Does anyone vary the type of food they buy for their cats or dogs? Or they eat the same thing year after year?
These days commercial pet food is formulated to appeal to humans rather than pets. I mean when I was a kid fifty or sixty years ago you'd have to be an idiot to put dog food in your mouth. It smelled terrible and probably tasted worse and had a horrible texture. Nowadays it looks, feels and smells like human food.
Dogs will eat almost anything including garbage and feces, but cats don't like to put things in their mouth that don't smell right to them and a lot of food that smells good to humans doesn't smell good to a lot of cats. If you've found a brand of food your cat likes, it's no guarantee that he'll like another brand, just because they seem the same to you.
I remember I used to feed my pitbull our dinner's leftovers. She freakin' loved it! Once she got used to the food we ate, dry dog food was never touched by her again.
Be careful. It's quite possible to feed dogs too much protein. One of the three main differences between dogs and wolves since they split off as a subspecies of
Canis lupus is that they adapted to a full-time scavenger's diet which has much less protein than a hunter's diet. As a result they have smaller brains (brains require a lot of protein to maintain) and their metabolism isn't tuned to a high-protein diet. They don't have the miles of intestines that we do so it's not easy for them to process nutrients they don't need. Some dogs can have seizures or other reactions to too much protein. If you're giving your dog human food I hope it's not a lot of meat and dairy products.
Fat is also no better for dogs than it is for us. Don't trim fat off of your own meat and give it to your dog.
A rather large number of dogs have bad reactions to pork. I'm not clear why (my wife understands these things and I trust her) but we don't let our dogs have it--neither bones nor meat nor pig ear snacks.
And of course chocolate can be fatal to a dog.
Finally, don't give your dog anything with preservatives--including cheap commercial dog food. It will kill the bacterial culture he needs in order for his extremely short intestine to digest food. He'll run right out and eat some feces to replenish it.
