FACTS:

Dogs are animals.

No animal anywhere has EVER been known to cook it's food.

Now that they are domesticated, we serve them food that is cooked, processed, or made from sub-par ingredients that they wouldn't normally eat.

In other words, dogs by nature, eat uncooked (raw) meat.  Isn't that what we should be feeding them?

Imagine if you will, that instead of wolves (dogs), humans domesticated crocodiles or tigers.  After domestication, people began to feed the crocs and giant cats a heat-processed pellet of corn, chicken feathers, heads & beaks, and sugar/salt/chemical additives.  These pellets were also marketed to "keep their teeth clean" and "provide optimal nutrition" and were sold at the vet's office.  If a Veterinarian is selling it, the product must be good, right?  TV commercials show Crocodiles enjoying these pellets with a smile on their little faces, so it must be the right thing to feed, right?  The package has pictures of chicken drumsticks, eggs,  and carrots, they wouldn't lie would they? 

If we were to feed something else, it might not be complete nutrition, or we might do it wrong, make them sick, poison ourselves with bacteria or give them "blood lust"... right?

WRONG.

In actual fact, we domesticated the dog, which is technically, and biologically an Omnivore.  Crocs and Tigers are techinically and biologically, Obligate Carnivores so their nutritional needs are not exactly the same but I made up the above scenario to illustrate a point.  If it weren't for their smarts and good looks, dogs would still be wild and would still be eating what they could find or what they could kill.  No cooking, no processing, and no pellets.

Gross at it sounds, a dog's digestive system is hearty enough to eat bacteria-ridden decaying garbage (both vegetable and animal), their teeth are designed to tear meat from bone, and then to crunch the bone into usable phosphorous, calcium, and energy.  The fact is, they have been eating our scraps for 10,000 years (from caveman's bone scraps in the beginning to farmer's scraps in the 1800's) until the dawn of dog biscuits.  

Strays on the English docks were thrown mouldy hard tack biscuits and scraps of rotten food, a method called Trencher feeding.  An American electrician vowed to change this.  He created a biscuit (wheat, vegetables, beetroot and beef blood) called Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes.

Eventually when people began to starve during The Great Depression, and they did not want to give up Man's Best Friend, what we fed our dogs started to change.  We had to find other things to feed them, as competition for meat became very real.  Canned dog food was born (some meat flavouring, lots of filler to produce edble substance for our pets.)  In the 1940's when metal became scarce due to World War II, dry bagged dog food became the norm.  The dry food has always been a way for the milling industry to sell by-product and the dog food industry to obtain a cheap filler which they could flavour, package and market as 'nutritionally sound' and healthier than anything you could come up with on your own.  Another way of looking at it is, the dawn of processed food for humans also brought with it processed food for pets. 

Enter Purina, Ken-L-Ration, and General Mills and their fancily-packaged bags of "DOG FOOD" available at the grocery store, boasting shelf life, flavour, and health for everybody's dog.  Huge advertising budgets and profits offered to Vets who sold it solidified the deal.  People were no longer capable of feeding their dogs anything but prepared dog food.  The Western World switched its idea of proper pet nutrition overnight.  Nobody really questioned the ingredients (mostly, and to this day, corn, fillers and unfit-for-human-consumption animal parts.)  Advertisers and Vets gave this product the credibility it needed.

To this day, huge pet food manufacturers, and veterinarians all maintain that XXX brand dry food is the only thing your dog should eat.  That you are irresponsible, 'kooky'  or a radical if you want to feed anything else, and that YOU as your dog's loving, devoted caregiver and owner, could not possibly come up with anything better on your own.  You will do it 'wrong', miss out on important ingredients, cause nutrtional deficiencies, or make your dog ill.

I beg to differ.

A raw diet prepared either by you or by a small-scale raw food manufacturer, is the best thing you can find to feed your dog today.

Read More about what our dogs are eating.