ARCHIVED COLUMN from APRIL 2006
OUR DOG’S MEALS - VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE
As stewards for our dog’s nutrition, we need to examine the importance of variety in our dog’s meals. Whether we feed as nature intended, prepare a home-cooked version, or use the convenience of commercial pet foods, variety is essential to ensuring a rich assortment of nutrients for optimal nutrition as well as providing satiety and a healthy appetite.
Consider if we were limited to eating the same food – a dry cereal – every single day, at every single meal, for our entire lives. To ‘balance’ the nutrients, it would be necessary to add a cocktail of artificial and processed vitamins and minerals because we wouldn’t have any other (or natural) source of nutrients. Fortunately, we don’t eat that way, but many of us force our dogs to eat that way, even though that is not the best form of nutrition or source of nutrients. Because we don’t eat that ‘one food’ day-in and day-out we obtain our nutrients throughout the day or over several days. Our dogs are intended to receive their nutrients in that overall way as well.
Here are some wise words from C.J. Puotinen, author of The Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care:
“The key word is variety. Why feed your pet under laboratory-controlled conditions when its species evolved on a constantly changing assortment of foods?”
A dog’s digestive system is very different from that of humans, but the principles of reaping nutrients from a range of foods applies to dogs as well as to us.
Whether we’re talking about dogs, horses, humans, or snakes, there is no one ‘best’ food – the best nutrition is gleaned from a variety of species-appropriate sources. And for dogs that are fed commercial kibble, they especially need a variety of those products. Every dog is an individual so, what ‘works’ for one dog, may not ‘work’ for another one.
I’ll address the fundamentals of variety for:
- dogs fed commercial dog food
- those fed in a species-appropriate manner, and
- those fed a home-cooked diet.
DOGS ON COMMERCIAL FOODS
Commercial pet food products benefit humans more than their dogs -- the products are cheap and convenient. For further information on commercial dogs foods, I recommend the Animal Health Protection Agency’s “What’s Really in Dog Food?” For those wanting to be better informed on selecting a commercial product (and hopefully that will include canned as well as the difficult-to-digest dry products), The API has another informative article, “Selecting a Commercial Pet Food”.
Feeding multiple commercial products rather than just one product can help fill in the nutritional gaps that each brand may have. An added benefit to our dogs in feeding multiple or varying commercial products is that our dog will be less apt to develop a food allergy.
How to Provide Variety to Commercial Foods
After carefully evaluating the contents of commercial products, decide upon a trio of them. If we are feeding exclusively dry products, this method will achieve a variety for our dog without causing digestive upsets:
- At meal one feed kibble “A”, at meal two feed kibble “B”, at meal three feed kibble “C”, at meal four feed kibble “A” again, and so on. This method also eliminates the need for having to so carefully transition from one commercial product to another.
Even if we provide the variety suggested above, our dog will benefit considerably if we regularly replace part or all of the dry kibble with a good quality canned dog product. Better yet, add some real and fresh foods to your dog’s meals. Examples of this would be: an egg (very nutritious and low in price), some leftovers, fresh meat, and/or a can of sardines or other canned fish (drained). This also provides some nutrition that processed foods simply can't offer.
DOGS ON SPECIES-APPROPRIATE MEALS
Most dog guardians who feed this way have a greater knowledge and understanding of a dog’s nutritional needs because of the research and information gathering we’ve done to learn about feeding dogs as the carnivores they are. Feeding an assortment is the key to success and optimum nutrition.
To achieve variety in feeding this way, it’s important not to feed meaty bones from only one or two primary animal sources. For example, if we’re feeding as much as 50% or more of chicken, that is not enough diversity for optimum nutrition.
Feeding as wide a variety of meat sources, from as many body parts/cuts of meat, including some organ meats from those sources as possible, and we’re well on our way to providing wholesome nutrition. Every animal source contains a unique set of nutrients and those nutrients vary within each part or ‘cut’. As Kymythy Schultze, author of Natural Nutrition for Dogs and Cats states, “Nutrients don’t work alone; they work in harmony with each other within the body. Raw food is a great source of natural nutrients with superior bioavailability.”
DOGS ON HOME-COOKED MEALS
As Dr. Richard Pitcairn discusses in his Natural Health for Dogs & Cats the primary principle in a home-cooked, do-it-yourself manner of feeding is “to aim for variety because that helps to ensure the best balance of nutrients.”
When feeding home-cooked, rather than naturally raw foods to our dogs, we need to remember that the unnatural (for dogs) process of cooking destroys the live enzymes and changes the nutrient profiles. For this reason, we should always refer to the range of recipes for home-cooked meals that are provided in books such as Dr Pitcairn’s. The recipes in these books are carefully formulated to compensate for the loss of nutrients through cooking.
Imagine the delicate, yet complex spider’s web. When spun and fully constructed, it is strong, complex, and is essential for sustaining the life of a spider. Wouldn’t you rather your dog’s nutritional condition be as complex and stable as a fully-formed spider’s web, rather than as ineffective as a single dangling thread?
Copyright © 2006 Diane M. Schuller. All Rights Reserved.
Comments are encouraged ... please let me know what you think.
