“He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog.
You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours,
faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart.
You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.” – Unknown
Vegan dog food: It’s a fad in Europe and is becoming more popular here in the U.S. But is it really what we should be feeding our dogs, our most loyal companions? Make your decision after reading this article, or feel free to search the internet for more information to supplement your research if you feel the need to do so. Your decision affects not only your dog’s life but also your own.
When considering what should be in any diet and what shouldn’t, it’s important to think of the human body as a perfectly well-designed machine. We can compare it to a car.
There are many types of cars on the market, and you can choose any one depending on the money you have to invest. All have four wheels, an engine, and a gas tank. However, what you do to the engine and what you put into the gas tank will always affect the results you get from the well-designed machine. Wouldn’t you agree?
Yes, you can choose to use high-octane fuel and increase your car’s performance. You can fuel it with cheaper gas that has a little water mixed in and decrease its performance. You can also make minor adjustments to the car’s engine, such as the carburetor in older cars, to improve performance.
By making adjustments to your car, you can directly influence the outcome and the performance of the vehicle.
Choose to Give the Minimum or the Maximum
The same principle applies to the diet of both humans and dogs. Feeding a living being is similar to adding fuel to a car’s gas tank. Just as you can give a car fuel with a little water in it, you can feed a person or a dog the bare minimum required to survive. And just as you can give a car high-octane fuel and adjust its engine for maximum race car performance, you can feed a person or a dog the right fuel and make the necessary adjustments to optimize their health and performance.
Consider the Original Design
What you put into the mouth of a living person or animal determines the output. For optimum performance, consider the original design of the car—or the living body. For decades, regular dog food was designed with meat or animal by-products. Why? Simply because high-quality animal protein matched the original diet design that best suited the dog’s body. Would you give a dog a diet of rocks and expect it to thrive? Of course not—the dog can’t absorb any nutrients from rocks. However, the dog can absorb almost all the nutrients it needs from meat.
To answer the question, we must consider what foods these vegetarian diets contain.
The answer is grains and vegetables. And that’s where the problem starts. Three grains commonly used in vegetarian dog food are soy, wheat, and corn—common foods that cause allergies in dogs. Grains have a unique fat composition that is high in omega-6 fats and low in omega-3 fats.
However, a dog’s brain is similar to a human’s in that it is wired for more omega-3 fats than omega-6. When the balance is upset, you may start to notice small signs of degeneration, such as difficulty with concentration and focus. Over time, these small signs can evolve into full-blown inflammatory diseases and even cancer.
Some Things Cannot Be Willed, No Matter What
We can’t change the original diet design of a human or an animal, no matter how much we want to or believe it is spiritually better to do so. Some laws in nature are fixed, and diet is one of them. Dogs need meat to survive.
The composition of grains is primarily carbohydrates, with a little protein and a small amount of fat. In the average serving of grain, half a cup provides about 15 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of protein, and 0.5 grams of fat.
The small amount of protein in grains doesn’t contain enough of the right amino acids to sustain life for the long term. By feeding a dog a diet that is grain- and vegetable-based, the dog may appear to be doing fine temporarily, but will eventually decline rapidly. This process may take years, but it will occur.
Even though dogs can eat grains and assimilate some of their nutrients, grains are not their high-octane fuel. They are more like watered-down gasoline with lots of water in it! Dogs never wandered into a cornfield to snatch a cob of corn off a stalk. That’s why dogs in the wild ate meat to survive, and they have been doing so for centuries.
So Should Dogs Be Fed Vegetarian Diets?
Absolutely not. It would be like feeding a human baby rocks instead of milk, like running your expensive race car on sugar water, or like feeding an adult human fabric scraps from a sewing store.
Do the research. Decide logically, not emotionally. Your best friend’s life depends on your decision!
