Meg - 1979 – 1992

Nine National trials

English team 1983

The first of our Main Line of dogs and the inspiration for MBCC

Modern Day Dog Food

Is modern day dog food an improvement on the food we used to feed our dogs on? Technically it should be but if we asked the same question about human food we would probably find that many people don’t think that ‘improvements’ have been for the better. We are more hygiene aware and we have greater access to a wider variety of human food but this has brought with it convenience foods, pre-packaging, preservatives and of course marketing. Whereas most people who had a garden would try and grow a few vegetables it is now considered to be ‘organic’ gardening, whereas years ago it was done to put a cheap meal on the table. Then it was cheap, but now it’s good for you, and usually expensive! We used to have natural preservatives and if it couldn’t be preserved you didn’t keep it, you ate it straight away. Food wasn’t gaily coloured to tempt children to pester mum and dad to buy it, and carrots bought from the local shop were expected to have some dirt on them, if not someone had tampered with them! Sell by dates weren’t necessary as food could be seen to be stale and people bought, took home and cooked, whereas today people buy, take home and freeze, it may be eaten in the next week but sometimes it is left there for such a long time – in case of emergency – that it ends up being thrown out as even the freezer can’t be trusted to ‘keep it fresh’.
On the plus side we have greater choices, we can shop for the week, we can get our Christmas food in at the beginning of December and if we shop wisely we can buy food that is good for us and at a competitive price.

Dog food isn’t really any different, it has come a long way in the last half century and there have been great improvements but you need to shop carefully and be aware that clever marketing will tell you what they want you to believe and not necessarily what you need to know. We need to understand a little about feeding energy and of a dog’s requirements and to do this we need to be able to read the labels on the dog food. To simplify it we deal in terms of protein levels, if the protein is high or low everything else will be in balance with it, for example  high protein will have high oil content equals high energy, yes the dog will have a shiny coat but that really isn’t as important as the dog’s overall well being.  The energy intake needs to fit the energy output, so if a dog is growing it is using energy therefore it needs energy input, when the growth rate slows down the energy input should decrease at the same time as the growth rate slows down. If we go back thirty years 14% protein was considered high and 12% - 13% was more normal. The levels were raised until 20% was high and 18% more normal then suddenly a law was passed that complete foods must be over 16% and suddenly we had food at 26%. Its worth noting that thirty years ago the average dog was not suffering from malnutrition or rickets, maybe they could have been fed better but we have to find a happy medium and not food that sends dogs into hyper mode.

There are choices in diet, but the three main ones are meat, complete, or raw. Choosing from three may not sound difficult but which meat do you buy, tinned, fresh or in plastic bags? Which complete food, there are hundreds of them and what do you feed raw?

We will deal with meat first, tinned meat is no different to human tinned meat in the respect that it has been processed, it can contain both preservatives and colourants and it doesn’t contain everything a dog needs. In the wild a dog kills and eats bones, meat, sinew, and it can pick at herbage to add vitamins or to bring the meat into balance. The analysis on the tin also makes it seem that the meat is low in protein e.g. 8% but there is high moisture content in the meat which can make that protein level ride at over 20% of the dry matter. Meat needs additions to the diet usually in the form of a mixer biscuit which has its own energy level thus increasing energy input again. Meat in plastic bag form is often less processed and usually contains less, if any, colourants but the energy level is still high. Fresh is without a doubt the best way of feeding meat but (like human food) its not always the most convenient and the energy that fresh meat provides is high, (remember a dog kills in the wild to get the fresh meat it needs to keep up that killing energy)
 
Raw food: that sounds as if it could be the most natural, if the dog eats raw food in the wild then surely giving raw food in our homes is the next best thing to being natural. But, our raw food isn’t natural is it? Beware the marketing trap of ‘you owe it to you dog to feed it as nature intended’. Nature didn’t intend for a ‘kill’ to be hung in a slaughter house, to spend time going through all the process of being hung, bled, tested, chopped and transported several times, nor did nature feed that ‘kill’ on processed food and antibiotics beforehand. Probably in the northern most tip of Scotland a dog may be lucky enough to find a rabbit that isn’t tainted with some kind of pollution! But that doesn’t mean to say it is wrong to feed raw but do be aware that it isn’t a ‘must’ for a dog to be fed that way. Raw bones? Personally my dogs never get raw bones but they do get roasted ones, I accept the bones are not how nature would have delivered them but then I can’t possibly feed as nature would have delivered so the next best thing is make sure its been cooked. I also like my dogs to graze but the herbage they can obtain is limited and in order to keep the gut clean after a ‘kill’ a dog needs access to a wide and varied amount of herbage which is almost impossible to find that isn’t ‘tainted’ with pollution. Raw chicken bones to me are an absolute taboo and I know a lot people do feed them to their dogs, but if you ever see a dead bird you will see the meat picked off the bones but the bones are left untouched, if its good enough for dog to leave the bones in a natural state then its good enough for me not to feed them in domestication.
Complete food: it’s not fresh and it hasn’t got the visual appeal of fresh food but if it’s a good food it should be balanced. I can remember many years ago having to have various different bags of food, bone meal, fish meal, meat, etc., so that we could mix up a balanced diet for our dogs. It was a relief when someone actually decided to manufacture the food ready mixed and balanced, but now there are so many different kinds of food that it can become a minefield. Even in the days of self mixing I can remember making enough dinner for one extra - to feed the house dog. Like all modern products marketing plays a key role in selling, so bags are no longer plain, some of them are very visual with a picture of a dream dog in amazing condition looking like butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth, and its amazing how the dog in the TV advert always chooses the right food. It’s a bit like the adverts for hair shampoo on the television, do those models really have hair like that and if so why doesn’t mine do the same when I use the product? It doesn’t mean that the food isn’t good but each company is trying to sell their own product so marketing is important to them. To us, the purchaser, we just want to know if it’s right for our dog. To be fair to the manufacturers they can’t be expected to provide information on the bag for every dog so when they say feed puppy food until your dog is six months old (and on some bags its 12 months old) they have to think of the St Bernard who will still be growing at that age, but the collie and most other breeds is getting near to stopping growing at that age! But then if the bag said keep this food in your oven we wouldn’t do it – would we? – we would use common sense and assume that the person giving that advice was either mad or wanted us to seriously think about keeping the food dry. So we should always use common sense, read the labels and then decide what is best for our own dog or dogs.

Some points worth remembering - if a dog is a working breed it doesn’t mean it needs food for working dogs - if it isn’t working it doesn’t need working food. A dog doesn’t need its energy food raising just because it is competing, it needs stamina, and raising the energy in the food can risk injury if the dog is running around without thinking properly – a little like a human under the influence of alcohol. Vegetables are good for dogs and they can be fed raw or blanched, many dogs like fruit but remember that the vegetables and fruit that we give to dogs are not the kind they would find and eat in the wild, so once again we are substituting. For example some dogs love strawberries but they wouldn’t find them in the wild, they would find wild berries but not our cultivated ones. Many shepherds used to feed their dogs on flake maze (it looks a bit like cornflakes) but their dogs would suffer from vitamin B deficiency and would need regular injections. The attraction of feeding maze was the way it provided bulk in the diet and was warming – a little like a bowl of porridge but not as good. They knew they would need a vitamin boost but it was a cheap form of feed and it kept them in condition but, fed on that alone, it could also give a percentage  of dogs a cough which, unless the diet was changed, could be fatal. Porridge was another good cheap feed for shepherds dogs and far more nutritious than maize, add to this a  diet of meat a couple of times a week, some bones and a bit of fishmeal and the dogs did well and many of them lived to a ripe old age. High protein, fed for too long a period of time, can damage the kidneys and the liver causing incontinence, there is now concern for human athletes on  high protein diets.

Sometime ago I was arguing about the rights and wrongs of dog food being sold in supermarkets that sell human food and a young man said, “I don’t see the problem, people have a dog and they just want the easiest way of feeding it and of getting that food.” After that statement I was even more convinced that I was right in my argument, if people aren’t prepared to walk that bit further and try that bit harder then dog ownership is too easy, and maybe that is part of the reason we have so many in rescue. I also believe that we should support our small pet shops rather than risk them going out of business. When looking for a good dog food I stay away from food in human supermarkets (why should they get a good discount at my expense?), I am cautious about expensive packaging and I am not swayed by massive stands at Crufts. I know I wouldn’t pay well over the odds for a pound of steak so I won’t pay over the odds for dog food, unless it is a specialised one e.g., gluten free, I need to know there are no unnecessary preservatives or additives in it and I won’t seek advice from someone selling dog food unless I know they have studied nutrition.

We are each responsible for the dogs in our care and as such we want to do the best for them, and if a dog is on a particular food, be it raw, processed or complete and it is fit and healthy with no behavioural problems and not hyper then the food is fine. But do remember that dog’s do not become bored with food, this is a human thought, in the wild dogs would eat their kill and then have a day off to rest their gut. Years ago shepherds used to feed a big meal on Saturday night and then the dog rested on the Sunday with no food (this was when Sunday was a recognised day of rest, I can well remember many shepherds who refused to compete in Sunday trials), on Monday the dogs had a light gruel in the morning and meal at night and then back to once a day feeding until Saturday, once again many of these dogs were still working into their teens. If a dog doesn’t feel like eating maybe it’s telling you it’s just not hungry and it needs to rest its gut.

Future article: why dog’s don’t become bored with food.

©Barbara Sykes
Mainline Border Collie Centre