In the last 3-4 THOUSAND years, I am sure millions of dogs lived on food from the humans' table.
Actually they've been eating our food for about fifteen thousand years, since before we invented tables.
Dogs and humans formed the first (non-symbiotic) multi-species community. Some evidence suggests that our hunting packs kept crossing paths in the same territory and realized they could hunt more effectively together. But other evidence suggests that the wolves whose ancestors became dogs (they're a single species) had more of a taste for scavenging than hunting and when they saw all the garbage in our camps they thought they'd gone to heaven. (Which I suppose they did, compared to the pigs who wandered in for the same reason and weren't so lucky.)
Those bones were all kind, cooked, roasted, raw. I am also sure that people don't carefully put all chicken bones into their kitchen composter, because they didn't have one! So how and when this myth started?
As I said, our vet removes about one bone a month from a throat. Remember that choking isn't what kills them, so if a dog eventually dies from it the cause may not be accurately identified. Still, it's a very small number. Americans are very poor at risk analysis so we often are alarmed by small risks and blase about big ones. (E.g., drunk drivers kill thirty times more Americans than terrorists--and we even know where all the drunk drivers live.)
You say you use a pressure cooker. Can you elaborate? I have two large dogs and add chicken to their meals. I would like to include the bones for health, but am still "worried about the wives' tales".
If you cook chickens in a pressure cooker the bones become very soft. Toss the whole thing into a food processor, and the bones will grind right up with the meat. Bingo, there's their MDAR of calcium.
Be careful about giving your dogs too much meat. Remember that one of the key differences between the wolf and dog subspecies of
Canis lupus is that dogs have a lower protein requirement, which is reflected in their smaller brains. If you buy a decent quality commercial dog food it surely contains enough protein and if you add more you're not doing your dogs any favor at all. (It can cause organ damage.) Dogs are not equivalent to cats. Cats are pure carnivores and picky ones at that. Dogs eat their entire kill including the intestines and their contents. (They need the bacteria, which is why domestic dogs eat feces, especially if their diet contains preservatives which constantly kill of their intestinal culture.) And they also scavenge from other predators' kills, as well as eating just about anything else they can find.
The typical problems with commercial food are:
- Vitamins in a form that they can't easily metabolize
- Preservatives, which a great many dogs are allergic to but manifest it in ways that can take you years to figure out, in addition to sterilizing their intestines and forcing them to go out in the yard and eat stool
- Meat byproducts like beaks and claws that do indeed contain protein but also a lot of other tissue that is not easily digested and should only be eaten in proportion to what they'd get by eating a whole bird they killed themselves
- Wheat--many people are allergic to it and so are many dogs.
I'm stunned. Your dogs eat better than some Americans.
Americans who come to our house eat very well. We have no control over their dietary habits once they leave. If my wife cooks like this for the dogs you can imagine what she makes for us. We have pizza with homemade crust, turkey sausage and cranberry chutney for Christmas dinner, followed by truffles made with her own chocolate tempering machine.
Some ppl are like that. I wondered reading that if he breeds them or something considering he has 13 dogs!
Yes, we breed Lhasa Apsos. But only about four of them are breeders. The rest are the ones that were too cute to sell, plus a rescue from somebody else's litter that looked like their momma slept with a giraffe. And one is an Anatolian who keeps the bears and cougars out of the yard, but even she is a rescue dog who is a runt at 90 lbs and takes thyroid pills.
Even so that seems like a hell of a lot of work making that dog food.
The only work is pressure-cooking and food-processing the chickens, and one morning's work makes enough to last for a couple of months. Making rice is trivial and the pumpkin comes in cans. (Although the day after Halloween some years we can buy a trunkload of fresh ones for a nickel a pound.) It saves us a couple thousand dollars a year and it seems like a good wage for the effort. Rather spend that money on a housekeeper!
My dog just gets regular dog food from a bag, and the occassional scraps.
Just be careful about what kind of scraps. As I said, you can give them too much protein and it causes liver and kidney problems. Trans-fatty acids are just as bad for dogs as they are for humans, and preservatives are terrible for them because they require bacteria for digestion. Don't buy cheap dog food or you'll spend every dime you save on vet bills many times over.