goes for salt (a.k.a. sodium chloride on many packages), which is no better for your dog than it is for you. As with sugar, it’s used to make generic meat products more appealing. Give your dog enough food with this needless seasoning and he’ll soon be competing with you for the pretzels and popcorn.

No. Premixed (but requiring you to add ingredients such as meat and water), freeze-dried, dehydrated, rolled, frozen, and fresh-chilled (cooked and refrigerated before shipping) dog foods have become increasingly common in recent years. All claim to provide a healthy and balanced diet in a convenient, nonperishable (or at least long-lasting) form.

Not all are as balanced or as convenient as others—nor as appealing to every dog. I tried one of the dehydrated varieties, only to discover that, after adding water, I had to wait 10 minutes before the food reconstituted itself. Used to more immediate gratification when he spots me puttering around the kitchen, Frankie waited impatiently for dinner. Upon finally being presented with a doggie version of grits, he turned up his nose at the bowl. I’m not sure whether he wanted something to sink his teeth into, or whether it was an olfactory issue; Frankie refused to discuss it.

But that’s hardly a statistically significant sample (except to me). I’m told that dog food rolls—which have the consistency of liverwurst—are so tasty that bits are used as training treats, and that they’re the only thing some finicky pups will deign to dine on.

All in all, these products run the gamut in taste, texture, and Rex appeal. If you decide to use them in a diet plan, it’s always best to check with your vet—and with the
Whole Dog Journal,
which has reviewed many of them. At a minimum, make sure you choose a food that’s labeled “complete and balanced.”

The difference in price between a high-quality company’s food and a major manufacturer’s “premium” product isn’t all that significant, but with the big companies you’re also paying for advertising, whereas the smaller businesses generally spend more on the product and less on pushing it. And for some niche varieties, such as freeze dried and dehydrated, you’re eliminating the water weight that bulks up other products—and inflates their prices. To economize on high-class kibble, buy in bulk and store the unused portions in sealed bags in a cool, dark place.

More to the point: pay now or pay later at the vet. Crappy
³²
food is bad for your dog’s health. Period.

With difficulty. If possible, restrict yourself to products that list the country of origin of their ingredients and the location of the manufacturing plant.
³³
When I realized that one of my (former) favorite brands of chicken strips, sold by a small company promoting its healthy products, were produced in China, I stopped buying them. The company claims that they spot test each batch and I’m pleased about the disclosure of the factory locale—which is more than many large manufacturers do—but I think I’ll wait until they move their production to the United States in case some melamine slips through, thank you.

In September 2007, a few months after the massive pet food recalls, Congress passed the Food and Drug Association’s Amendments Act (FDAAA), which mandated new standards and improved labeling within two years. Don’t hold your breath for anything to happen. In 2008, a year after the FDAAA’s passage, instead of starting from scratch and writing new, more effective legislation, committee members dredged up the old laws and added huge loopholes. And, as we went to press in 2009, the early warning and notification systems mandated for pet food recalls were nowhere in evidence. To find out about recalls, your best bet is to check the ASPCA’s website,
www.aspca.org
.

You can. There’s a common misconception that dogs should never eat human food. More accurately, your dog shouldn’t subsist on table scraps or eat scraps that are unhealthy for them.
³⁴

Which is a comparatively recent development. Dogs did fine on scraps when they lived on farms. The first prepared dog food was a response to city life: In 1860, James Spratt created Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes to provide London’s shipyard pups with more nutrition than they could get from scavenging hardtack (biscuits). Many of the mass-prepared dog foods that followed in the United States continued to feature meat, if not prime cuts, until the Depression. With the rise of highly processed dog food after World War II, any real health benefits were sacrificed for convenience and low cost (especially for manufacturers). The fact that so much human food is equally unhealthy explains why table grazing isn’t an ideal nutritional plan for your pup.

I came to home cooking for Frankie reluctantly, because I tend to avoid cooking for myself. When I learned about the problems with many commercial dog foods, I simply switched to better brands. Then Frankie was diagnosed with diabetes and my vet prescribed a kibble in which “chicken meal by-products” was the sole ingredient that seemed to have even a remote connection to the natural universe. And none of the good-quality brands fit the recommended high-fiber/no-grain /low-fat bill.

I won’t go through the saga of seeking a home-cooked diet tailored to a small, insulin-dependent dog. Suffice it to say, the two holistic practices I consulted were long on supplements and general advice—and, in one case, on testicle-site massage (see question 27)—and short on actual portion sizes and ingredient proportions. It took lots of independent research and many weight/age/exercise level calculations to come up with the ideal Frankie formula. Diets that need to be adjusted for other health problems, or those geared toward modifying behavior (which I discuss in Chapter 6), pose challenges that may make home cooking extremely difficult if not impracticable.