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For the past two decades or so, many people have been choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet over a traditional animal protein based diet. Their reasons usually include a desire to not contribute to the suffering of slaughter animals, environmental reasons or because they believe that animal source protein is unhealthy. Over the long term, I believe a strict vegetarian or vegan diet is unhealthy for humans (omnivores); it’s a free

and people are free to choose for themselves what they eat, and that’s cool. My problem is when people impose their eating philosophy on their pets, dogs and cats who are carnivores. For all of their exterior differences, a dog’s insides are the same as a wolf’s. Digestively speaking, a dog is a wolf and both are carnivores. Want proof? Read some of evolutionary canid biologist Dr. Robert K Wayne’s stuff (he’s the guy that mapped the canine genome), or respected wildlife research biologist David Mech, who specializes in studying large carnivores, specifically wolves.

Common Sense

For as good a job as the pet food companies have done to ‘brainwash’ - ah, persuade - people that dogs are omnivores, fortunately there are still common sense thinking people that trust in Mother Nature’s wisdom, and continue to feed their pets raw meaty bones, the diet that they evolved on and thrived on for millions of years.

This recent trend of feeding dogs a vegetarian diet is terribly irresponsible and scares the hell out of me. Most vegans/vegetarians are aware that they must ‘food combine’ because vegetable protein does not contain all of the eight essential amino acids required by humans. The problem is that the quality and bio-availability of the amino acids from vegetable proteins are of lower quality and bioavailability compared to vegetable sourced proteins. Now let’s apply this to dogs.

Trusting Mother Nature

Dogs are carnivorous animals which by definition means they’re meat and bone eaters, and they have been for thousands of years. The canine digestive system has a PH (acidity) of between 1 and 2. To putt his in perspective, a PH of 1 equals the acidity you would get from a 0.4 percent solution of Hydrochloric acid—seriously corrosive stuff able to digest bone. A little bit of overkill for digesting plant material don’t you think?

Another problem with feeding a dog a vegetarian diet is, that diet will be in the form of an extruded kibble. All kibble is extruded, cooked. What happens when you cook vegetables? That’s right, you destroy valuable nutrients , like fragile amino acids, vitamins C and B, etc. So, that the dog will pass the AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control) Feeding Trial (cough…a joke) and doesn’t die, the pet food manufacturer adds those nutrients back into their products somewhere along the processing line.

Benefits of a Meat and Bone Diet

There are many, many benefits to feeding our pet carnivores a meat and bone diet that mimics as closely as possible their evolutionary diet, and there are many, many, many potential negative health effects that will come from feeding a carnivore a vegetarian diet.

If you’re feeding your carnivore a vegetarian diet, you’ve just taken your dog’s nutrition and health out of the hands of Mother Nature, who by the way just celebrated her three-billionth birthday, and into the hands of a pet food company that’s been around for 70 years.