When exactly was kibble invented?

You'd have to live in a cave to have missed the story about the recalled pet food causing liver failure in cats and dogs. A story in the news today reported that pet owners are choosing to home-cook food, and sales of cookbooks and nutritional guides for dogs have skyrocketed. But then the story added a note of caution: "Veterinarians warn that making balanced meals for pets can be complicated and should only be a temporary remedy until the scare passes."

Excuse me? What exactly did canis lupus and felis catus eat for tens of thousands of years before humans figured out how to chop up the most disgusting, unusable portions of animals, freeze-dry them into hard little rocks, and dye them a vaguely meat-like color?

Sure, there are things dogs shouldn't eat, like onions and chocolate. But if it's so hard to figure out what a dog should eat, shouldn't we be a little uncomfortable at being so completely ignorant of what we're currently feeding our pets? I know Americans are are famous for over-doting on our pets, but they do rely on us for their survival. We owe them a degree of care.

And here is where I make a potentially embarassing admission: We have home-cooked our dogs' food for seven years. We use a rice cooker to make big pots of brown rice and quinoa, and mix it with a variety of proteins: meat, tofu, eggs, tuna. The dogs do get some dog food too, but most of their meals are a mix of home-cooked carbs and protein. I know, this sounds nutty. But let me mention a few things in our defense.

First of all, we always have a pot of brown rice and quinoa available for our own consumption, just about the most nutritious mix of whole grains you can cook up.

Second, we started doing this after Nelly got her teeth cleaned, when the discharge instructions called for cooking the dog food for a couple of meals to make it soft - and let me tell you, the stink that came off that dog food made the whole house reek like a glue factory. So we asked ourselves, what the hell is in this stuff? I did a little research and let me tell you, you don't want to know.

Third, once we started feeding them rice & protein, the change in the dogs' health was immediate and striking. Their coats became absolutely luxuriant. Nelly stopped inexplicably throwing up all the time. Their water consumption dropped by about two-thirds. Apparently, living on kibble is like subsisting on vitamin-enhanced extra-salty Doritos.

So is it actually so hard to cook your pets' food? In our experience, the answer is no, and yes. No, it's not onerous, once you get into the routine. Preparing their meals is not at all complicated. But it was surprisingly hard to find out what dogs need, nutritionally, because the pet food industry has has virtually eradicated any memory of life before kibble - circa 1950. When I looked for a book on canine nutrition - not cutesy cook books filled with baked dog treats, but an actual nutrition guide - it was very hard to find. But find one I did, and when I conferred with our vet, she was extremely supportive, but admitted that vet schools now spend about one day - one day - on dog and cat nutrition. "If Nelly were a cow, I could help you," she said, "but honestly, armed with your book, you know about as much as I do." About the only advice she gave us was: feed them more organ meats, because canines in the wild eat the whole animal.

For what it's worth, although our guys are big fans of organ meats, their favorite form of protein, hands down, is fish. They would turn themselves inside out for a can of tuna.

Thus, though it was not my intention, I come back to my previous post, the politics of food. How interesting.