>Domestic dogs have been eating the forbidden fruit for far more
generations than humans have.  They still do
better on a wolf diet than they do on even the most advanced formulas of
dog food made from grains and beans. I
think humans will do better if they stick to Primate foods. >


Grains did not become prevalent in domestic dogs' diets until commercial
dog foods became the preferred way of feeding them after WW II.    Until
then dogs were fed meat scraps and bones with perhaps some leftovers from
the family's meals, whatever else they could scavenge, including fresh
whole food off the ground which added small amounts of trace nurients to
the diet.  Grains could have been acquired thru meal leftovers, or thru
eating the digestive tract of an herbivore, but the day-to-day variety of
food would have prevented sustained, large amounts of grains in the diet.

Australian vet Ian Billinghurst writes in "Give Your Dog a Bone" that the
increased popularity of commercial dog foods in Australia since the 1970s
has brought the "diseases of civilization" with it:

"As a veterinary student in the early seventies, I found it hard to
understand why Aussie vets had fewer and simpler dog and cat diseases to
deal with than the Americans.  It seemed to make the Aussie vet somehow
inferior.  We did not need to be trained to the same high degree of
complexity and sophistication.

There was a simple explanation.  At that time, more than seventy percent of
Aussie dogs were still fed bones and scraps.  American dogs had been eating
processed food and no bones for decades.  They had developed a wide range
of problems. Their vets had to develop a complex set of diagnostic and
therapeutic tools to deal with them."

I need not have worried.  Our dogs' disease problems are increasing on a
par with their increasing consumption of processed and cooked foods.  We
Aussie vets now have to be as good as our American counterparts to deal
with them."


The incidence of health problems such as allergies, hot spots, various
cancers and digestion-related problems in today's domestic dogs and the
prevalence of commercial food diets peddled as "100% nutritionally
complete" is not coincidental.   The affect of the modern dog's diet on
their health is a bellwether for humans.


Lynda Bryson
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