What's eating you?

"Over the teeth, over the gums, look out tummy, here it comes! 

A dog’s teeth, in this domesticated day and age, are really rather outdated. Now obviously, Fido make good use of his teeth while rearranging the pattern of your old knit sweater, modifying the fit of your favorite dress shoes, or processing todays news print, but when eating, the mouth serves mostly as a gateway to the oesophagus, connection the mouth and stomach. 
The dog’s saliva does not contain amylase, like a humans mouth, and his saliva serves only as a lubricant to the food on its way down. If ravaging a large chunk of meat, a dog’s teeth would serve to break the meat into pieces that could fit down the oesophagus, without choking him. Once in the stomach, the food meets hydrochloric acid, which is the dogs first defense against poisoning via bacteria such as e-coli or salmonella. 
This is why your sweet Pooky can ingest a positively rancid piece of meat with  little consequence, aside your scolding and perhaps a cold shoulder for all of a day. With a PH level of only 2, these canine stomachs can virtually dissolve their way through meat, bone, or even crazed strains of bacteria. The gastric juices found here work to reduce protein, breaking them down before they pass to the small intestine. 
The small intestine is really the grand central station, where it receives the chyme from the stomach via the regulatory pylorus valve. Here in the small intestine, food that can be digested will enter the bloodstream. Both the pancreas and the liver secrete enzymes into the small intestine, to reduce fat and protein into absorbable forms of fatty and amino acids. In dogs, the digestion of protein and fat is far superior to the digestion of carbohydrate. In fact, digestion of carbs is so limited that most sources of carbohydrate will pass thought the dog unused, and unchanged.

 Therefore, in a diet os meat and cereal mixer (carbohydrates), the meat will provide protein, digested primarily in the stomach and small intestine, while the majority of the cereal mixer will simply pass through, unchanged. In herbivores, a greater process occurs in the large intestine, or colon, where they digestion of carbohydrate takes place. In carnivores, the colon functions primarily to extract water and compact the remaining wastage, making the absorption of carbohydrate near-impossible.

Say what? 
Yes! It is true...dogs can not digest carbohydrate! Shall I say it again...

                                                                      dogs can not digest carbohydrate!

So why add the carbohydrate into the diet? For good reason, carbohydrate is added to many kibble diet as filler, simultaneously serving to firm up the stool of your pet. Lets face it, most of us must pick up after our personal lap warmers! However, in a natural diet, the raw bone in a wolf's diet will serve to to the same thing as the carbohydrate in the commercial diet. Yes, by all means, compensate a loose stool with the addition of raw bone into the diet and watch your pooch turn into a sidewalk chalk producer! The veterinarian community has often eluded to the presence of loose stool to be a obvious sign of an ill dog. Although this can be true, more often a loose stool simply means a high protein diet has been ingested. What to do? Throw your dog a bone!

So the loaded question is, "what is the ideal diet for my dog?" 

The truth, is simple. You are feeding an animal, a carnivore, and an Canid that still shares 98% of its mitochondrial DNA with a wolf. A closer relation than between the same wolf and a coyote. 

What does a wolf eat?
Not kibble."

Courtesy of
Valina & Carelton Pope
Starstruck Labradors