Q: Is it correct that grain and cereal are not the normal or integral part of a dog's diet?

 

(Our thanks to John E. Burchard, Ph.D.,Tepe Gawra Salukis, for permission to reprint this Email.)

 

Grain has become the foundation of *human* diet since the invention of agriculture, something like ten thousand years ago.

 

For all the rest (roughly 95%) of its existence our species has lived primarily as a hunter of large game.

 

Dogs seem to have become commensal camp-followers of humans (as the pariah dogs are to this day) at some point perhaps a little before our own transition from hunting to farming.

 

During most of that time dogs have probably used cooked grains and/or other starch crops (grains other than rice are not a significant factor in the moist tropics) as at least a significant part of their nutritional base.

 

In other words, until the 20th century dogs have basically eaten whatever people ate. There was after all not much in the way of other options. Ordinary people did not cook specially for their dogs.

 

There are interesting accounts of how hounds were kept in the Middle Ages (see e.g. John Cummings, The Hound and the Hawk, the Art of Mediaeval Hunting). One has to suspect that the simple German yeoman hunter, who had to depend on his one all-purpose dog for just about everything, fed his hound better than that.

 

I know in some detail how such people kept their hawks, and it was not at all lacking in sophistication - indeed, I have learned tricks from the mediaeval German falconry literature that most modern falconers no longer know, to their loss <G.

 

What I have seen among Arabian Bedouin was that the hunting Saluqi was given preferentially the best quality food - not necessarily the greatest quantity, but they considered the quality very important. Indeed I have photographs of one of the King's brothers feeding his Saluqi, by hand, choice morsels out of the communal tray from which we were all eating.

 

Not a one of the very conservative Bedouin objected to that. They thought it perfectly normal. They would do the same. The city Arabs have no understanding of such things. They think a Saluqi is a dog (the Bedouin know better <G).

Ten thousand years is not a very long time in biological evolution.

 

I am suggesting that the canine digestive anatomy and physiology have probably not changed significantly in that time. I know that my own Salukis - definitely rather aboriginal in many ways - can and will eat almost anything, but big chunks of raw meat with bones seem to agree best with them, and are most eagerly consumed.

 

In practical terms in the U.S. that means chicken leg quarters - I just hand them out, none of my dogs, even half-grown puppies, has any difficulty disposing of them - and occasionally a chopped-up lamb carcass, i.e. the meaty bones after the choice cuts have been removed, purchased from the local meat locker. After fifteen minutes there is nothing left, nothing at all. Crunch, crack. The sound effects are a bit intimidating, but nobody has ever had any kind of digestive problem as a result.

 

So I am left thinking that grains have been a significant part of dog diet for nearly or quite as long as they have been of human diet, but also that not much in the way of physical or physiological adaptation - evolutionary, that is, which is to say genetic - has occurred during that time.

 

Dogs are dietary opportunists who can do well on a variety of diets. That said, a considerable amount of adaptation in the other sense, of adjustment of the animal's physiology and even structure to the conditions it encounters during its individual life, does undoubtedly take place.

As a result, a dog fed largely on cereals will have a bulkier and heavier gut than one fed largely on meat.

 

Foodstuffs consisting largely of vegetable starch will have a longer passage time than foodstuffs consisting largely of meat. That in turn has some effects on the dog's ability to perform in athletic activities.

 

Best, John --

 

Dr. John Burchard Tepe Gawra Salukis
 saluqi@ix.netcom.com
 http://saluqi.home.netcom.com/