(Editor: scroll down to read email from American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC)

Have you ever looked at the teeth of a wolf?  How about those magnificent teeth of the lions we marvel at on National Geographic channel? 

Have you ever noticed the teeth of a cow, goat, or sheep?  A predator’s teeth are not the same as the teeth of a ruminant.  Predators are carnivores.  Simply put that means they are designed to eat MEAT.  Meat is highly usable and easily digestible by carnivores (dogs, therefore they have a short digestive tract and only one stomach.  The dog’s digestive system is not intended by nature to handle large amounts of roughage. 

Ruminants on the other hand have multi-chambered stomachs to break down and digest grains and forage crops.  They swallow take this material, mix it with digestive juices, spit it back into their mouths, chew their cud again, and swallow it back into the next stomach.  When a cow is butchered the stomach contents in the first stomach are nothing like the contents of the fourth chamber of the stomach.  The point is that it takes four stomach chambers to digest grains and roughage and make it usable.  The carnivore has only one stomach.

Corn is a useful vegetable.  It is used to make corn meal, which sits on your stomach like a heavy lump until passed.  Sweet corn is great, with butter in the summer, but did you ever notice it comes out the same way it goes in?  Corn is fermented to make ethanol and corn whiskey.  The fermentation process also produces methane.  Methane is a useful gas, it can power all sorts of machinery.  However the process of fermentation, which produces gas, is also the process that causes bloat in dogs.  When fermented, grains produce gas - or rye whisky or scotch, etc.  Meat may rot but it does not ferment.

I have one dog who is a confirmed stool eater, however she is selective.  She will only eat the stool of a dog that was fed kibble.  That stool has undigested particles in it so is viewed by the body as food.  The stool of a dog that is fed meat will not to be eaten because all the food has been digested.  This same principle applies to rabbits.  If not wire-caged, they will eat their stool once but reject it the second time around, after the nutrients are used up. 

Why do dog food companies use primarily corn?  That answer is easy.  It is cheap and readily available.  It is not a coincidence that most dog food companies are also cereal companies.  On most labels there are three or more different names for the corn, but it is mostly corn. 

The end of this short story is that I don’t feel that my dogs should be the disposal unit for the cereal industry.  If God intended for dogs to eat hay and corn they would have teeth like cows and horses.