I’ve always wondered about “pet food.” Dogs and cats ARE carnivores, meaning that they will never “choose” to eat grains. So why do we feed them this?
Grains are Very, Very Bad for Your Obligate Carnivore Cat, Carnivore Dog
3 thoughts on “Grains are Very, Very Bad for Your Obligate Carnivore Cat, Carnivore Dog”
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Marlene Dotterer 
Two things left out: even obligate carnivores get vegetable matter because they eat the stomach contents of their prey. Second, both humans and cats and dogs have had about 10,000 years of evolution since a grain (human) and scrap (animal) diet became common. In fact, one of the recent DNA findings is that dogs have carbohydrate-digesting abilities that wolves don’t. This is no excuse for the amount of cheap grains in modern pet food diets (not to mention human diets), but modern domestic cats and dogs, and modern humans, are not as poorly adapted to carbohydrates as were their pre-agricultural ancestors.
Good points, Sue. I didn’t know about the newly evolved carb-digesting abilities, but it’s not surprising. After all, some humans have developed the enzymes needed to digest milk past the infant stage. Evolution IS still on-going. But I suspect dogs (especially) and cats (maybe) have evolved enough to handle human food scraps. Not a steady diet of the lousy stuff.
Grain–and sugar, which is abundant in most commercial dog food. And I don’t want to go into the silage that pet food companies refuse to acknowledge.