Understanding Ingredient Labels Amidst Dog Food Scare

There are many aspects that go into finding the right food for your pet. When you hold a bag of food in your hands, skip over the cute dog and savory meat pictures. What really counts are the hard fact ingredients. And boy, can they be misleading! Per the Food and Drug Administration, the ingredient list on a food label is the listing of each ingredient in descending order of predominance. This means the first couple of ingredients make almost the whole food. If the first ingredient on the list is corn, then your food is pretty much made out of, well, corn. But from here, it gets tricky – the order the ingredients are listed on dry food is made before the food is processed and the water extracted. So if chicken is one of the first ingredients, it may actually turn out to be one of the last, after the food is processed, because it is obviously a lot lighter when dried. Yet it will still be on top of the ingredient list. Here are some other potentially misleading labelling practices:

• Chicken Byproduct Meal, for example, reads like there is still chicken meat included. It consists however of dry, ground, rendered parts of the carcass such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines. There is typically no muscle meat included.
• Animal fat is obtained from the tissues of mammals and/or poultry in the commercial processes of rendering or extracting (AAFCO). Since it is not required to originate from slaughtered animals, the source can include roadkill or euthanized animals. This is the same for anything that is named ‘Animal’ like Animal Digest or Animal by-product.
• Brewer’s Rice are the small milled fragments of rice kernels that have been separated from the larger kernels of milled rice (AAFCO). This processed product misses many of the nutrients containted in whole ground rice and brown rice.
• Propylene Glycol is an approved additive for dog food. It is toxic to cats and may be lethal for dogs in higher dose. It is also used in anti-freeze.
• Wheat Gluten is the substance remaining when wheat is washed to remove the starch (AAFCO). It is used as a binder in dry food and has almost no nutritional value. Corn Gluten Meal similarly has almost no nutritional value.
• Beef and Bone meal are rendered product from beef tissues, including bone. These are parts not suitable for human consumption.
• Meat and Bone meal has the same source issue as the ‘Animal’. It can be from any mammal, including roadkill or euthanized animals. It can also contain animals like rats or sick animals, some may have been treated with medication.
• Poultry does not mean chicken! It can be sourced from any fowl. Poultry Meal does not even have to origin from slaughtered fowl, which again, makes it possible to include roadkill and euthanized birds.
• Any type of sweeteners, like corn syrup, cane molasses or plain sugar, have no place in dog food. Just like salt (or Sodium Chloride) or yeast culture, it is being added to make the food more appealing to dogs.

So check the ingredient list when you are shopping for your dog’s food – compare different foods and check the Internet for more information. A healthy diet makes for a healthy pet!

Should Dogs Eat Raw Meat?

There is no doubt, that our dogs are meat eaters. Dogs have the digestive system of carnivores. This makes their digestion completely different than ours, even though many of us do so enjoy a juicy steak more often than not. Since dogs historically don’t cook their food, their digestive system is made to deal with the benefits and disadvantages of raw food. Dogs cannot chew as well as we can, their jaw does not move sideways and their teeth are made to rip off flesh of a bone. If you have a dog, you may have noticed that often they do not take the time to work their food in tiny pieces – instead they literally ‘wolf’ down as big parts as they possibly can. This may well be an explanation why they only have about 1,700 taste buds as compared to our whooping 9,000! Cats, who are true carnivores, have even less – they have to make do with just about 470. The dog’s saliva acts as lubricant and helps them to swallow big pieces of food. It also lacks the enzyme which helps us breaking down our food already while we chew. Once the food reaches the stomach, a very strong gastric acid helps process it. The gastric acid of a raw fed dog is normally stronger than ours and is partially the reason, why bacteria on food such as salmonella are not as big an issue with healthy dogs as it is with us. In the wild, dogs don’t only eat fresh kill but also food that has been laying around for quite a while. In fact, many dogs bury their food and eat it a couple of days later. I have observed my dogs doing that – not something for our noses, that’s for sure!

Dogs have a very short digestive system. It takes about 8 hours for them to digest food whereas we need between 24 and 72 hours. Their large intestines are only about 8 inches to 2.6 feet long, depending on the size of the dog, where as ours is about 4.9 feet long. When you look at true herbivores, such as cows and goats, theirs are even longer. Plant matter is much more difficult to break down and does take more time. And it makes sense to pass food that may rot, like raw meat, through the system much faster, while plants are less delicate.

So, is a dog strictly a meat eater? While meat should be the main ingredient in a dog’s diet, our canines absolutely benefit from different food sources. Many dogs like fruits, such as berries, apples or bananas. Leafy foods, such as herbs and veggies should be prepared in a food processor, frozen or blanched to make them adjusted for a dog’s digestive system. Feeding raw meat to healthy dogs can be great for them, but you may have to be extra cautious when handling it as we are more susceptible to things like salmonella. Dogs can lead healthy and long lives without being fed raw meat, but given their digestive system, they are made for it. Ultimately, it will depend on what you are comfortable with feeding your dog. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Mondio National Championship in Costa Mesa, 2012

While I am sure glad to get back a couple of hours of sleep at night, I already miss the excitement and the spectacle at this year’s Mondio Ring Nationals in Costa Mesa, right next to the O.C. Pet Expo that ended last weekend.

It was a great tournament, a difficult course and a hard, but fair judge. All of the teams showed extreme skills and sportsmanship and I hope, you had the opportunity to get a glimpse of the fruits of years of training.

A bigger than life blow-up elephant head marked the field as the biggest item of the playground objects scattered around. Every Mondio Ring tournament has a specific theme – there have been UFOs and aliens, flowers, even ranch themes with blow-up cows and horses. All of these objects are there to make the dog and handler team use their creativity and flexibility to master the different tasks. A level 3 course can take up to 45 minutes per team!

First, the team has to go through the obedience routine, which includes heeling with distractions, retrieving an object, which was a foot-long pen with ballons attached in this tournament, finding a piece of wood with the handler’s scent on it and a send out, where after the handler’s sign, the dog has to run 40 meters (over 131 feet) in a straight line. They also have to go through a food refusal exercise, where the dog is taunted with hot dogs, steaks or other goodies, while the handler is away. These are just some of the obedience routines.

The next phase is jumping – the dog has to jump over a hurdle (between 3.2 and 3.9 feet), a palisade (5.9 to 7.5 feet) and a long jump (9.8 to 13.1 feet). The handler may select the height between the minimum and maximum level and try three times for each jump. They will only score maximum points if the dog jumps the highest level.

The third and final phase is the protection part – it is also the most exciting to watch. Each trial requires at least two decoys, packed in a thick padded suit, so they won’t get hurt by the dog’s bite. During this part of the tournament, the dog has to protect the handler during one exercise and may only bite, if one of the decoy’s attack the handler, requiring utmost restraint and attention by the dog. Another exercise is the object guard, where the dog protects any given object, pointed to by the handler. If a decoy gets too close, the dog is allowed to bite, but needs to let go and return to the object, if the decoy drags him too far away. During one of the exercises, a gun is fired twice, to see, if the dog will let go or continues to hold down the decoy. These exercises are stunning to watch. They require combine courage, control, speed and fun, the training is long and the teams are committed.

Even though these dogs are trained to bite the decoys, they are not aggressive. In fact, if you were there, you were able to admire most of them up close while they took a stroll through all the people watching – maybe you even got to pet and play with them. Most of these dogs are Belgian Malinois, a breed not for the common household. They are high strung and require an enormous dedication to training and exercise. Many of them compete in more than one sport or have an actual job as a detection K9 or other working K9.

There are some other breeds playing this sport, though. That weekend, one of them was an American Bulldog – an unsual but welcome sight! We all enjoyed watching, as this often misunderstood breed displayed outstanding control and looked like having so much fun throughout the course.

If you have missed this event, be sure to check the US Mondio Ring or Rock Solid K9 website for tournaments in your area!