“He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog.
You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours,
faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart.
You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion” – Unknown
Vegan dogfood: it’s a fad in Europe and becoming more popular here in the U.S. But is it really what we want to feed to our dogs, our most loyal companions? Make your decision after reading this article or search the internet for more info to supplement your research if you feel the need to do so. Your decision affects not only your dog’s life but also your own.
When considering what should be in any diet and what shouldn’t, it’s important to think about the human body as a perfectly well-designed machine. We can compare it to a car.
There are a lot of cars on the market and you can choose any type of car you want, depending on the money you have to invest. All have four wheels, an engine and a gas tank. However, what you do to the engine and what you put into the gas tank will always affect the results you get from the well-designed machine. Wouldn’t you agree?
Yes, you can choose to use high-octane fuel and increase your car’s performance. You can gas up with cheaper gas that has a little water mixed in with it and decrease your car’s performance. You can make minor adjustments to the car’s engine, such as to the carburator in older cars, and get better performance by doing so.
By making adjustments to your car, you can have direct influence over the outcome and the performance of the car.
Choose to Give the Minimum or the Maximum
The same thing happens with diet of a human or a dog. The feeding of a living thing is similar to adding fuel to a car’s gas tank. Just as you can give a car fuel with a little water in it, you can give a person or a dog the bare minimum that it needs to survive. And just as you can give a car high-octane fuel and adjust its engine for maximum race car performance, you can give a person or a dog the right fuel and make the right environmental adjustments to make that person into an athlete or a top dog.
Consider the Original Design
What you put into the mouth of a living person or animal determines the output. For optimum performance, consider the original design of the car, or the living body. For decades, regular dog food was designed with meat or animal by-products. Why? Simply because the high-quality animal protein matched the original diet design that best suited the dog’s body. Would you give a dog a diet of rocks and expect it to live? Of course not; the dog can’t absorb any nutrients from the rocks. However, the dog can absorb almost all of its nutrients needed for life from meat.
To answer the question, we must consider what foods these vegetarian diets contain.
The answer is grains and vegetables. And that’s where the problem starts. Three grains commonly used in vegetarian dog food are soy, wheat and corn, common foods that cause allergies in dogs. Grains have a unique fat composition that is high in omega-6 fats and low in omega-3 fats.
However, a dog’s brain is similar to a human’s in that it is wired for more omega-3 fats than omega-6. When the balance is upset, it’s easy to start to see little signs that the body is degenerating such as difficulty with concentration and focus. These little signs can eventually include full-blown inflammatory diseases and even cancer.
Some Things Cannot be Willed, No Matter What
We can’t change the original diet design of a human or an animal no matter how much we want to and believe it is spiritually better to do so. Some laws in nature are fixed and diet is one of them. Dogs need meat to survive.
The composition of grains is primarily carbohydrate and a little bit of protein and a smaller amount of fat. In the average serving of grain, one half cup provides about 15 grams carbohydrate and 2 grams protein with about 0.5 grams fat.
The small amount of protein in the grain does not contain enough of the right amino acids to support life for a long time. By feeding a dog a diet that is grain and vegetable-based, that dog may appear to be doing better temporarily but will then go downhill fast. The process may take years, but it will occur.
Even though dogs are able to eat grains and assimilate some of the nutrients in grain, it is not their high-octane fuel. It’s their watered-down gasoline type of fuel, with a lot of water in it! Dogs never wandered into a corn field to snatch a cob of corn off a cornstalk. That’s why dogs in the wild ate meat to survive and they did this for centuries.
So Should dogs be fed vegetarian diets?
Absolutely not. It would be like feeding a human baby rocks instead of milk, like running your expensive race car on sugar water or like feeding an adult human fabrics from the sewing store.
Do the research. Decide logically, not emotionally. Your best friend’s life depends on your decision!