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Commercial dog food did not become popular until after World War Two. Before WWII, owners most likely fed their dogs the same food they ate. Purina Dog Food did not hit supermarket shelves until the 1950s.
Many people will argue that dogs, as descendants of wolves, had to kill their prey in order to eat. To a point, this is a reasonable argument. I simply have a hard time believing, however, that when the Pekinese first showed up in China thousands of years ago, these little 10 pound dogs had to kill their prey in order to survive. It seems to make more sense that the vast majority of dog breeds relied on their owners for food, thus eating similar (if not identical) diets based on foods available locally.
The majority of breeds today have been “man made” through cross breeding. Cross breeding has been around for centuries, and is performed in order to take certain characteristics and bring them together to create a dog with very specific physical characteristics and personality traits.
A Brief History of Dog Food
In 1860, the first commercial dog food biscuit was made in London by James Spratt.
In the early 1900s, the first canned food was made, with dry pet food showing up in grocery stores in the mid 1930s.
In the 1950s, Purina developed an extrusion process allowing mass production of commercial pet food and introduced Purina Dog Chow.
The Extrusion Process
The extrusion process is similar to making bread and is based on technology designed for making plastic forms. The following steps are involved in the exptrusion process:
- Ingredients arrive in loads weighing 10,000-40,000 pounds.
- Concentrated bags of minerals & vitamins arrive in 25-50 pound bags.
- The ingredients are ground to a particular size.
- Dry ingredients and wet ingredients are separated.
- 2000 pound batches are mixed together.
- Wet and dry ingredients are eventually mixed together.
- The mixed ingredients are cooked in an extruder.
- The mixture comes out of the extruder soft and wet and is cut.
- The mixture is dried and cooled.
- Before packaging, enrobing takes place. Enrobing involves adding liquids and powders (usually fat and flavor enhancers) to the finished dry food product.
- The final product is then packaged in various bags according to weight.
Commercial Dog Food Ingredients
Commercial dog food is economical because of one main reason: cheap ingredients. Food that is not meant for human consumption is cheap because it cannot be used for anything else, and much of what commercial dog food is made out of is feed stock (originally intended for cattle and other farm animals) and animal by-products.
What is an animal by-product? Feathers, hooves, beaks, and other left-over parts not fit for human consumption. If you think about it, the meat we eat comes from the majority of the given animal. There is not a whole lot of waste from a cow, chicken, or pig that has been sent to the processing plant. A simple walk down any grocery store meat isle will tell you that the meat we eat pretty much covers the entire body of the animal. . . shoulder, loin, rump, organs, tongue, breast, thigh, wing, hind quarter, pickled pig’s feet, etc. What’s left over – the pieces that there is no other use for - goes into commercial dog food.
Generally speaking, there are minimal quality control processes and requirements in place related to dog food. As the food is not fit for human consumption, health standards have not been a focal point and have been generally developed by those companies who make commercial dog food. Quality Control by Pet Food Manufacturers are voluntary, not mandatory.