American Bulldog: Willtooke's Flickr Photostream
What does a feral dog eat? What does a wild dog eat? What would your dog eat if it got lost in the bush?
According to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, feral domestic dogs eat small animals as their main food source.
During times when prey animals are harder to find (like winter), wolves, wild dogs, and feral domestic dogs will become more “opportunistic”. They’ll eat whatever they can find, including insects, berries, garbage, feces, grass, fish and birds eggs among other things – to bridge the gap during lean times when less live prey is available to them.
The Terror of Cowichan Valley
This past summer I read a story in the Vancouver Province about a 110 pound feral American Bulldog that had been abandoned on an native Indian reserve in the Cowichan Valley. The story was called Gunning for Duke: Wild dog and his pack are the terrors of Cowichan Valley. The only place I can find the story online anymore is in this Yahoo Group, but in a nutshell, Duke had been abandoned by his owners and had to fend for himself, and that he did, very successfully.
Duke survived by eating small animals and apparently often killed and feasted on domestic sheep, making quick enemies with the farmers in the area. He was smart too, too smart for live traps and somehow managed to escape a potentially fatal dose of lead poisoning via moose hunting rifle.
Duke was eating a primarily whole carcass, raw meaty bones diet, which I suspect in the long run proved to be bad for his health, not because of what he was eating but yet because of what he was eating, sheep! Farmers usually don’t take kindly to animals killing their livestock and they always have guns at the ready to deal with carnivorous marauders.
A lost pet dog’s diet would look much the same as Duke’s, depending of course on the size of the dog and the region and prey availability in which it was living. Obviously small dogs wouldn’t be falling sheep, but they would be hunting rats, mice, pheasants and rabbits and the like. One thing is for sure, the diets of all feral dogs would consist solely of raw food items.
Even though Duke for all intents and purposes was now a “wild dog”, he’d still occasionally visit his old house, play with the new tenants’ dog Buddy and eat Buddy’s food, which isn’t all that surprising to me, even given Duke’s access to tasty lamb chops. I get a kick out of hearing people say, “oh my dog really loves his X brand dog food”. C’mon, lets be real here, a dog would eat a bicycle tire with peanut butter slathered all over it if you offered it to him.
Why the Resistance
I have conversations on an almost daily basis with people that will argue against raw feeding, just as fervently as some people debate/ argue about religion and politics. I just can’t wrap my head around how their can even be a debate.
Are pet owners really that influenced by the bullshit spewed by pet food companies propagating their lies about the “dangers” of a raw dog food diet, and by slogans and phrases like these ones, found on popular dog food bags;
- “complete and balanced”
- “the real meat taste that every dog loves”
- “garden fresh vegetables”
No animal ever ate a complete and balanced meal, every single day of its life, and if every dog really loves real meat, wouldn’t every dog prefer real meat? Aren’t all vegetables garden fresh at some point, and how is that even relevant anyway, since the vegetables in commercial dog foods meet the same fate as the products that contain “real meat”, they get cooked!
Feeding Kibble is More Convenient
“The primary focus in pet food packaging today is on convenience,” says Michael Mullen, spokesperson for Heinz North America, maker and marketer of Heinz Pet Snacks and Heinz Pet Foods, “with shelf presence not far behind.”
Did you get that? The two most important things that pet food companies want to achieve with their packaging is the convenience of feeding their products, and good shelf placement. It’s apparently not high on their priority list to educate and inform consumers in a transparent language, about the sources and quality of the ingredients in the bag.
Now I totally get that there are some pet owners out there that feed commercial pet foods because they perceive kibble to be a more “convenient” feeding option than feeding raw meaty bones. Fair enough, I guess? Most people probably don’t think much about what they feed they’re pets and just follow the status quo.
But really, let’s face reality – there is no way in “H, E double hockey sticks” that a dry pile of rocks kibble with some synthetic vitamins thrown in, (an attempt to replace some of the ones destroyed in the extrusion process) will ever be the healthier food choice for any dog, regardless of what the pet food companies paint on their product packaging.
So What Became of the Terror of the Cowichan Valley?
I don’t know what ultimately became of Duke. I hope he was captured by the SPCA and sent to a sanctuary somewhere to live out his days, and if not then humanely euthanized rather than having been found by a farmer’s bullet.
Sadly, I’m sure the abandoned, once friendly pet dog name Duke, met an unfortunate demise – from his point of view anyway. He did eat well the last three years of his life though, even if he did have a bite or two of Buddy’s food now and then.
I'm a dog guardian to Sweety, my 15 year old Border Collie & Zeus a stray American Pit Bull Terrier that I rescued in October of 2009. I write about canine health and nutrition focusing mainly on topics relating to feeding a raw meaty bones diet.
