November 14, 2006

• Wot? Is it Vomit Day already?
• This would be appealing to me, actually. Except for the fact that it probably entails hacking up raw animal carcasses.

• "Perhaps you have persistent dry skin and allergy problems and are tired of high vet bills and constant medication."

  Wha?
• I hate being told what I 'should' be feeding my dog. He's healthy (I know) and happy (I think and hope), full of energy, and he very rarely eats meat. *assumes the position*
• Apart from anything else, humans evolved to eat cooked food. By cooking food, we made it easier to digest, so less energy was wasted, and more was left to give us big brains. That's what I read anyway. gggrrrr pseudo science
• Not only that but dogs have been eating our cooked garbage for about 20,000 years. And, "naturally," they're called wolves and don't fit in your purse or have inbred underbites that prevent them from being able to eat real food. I'm looking at you, you cruel inventors of "pedigree."
• Yes, those are gratuitous stabs at BARF's support for both natural food and unnatural selection. Blind hypocrites.
• Dr Mike does not recommend raw meat. Make your dog a vegetarian?
• This lot have a good range of stuff, including vegetarian rabbit food! Whodathunkit? Most dog food is the worst cheap meat anyway. The Pedigree Pet Foods factory I visited is the most disgusting place I've seen. Vats of liquid meat, bubbling and stinking. I'm off for a gammon sandwich now.
• We fed our dogs BARF for about a year, and would do it again, especially if starting off with a new puppy. But rather than buying this guy's (expensive) stuff, we did as our vet highly recommended - we bought huge boxes of chicken backs and necks from a nearby poultry processing plant. We bagged up meal-sized freezer bags, and every day at doggie mealtime a thawed bag got dumped into bowls. Cruch, crunch, crunch. They loved it, and it was clearly good for their teeth and gums.
• Thoughts from the vegetarian dog link: I have nothing against vegetarians. But when I hear some of the guilt arguments I have to know how far they go. For example, one question I have is what we would do with all the animals that we do eat for food should we decide not to eat meat. How is not eating them going to provide more food when they still will be an ecological competitor for food by sharing this planet with us? I know that we have bred many of them to the current biomass, but without our constancy of breeding and use how long would a ten thousand year old domesticate fare as an extant feral species? Part of the problem here is domestication creates a docile animal, skittishness is bred out of it so that we can approach it to milk it, shear the wool or cull it. This is shooting fish in a barrel to a predator; the natural flight instinct of the lower food chainees is severely hampered. With that considered, and with a lack of the selective advantage of reproductive litters in some of these animals could we be heralding a species toward extinction? On the other hand we could maintain them as domestic pets, but then we still have to feed them. Albeit, in smaller numbers in zoos and what not. I know it sounds like I'm fighting a slippery slope with a slippery slope, but the thing is: I believe that even with those steps taken to not eat meat, people will still starve in other parts of the world. It has less to do with Malthusian economics and more to do with politic, wealth, its distribution and the old callous "no such thing as a free lunch."
• An ignoramous of my acquaintance did a very stupid thing in feeding his newly acquired retriever pup some large stalks of steamed broccoli. Unable to cope with this, the pup's bowel everted. Imposing our dietary shibboleths on our pets is not necessarily in their best interests. Farmers never find dogs digging up a field of turnips nor feral cats attacking the standing wheat. As to animals reverting to a wild state - with horses it doesn't take long, as witness the mustangs in the American west. I believe cattle, too, have often have adapted to local conditions. But these animals require a lot of natural grazing - and there is less and less access available. Pigs are very good at surviving on their own. Even domestic pigs have, for most centuries, done a lot of foraging. I'm not too optimistic about most of the sheep, though. Climate and disease would be the big hazards for poultry. I very much doubt whether the abandoned hens we now have in the valley will make it through the winter; we're putting out feed for them, but it's going to get far colder soon than they'll be able to cope with. Thus far, trapping them hasn't paid off. But turkeys are native to this continent, and geese and ducks should be able to make it. All of the above could apply if man were not in the equation. People can rationalize any mistreatment of creatures, as easily as we rationalize the reasons for going to war with other people. If game is in the neighbourhood, and especially if it's big and visible, people will eventually want to hunt it, trap it, poison it or 'control' or 'manage' it.
• Poor thing - too much fibre will not be good for a puppy. A small amount of broccoli with other food, when they're a bit older, is fine. George Stewart goes into great detail about what would happen to various animals in his great book 'Earth Abides', in which a plague all but destroys humankind, leaving nature to reclaim everything. Lapdogs don't fare very well, or indoor cats, etc. Domestication seems to be a negative, but not always.
• Well, bees, I've been witness to feral horses this past summer and they aren't so much skittish as they should be. They would constantly walk through our camps, surrounding tents, oblivious and ballsy for the most part. They did get their hackles up, but after approaching us. For the record, one foal was being eaten by a black bear the moment we arrived at camp. There was a lot of horse bone around our camps, some of the bones were modified by animals. Whether these were predators or scavengers it's impossible to tell without being there. But there aren't many predators in the bunchgrass zone of the interior besides bears. And that bear was probably hungry being that far out anyway. I don't recall how many generations the horses have been feral, however. Maybe it's been since the '60s or '50s, but not a very long time. On top of that, the human selector in fattening food animals through breeding doesn't really help feral animals. Chickens and turkeys aside, animals like pigs, sheep and cattle have been bred to this current yeild through several thousand years of generational selection depending on the beast. By choosing the most docile animals to breed we eliminate fighters and lessen their natural weapons, like horn, tusks and antler. We breed stupidity into animals that we want to keep tame and docile. It's pretty much what keeps them from running off when we approach. We also breed for piebaldness. Piebaldness is anything but an evolutionary survival advantage. It's a great way to see your black and white cow or pig that got away from you on a green field or in the snow, but it's not a good way to keep that cow or pig hidden from a predator a mile off. Domesticates never return to a wild state; they can only become feral domesticates. They become somewhat better survivors, but genetically and morphologically inferior to their ancestors who had adapted to wild social life and danger. We've basically been spending thousands of years undoing their evolutionary advantages in surviving predation. And since we're masterminding it, it's a hell of a lot more effective and quick than nature could do. For the most part, I agree with your point about re-acquired independance in ferals, bees, but I think of the humane society cases of neglected husbandry resulting in a lot of dead farm animals, too. And on top of that, what we will see with the destruction of husbandry in favor of higher crop yeild is a severe reduction in these populations, bringing them to a much smaller subsistence population. This is where they will be fighting - with all of the retardants we have bred into them - against extinction. But do I care, terribly, about extinction? Not on a small scale, I guess. And hey, we were in no way responsible for the dinosaurs, were we? This shouldn't matter to us, anyway, because they're our competitors for food. Not only that, but they pollute our groundwater and our atmosphere in the populations we maintain them in. I just wonder what future is envisioned in these arguments. Aghanya everything.
• Dogs might not naturally eat turnips, bees, but our dogs do. Also pears from the tree in the garden, which they harvest themselves, sun-dried tomatoes stolen from my plate, laps of Guinness if I'm not paying attention, olives - olives, for goodness' sake - and anything curried. In fact, I'm entirely sure at least one of our dogs would walk through fire to get to a hot curry. I've also seen the dogs go mad for marmite, sardines, chow mein, and seedless grapes. And if you want to lose limbs, get between any of our three and a plate of cheese. The middle one can detect cheese being unwrapped from the other side of the house, and positively loses it for Gorgonzola. Let them, perhaps foolishly, and dogs will develop likes and dislikes just as humans do - far beyond the supposedly natural.
• Dogs are omnivores, like people, and can do well on a vegetarian diet if you're careful. I have some friends who have a dog with a liver condition that they keep healthy by feeding her a veggy diet, but they're very careful to meet all of her nutritional needs. My dog seems pretty happy eating store-bought dog food (rice based because corn makes him flatulent, and no one likes a farty dog), but he's also more than happy to help us eat cereal, cheese, peanuts (he can hear us open the peanut jar from upstairs!), the cat's food, or whatever else he can get his paws on.
• To derail the thread slightly, does anyone know what to feed a cat with dry skin? Now that winter is coming on and we have the heater on, we've noticed that our cat Monkey has gotten really itchy and we suspect dry skin (she doesn't have any fleas). We think she has sensitive skin because the people at the shelter told us she was allergic to her collar.
• I suppose she wouldn't take too well to an Alberto VO5 hot oil treatment? I'm only half kidding -- I don't know anything about cats, but we had a dog once with skin problems and I remember using some kind of special shampoo on her. Of course that would mean bathing your cat. Which could, you know, hurt. You.
• Dogs are omnivores, like people... Dogs are carnivores, like bears. Our primitive dentition allows us to be fully classified as omnivorous, but dogs have specialized teeth. But just like bears they can eat anything and live off anything that will give them energy. (I'm just being picky about the details.) Can you feed the cat oily fish, meredithea
• ?
• Thanks for the suggestion, IC. I'll try and see if she can tolerate some fish. She's kind of a barfy cat, so we have to be sort of careful about introducing new things.
• Try cod liver oil, meredithea, for the kitty. Cats love it. (Don't use the scentless kind, they like it smelly.) Sardines, mackerel, salmon - any oily fish. Oh, I believe ye, Danger, for our disgraceful old dachshund eats almost anything she can reach. And not all of it's food, alas!
• Woops. My mistake, bears aren't carnivores.