This week it was reported that an ingredient included in cat food made by Fold Hill Foods for Applaws, Pets at Home’s AVA and Sainsbury’s hypoallergenic range had been linked to the rare and often fatal disease of feline pancytopenia and the products have now been recalled.
Also this week, it was reported that certain vegetables found in some dog foods had been linked to fatal heart disease in dogs. Further, this week I put two and two together and had to wonder: what the hell are we feeding our pets?
When I first got my dog I fed him commercial pet food. Like you, probably, I thought “complete and balanced” on the tin or bag was all you needed to know, job done, all nutritional requirements met, happy days, and look at the healthy, bright-eyed, stunning show-quality golden labrador on the label! (If my dog could speak I imagined one of the things he might have said was: “I try my best not to whine, but I know I’ll never measure up.” And also, perhaps: “I wish dog food companies would stop with these unrealistic images.”)
Then one afternoon I was out walking my dog (“why isn’t my hair as glossy as that?”; “I bet Golden Boy is so smart he doesn’t fall for the fake stick throw like I do”) when I met a woman with a very old dog, something like 16, and its eyes were a bit opaque, to be fair, but its teeth, my God. This ancient dog basically had a Hollywood smile. It was dazzling. These were teeth to out-dazzle even Dan Wootton’s.
She said her dog had only ever been fed a diet of scraps, raw meat, bones, and that the abrasive action of bones removes tartar from teeth and keeps then clean.
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I had never heard this before and immediately went home to research it, by which I mean I eventually researched it. I am quite lazy so it probably took me a few weeks, I’m sure. But, being quite a shallow person, I wanted that dazzling smile for my dog. And when I gave him his first raw chicken wing — I was terrified; what if he chokes? — he knew exactly what to do and knocked it back as you might an oyster. I was amazed.
When you think about it, how can any meal that you serve over and over (and over) be “complete and balanced”. If it were a good idea then that’s what we’d all be eating, surely, and the fact is, it would be a godsend. Mum, what’s for lunch? “Kibble.” Mum, what’s for tea? “Kibble.” Mum, I’m hungry. “Here, have a handful of kibble. No, you can’t have the bag, or you won’t eat your dinner, which is kibble.” Yet we know that, in addition to being incredibly boring, it wouldn’t be sound.
Also, what would we say when summoning everyone to the dinner table? “I’ve plated up your dull, dry nuggets extruded from highly processed, highly suspect meat sources with vitamins that had to be added because the processing took them all out? Come and get it! Enjoy!”
The pet food we know today didn’t even exist until the 1950s when major food manufacturing companies realised they could market their by-products — scrapings from the abattoir floor, essentially — by mixing them with cheap starch (ie grains) and, voilà a profitable source of income. Dogs would not naturally eat grains. For example, in all my years, which have been many, I have never read the headline: “Farmer shoots dog caught raiding barley field.” Similarly, when out in the countryside, I have never read a sign saying: “Please keep your dog on a lead to ensure it does not worry the maize.”
So because of General Foods, Nabisco, General Mills — the pet food industry started in America — dogs were suddenly forced to eat a diet that departed enormously from what they had eaten for tens of thousands of years, which was human leftovers.
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In fact, wolves evolved into dogs because they liked hanging round human encampments for the carcasses and rotten meat that would be tossed away, as we couldn’t digest them. (Dogs, like wolves, have high levels of hydrochloric acid in their stomachs which means they can dissolve bone and see off the bacteria that would kill us. This is why a dog can drink from a puddle, for instance, and not get sick. And why they can eat poo with impunity, alas.)
The basic point is: dogs have eaten the same diet, and been fine, up until around 70 years ago, when it was seen there was money in them there hills. Ever sat at the vet’s and wondered why the shelves in the waiting room are filled with a certain branded food sold at a premium? It’s because the vet and manufacturer do very nicely from it and the mark-up is phenomenal. It’s like buying wine in a restaurant or shampoo at the hairdresser.
But, all this said, not everyone is in favour of the unfortunately named BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food) diet and some are dead against it.
You’ll have to do your own research (eventually) but I decided it was the far healthier option, was the only way to truly know what was in my dog’s food, and quickly learnt my way around not just chicken wings but also lamb ribs and heart and tripe and, of course, marrow bones, which are like crack cocaine to dogs — although you do have to keep your butcher sweet so one will be put by. I found: “My, what lovely meat you have on display today” worked, as did: “Is that a new fly-screen?” Butchers like it when you notice their new fly-screens, I think.
The positives of the switch were apparent almost immediately, particularly in the what-comes-out-the-other-end department. No more Pedigree Chum poos, as I called them, which you had to scrape up, as best you could. Instead, his were solid as a rock. You could have robbed a jewellery shop with them. I was that proud I was sometimes minded to call other people over and say: “Hey, couldn’t you rob a jewellery shop with this?”
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Sadly, my dog died a little while back, but he was a good age, and shall I tell you what he died with? Excellent teeth. So take that, Golden Boy; take that!
Giles Coren is away