dog study, diet related, different from wolves


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Winnie Mae

Just let me jump- it!
Barked: Wed Jan 30, '13 4:52pm PST 
Oh, felt the need to respond to this:

"Except that dogs don't have the physiology of a carnivore - they have funcitonal taste buds for sweetness, unlike cats and have multiple copies of starch digesting enzymes."

That's a red herring. First of all, comparing canines to felines is a bit of a stretch. If you're going to talk about functional taste buds for sweetness, find something about wolf taste buds, and then compare to dog taste buds. But, more importantly, merely because an animal can taste sweetness does not mean they are not physiologically a carnivore. Dogs have a carnivore's teeth—sharp, tearing, shredding teeth, not grinding teeth. Cats are small-prey carnivores. Period. I don't think I've ever heard of a cat—domestic or otherwise—scavenging. Dogs are opportunistic. They can scavenge, they can kill live prey: that's just their nature. But they are carnivores. Hyenas scavenge: they are carnivores. Coyotes scavenge: they are carnivores. The ability to eat anything they find, if necessary, does not make dogs any less of a carnivore.

Member Since
Barked: Wed Jan 30, '13 7:12pm PST 
Domestic dogs have teeth remarkably similar to that of Maned Wolves. Maned Wolves's diets consist of a fair portion of vegetable matter. So the lack of grinding teeth is really neither here nor there since dogs bolt food rather than do much chewing. And some herbivores and omnivores bolt food as well with no chewing.
Danika &- Maggie

The Play Girls
Barked: Thu Jan 31, '13 11:06am PST 
Ever take a class in statistics? If you have, you're aware that scientific study results can be interpreted in many ways and can be manipulated.

I want to know who funded this study. I'm betting that it was those involved in so called "pet food" manufacture. My dogs do great on raw, and I'm sticking with raw!


Sir Winston- Crazy-dog - can we play yet?
Barked: Thu Jan 31, '13 1:57pm PST 
Quote from paper: "Author Information Sequence reads are available under the accession number
SRA061854 (NCBI Sequence Read Archive). Reprints and permissions information is
available at www.nature.com/reprints. The authors declare no competing financial
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to E.A.
(Erik.Axelsson@imbim.uu.se) and K.L-T. (kersli@broadinstitute.org)."

I.e. not funded by pet food companies. The paper says nothing about whether or not you should feed your dog meat, you can blame the accompanying media for that.
Follow Conkers link for more information.
We as raw feeders want scientific studies done on dog diet, do we only want them if they "agree with what we already know to be true"?

Member Since
Barked: Fri Feb 1, '13 5:39pm PST 
Everything is not a conspiracy by the pet food companies!

Thank you, Winston.

Member Since
Barked: Sat Feb 2, '13 4:41pm PST 
My opinion:

Prey-model raw is to dogs as Paleolithic Diet is to humans. Any paleolothic dieter (as I am) will tell you that the reason America has a ginormous healthcare cost is because of processed foods that is prevalent in American culture. So, basically, if you're eating food from the aisles of the usual American run-of-the-mill grocery stores, you're equivalent to a kibble fed dog.

There are healthy processed food in the aisles of American grocery stores and then there are super-crappy processed food in the aisles. But, it does not necessary mean that if you're a grocery-aisle-dieter that you are going to die a horrible death. A paleolithic human diet is superior in a holistic sense. It fuels the body in the way that human physiology is designed for leading to the least possible chance of the body having to compensate for less-than-ideal conditions.

This is what Prey-Model Raw for me means. A dog is an omnivore with a carnivorous bias. By the way, just because an animal is under the order Carnivora doesn't mean they are obligate carnivores. It only means they eat meat. And the process of natural selection in evolution theory does not apply to modern dogs because they are human-manipulated, not naturally selected.

So, pertaining to the study, having extra copies of certain genetic traits does not make a dog an obligate omnivore. It only means that they have a higher tolerance for carbs. Tolerance. Not required.

Just like processed foods in humans can be attributed to certain health conditions not common in those that live a less-processed lifestyle (you can actually track this in newly modernized Asian countries), processed foods in dogs can be atributed to certain health conditions not common to its more natural counterparts. Bringing a dog closer to its paleolithic roots is intended to eliminate health conditions caused by the non-natural lifestyle. Whether it works or not will not be obvious today. It will take generations and generations nothing-but-paleo dogs to see a difference in the species as a whole. Who knows, 100 years from now, we might see that a society of PMR-fed dogs will show to consistently have life expectancies of over 20 years... closer to the lifespan of wild wolves in an ecologically protected natural habitat.
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