Dogs and the Evolution of Feeding Habits

[invert_nexus]

A thought occurred to me earlier as I read a pamphlet on pet care.

"Those soulful, pleading eyes may melt your heart, but it's best not to feed your dog human food. It can lead to canine obesity, intestinal upsets and nutritional imbalances. Unlike people, dogs are content eating a similar diet every day, especially if it offers the wide range of flavors and textures in [XXX] and [XXXXXXX] Dog Foods."​

Shameless advertising aside, this set me to thinking.
Why is it bad for dogs to eat people food?

Fraggle, our local dog expert, is always posting about how dogs became part of the human tribe long ago because they were camp-following wolves which were then allowed to enter the camp and take a more active role.

If this is the case, then why should human food be so detrimental to their health?

Evolution should have adequately prepared them for their diet.

Now. People might object that dogs and humans have only been symbiotic a relatively short amount of time evolutionarily speaking. And I'd agree. Except for one small details.
Dogs are nothing like the wolves which were originally incorporated into human society. Despite the great length of time necessary for evolution to do its magic, controlled breeding and husbandry gets results much faster.

An argument that I can think of is that while the dog's form may be varied, their internal workings aren't necessarily so different. The digestive tract may evolve at normal rates while only certain aspects of the dog are accelerated through planned breeding.

Another argument is that evolution doesn't care about canine obesity. By the time a dog is overcome with obesity and other nutritional disorders, he (or she) will most likely have bred already. And because of this, the trait is not selected for strongly.

Another possibility is that 'human food' has gone through a severe transformation over the past century. There was a time when it would not be outrageous to describe humans with the words: "...content eating a similar diet every day..." It's only recently that we have become such connoisseurs when it comes to our diet.


Still. I think it's strange.


Another thing is that dogs are natural beggars. Puppies that have never eaten a morsel of human food in their entire lives... beg like a an old hand.

So. Even though a digestive system able to efficiently handle human food isn't selected for, the instinct to con their human companions into giving them said food is selected for.

Funny.


And we? Is it possible that we have been selected for being susceptible to those sad, puppy dog eyes?

 

[spuriousmonkey]

Some human foods are actually toxic to dogs. I've heard people mentioning that for instance chocolate is poisonous to dogs.

 

[invert_nexus]

There is that, of course. In fact, a short list follows the section that I've already quoted:

• Chocolate.
• Onions.
• Bones.
• Raw eggs.
• Raw meat or poultry.

Pretty odd list, isn't it?
Of all the foods listed, I think that only chocolate is legitimate. Maybe onions, though I've never heard that before.

The rest are more safety issues. Raw eggs because of... what's the bacteria that can be found on egg shells? Not salmonella, is it?
Bones? The fuck? Chicken bones I can understand as they shatter into needle-like shards. But bones?

And what's the deal with raw meat? Evolutionarily speaking, this is what their diet should consist of. The issues that I can see from raw meat is various bacterial infections that are more of a consequence of meat processing than nature. But, still...

 

[grazzhoppa]

Hersey's chocolate / processed chocolate bars will 90% of the time not be toxic to dogs. Cocoa is toxic to dogs. There is so little cocoa in the chocolate candy we eat, it poses a little threat to dogs. I was told this by a licensed veterinarian.

 

[Frank King]

petrol is no good for dogs too, one day i went for a drive with my dog and i went into the petrol station with my dog to fill up, when i was in there this idiot across from me was on the mobile phone and didn't realise that he was over filling his tank. My dog made a bee line to the car drinking any petrol that came out of his tank by the time i could run over to stop my dog it was to late the dog sort of shuttered, and then took off, started running away, i went into the station to pay for my petrol and the jumped in my car a drove after it. He ran for quite a while and then all of a sudden slowed down and then just stoped and lay still on the ground.

 

[mardener]

Dogs rely upon bacterium more than us for the break down of their foods. Their enzyme production is not as good as ours and we are able uptake more mineral salts and nutrional ''goodness'' that a do cant. We have a much more effeicient digestive system and are able to cope with more toxins than a dog can.

When you think about it, our food is no good for us. Our digestive system has not changed for thousands of years and yet our diet changed every decade to a century. A dog could not cope with the amount of varied diet that we can.

 

[Gondolin]

petrol is no good for dogs too, one day i went for a drive with my dog and i went into the petrol station with my dog to fill up, when i was in there this idiot across from me was on the mobile phone and didn't realise that he was over filling his tank. My dog made a bee line to the car drinking any petrol that came out of his tank by the time i could run over to stop my dog it was to late the dog sort of shuttered, and then took off, started running away, i went into the station to pay for my petrol and the jumped in my car a drove after it. He ran for quite a while and then all of a sudden slowed down and then just stoped and lay still on the ground.

Ran out of gas, eh?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Dogs have in fact adapted to the food available in human settlements. One of the very few important differences between Canis lupus lupus (wolf) and Canis lupus familiaris (dog) is that dogs have smaller brains. Brains require a lot of protein, and scavengers don't get as much protein in their diet as hunters.

It's dangerous to make assumptions about things we haven't observed, but it's tempting to imagine that the wolves who stuck around the campgrounds were the opportunistic ones who were happy to eat free garbage and handouts of cooked food rather than always insisting on fresh raw meat. Self-selection, it always happens on the fringes of human habitation. Camp followers are by definition unaggressive, curious, and tolerant of the company of other species. Inter-species dating and hybridization tends to occur near humanity.

Canines are moderately well adapted to an omnivorous diet, even the fox genus. There are established urban populations of coyotes who get as much nutrition from sifting through garbage as from hunting cats. Europe's pathetically marginalized wolf population can be seen desperately scavenging in trash dumps.

It's only been in the last century or so that human food has become less than perfect for dogs. Aside from the poisons that have already been mentioned, the real issue is preservatives. Unlike humans, dogs have an extremely short intestinal tract so the preservatives kill off the bacterial culture they need to digest their food completely. That's why dogs eat stool. After it's been lying around for a while, the bacteria give the preservatives a run for the money and the dog can reestablish its internal flora. (If your dog eats poop, give him yogurt instead.)

Commercial dog food used to be full of preservatives. Notice that the better brands don't have it any more. They were defeating their own purpose by preventing the dog from digesting it. Remember when all garden experts warned you not to use dog or cat feces as fertilizer? The preservatives destroy the bacteria that makes soil fertile.

 

[invert_nexus]

Thanks for your post, Fraggle.
I've been waiting for you to chance on my little thread here.

A quick question.
On the subject of yogurt. My brother's house is full of shit-eating dogs.
What kind of yogurt? It needs to be unpasteurized or something?

Speaking of which.
There seems to be something going on where they're losing hair.
They're Pomeranians, and they thought that the problems was fleas at first. And maybe it still is, but it seems strange.

Ok. The two females have both given birth this summer. The first lost a lot of weight in the process. She's a toy and had six puppies with her first litter. All of them survived. They got lucky.

Anyway, she lost hair during the pregnancy and while raising the puppies as well. She was pulling out her underfur (Poms are fluffy as hell, normally) for bedding. But since the puppies have been weened, she's still losing hair. Could it be that it's just a summer issue?

Also, the other female has always had this weird hair problem. Losing hair and then growing it back. But, while pregnant she basically lost her mind and ripped all the hair out of her back and her head is balding from scratching.

There is also a half-pug/half-mini-pincer in the house and she's kinda got patchy problems around her back leg from chewing at the hair.

And one of the puppies seems to have a tiny bald spot forming right between it's eyes.

They took Mocha (the one that is really bald) to the vet one time to have it tested for mange, fungus, whatever, and the dermatological tests came back negative. It seems to be a stress issue or something.

Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Poor mocha looks like a freak. I've told the family to just go ahead and shave her completely. She can't look any worse than she does now. We thought at first that it might just be her, we kinda make fun of her for being inbred because she came from what might be considered a puppy mill and is kinda stupid and high strung. But then we noticed that the other dogs are thinning now as well. I joked the other day that they see Mocha being bald and think that it looks cool or maybe comfortable and want to jump on the bandwagon....

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

On the subject of yogurt. My brother's house is full of shit-eating dogs. What kind of yogurt? It needs to be unpasteurized or something?

Yogurt is made from pasteurized milk but the yogurt isn't usually repasteurized. But yeah, make sure it's got live cultures in it. Most of them do.

Speaking of which. There seems to be something going on where they're losing hair.

It sounds like an environmental or nutritional problem since they're all getting it.

Dogs are like people, halfway through their lives they suddenly become allergic to something that's really difficult, inconvenient, and sad to give up. And it's just as hard to find out what it is as it is with us.

It could be something in the environment if it's affecting them all. New neighbors with who love lawn chemicals? New carpeting? New perfume, detergent, bed linen, anything? You've really got to think "outside the box" in cases like this because it's often something that you just won't think about.

But stress is a big possibility too. The hair-pulling behavior sounds like something that could be due to stress. It's a little unusual for all of them to start doing it at once, however. Unusual, but not impossible.

Find a better vet. A good one will consider this a personal challenge.

 

[valich]

Raw chicken bones don't splinter so they ar okay for dogs as long as you preserve the meat properly to prevent bacteria from forming, but yes DO NOT give a dog cooked chicken bones as they my splinter. Dogs can eat raw meat! But make sure it is not contaminated! Continuous, but not a little, amounts of chocolate are poisonous: so why give anyat all! We have about three hundred breeds of canines with a wide degree of genetic deifferences. My last Norwegian Elkhound dies at age five, but aside from that, we could only give him "Lamb and Rice" diet formula, else he would vomit it up. My new Norwegian Elkhound has a similar proble. Any commercial dog food so far seems okay but if I give him any table scraps (licking the t.v. dinner plates) then its alk diarhea the next morning. I myself only eat steak and salad. So when I but a steak I make sure it has a large bopne in it. This helps in training my dog. He knows the commands and knows that he has to listen in order to wait for the resulting bone. There is no problem here. I wait to see how far he chews the bone up (pork or steak) and then take it away from him when I think that it is too small that it might get stuck in his throat.