In Search of Real Dog Food 6
I hope you enjoy our 6th excerpt from ‘Real food for dogs & cats – a practical guide to feeding your pet a balanced, natural diet’ by Dr. Clare Middle.
Dr. Middle tells us more about digestion by describing the pH level in a dogs stomach and reminds us it is suited to a raw diet and not designed to thrive on starches or carbohydrates which can potentially cause bloat to a dangerous level.
“Humans eat far more grain and a higher percentage of vegetable matter than dogs, and our digestion favours more continuous eating. We can’t digest raw bones at all, or raw meat very well, because our stomachs have too high a pH for this to occur:
Dogs do not chew food well – they have a basic scissor-action jaw which breaks the food into smaller pieces, if at all, prior to swallowing. The thought of gulping down lumps of raw meat and raw bone may sound foreign to us, but that is how dogs are designed to eat! They do not need to chew their food very well like we do, as their stomach acidity does most of that work instead.”
The above used with kind permission from the author, Dr. Clare Middle.
Leah & Angela OMeara
Hound Dog Day Care (Specialists in Dog Minding & Dog Boarding, Pet Sitting Brisbane & Doggy Day Care Brisbane)