Thursday, August 9, 2012

From the floor to your bowl (feeding in Africa)

When was the last time you bought dog food? For many people out there it can be answered with the date of the last time you were in a pet store, grocery store etc. 

All you raws foodies out there are laughing and I can hear it, so your question is when was the last time you stocked up the freezer with chicken quarters, raw meaty bones or, oh, I dunno, a dead llama (you know who you are).

Think about the lable on that bag of dog food, it is a cornucopia of carefully researched, meticuously labled bliss.  Wanna know how much protein? It's there. Is corn included? Check the ingredients. And so on and so on, you can find out anything about what they put in that stuff. 
The raw folks, how much time do you spend thinking about how much meat:bone ratio is going in your dog's mouth? How many poopies do you look at and think, "let me run this one by that message board, they'll have some ideas on what causes THAT." Raw foodies are very dedicated folks and pet people as a whole probably put more thought on what the average puppy eats than they do.

We have whole stores dedicated to the feeding and well being of our pets, accuse someone of being a bad 'parent' to their 'fur baby' and watch out, we get a little touchy about that stuff.

Man I miss it.  Dog food here is basically 2 options, you can either buy dog food in Lilongwe or another large city or get nsima and usipa to feed your dog.

But lets start with the nsima, what is nsima? Basically just boiled corn flour.  Boiled until it forms something like a dough and then you use it to pick up bits of greens or meat (if you're lucky). For a broke Peace Corps volunteer it's not a bad option for dog food, cheap and easy to make and the dogs love it.  My dog and cat fight over it. Now for usipa, usipa is a bit more nutrious, actually quite a bit more.  Imagine going to PetSmart and buying a few dozen little goldfish, now go dry them in the sun, tah-dah! Usipa...basically. Uspia is a fish in Lake Malawi, small and long, they are pretty oily and have a very very strong taste, personally i don't like them but the Malawians love them. I live on the lake shore area so usipa is alipo (around here). So that makes up the diet for many Peace Corps dogs, corn flour and dried fish.

What? What's that sound? Okay, okay, someone get the raw fooders to put down their spears whilst I explain.

The dogs who get to eat like that are super super lucky. I know it clashes with everything current in dog feeding trends, corn is personna non grata. Think about it though, as I said in my first post the local dogs here are not well kept or fed.  They are feral, scroungers, you should see the food aggression here. So as far as these dogs are concerned they have hit the jackpot, and rightly so.

Onto feeding option number two, processed dog food.  Remember those nice pretty, well labled bags we saw in the pet store a few paragraphs back? Yeah....this aint that.

To be fair there is labeling but by American standards it's just laughable.

Beacuse the internet here is not always condusive to loading pictures I'll just tell you what the ingredients on the cheapest brand, yes the very same brand I feed Dora, has in it.
Maize, meat and bone meal (20% min), sunflower 7%, fish meal 3% and minerals.

Maize, ok I know what is, meat and bone meal, well we assume that was once living, sunflower...sunflower what??? stalks? seeds? oil? husks? leaves? Fish meal, fair enough i guess, minerals, pretty ambiguous but whatever.

The Nutritional analysis panel is even better:
Crude Protein 18.5% (oh I believe you, it's crude)
Moisture 9% max
Crude oils and fats 6% min
Crude fiber 4.5% max
Crude ash 8% max (what???)
Calcium 0.9% min
Phosphorus 0.7% min

Now I know some of you back home are already picking this apart and believe me it's very very tempting and if this were sold in America I wouldn't feed it to a parakeet but again, this is outrageously nutritious for a village dog. I even have a bit of an experiment to back it up. Another PCV got a puppy from a litter that was born near my house, this dogs gets sweet potatoes and nsima, left overs, whatever. His sister, who was at my house for a few more weeks, got a couple of handfuls of this twice a day.  When we got them together after a few weeks she was almost twice his size! Little things make all the difference.

But now lets see how an imported dog food stacks up. I bought this dog food after I ran out and it was the only thing I could get my hands on, it was more expensive too.  She better be loving it.
Ingredients: Cereals (what? like cinnamon toast crunch?), meat & animal derivatives (probably the panda bears who can't figure out how to reproduce), derivatives of vegetable origin (how does this even work? Isn't a carrot just a carrot? How can you have a 'derivative' of that?), fats and oils, vitamins  & minerals, flavourants and approved antioxidants (how can I trust a dog food that spells 'flavor' with a 'u'?

Nutrition panel
This sucker was weird, the guaranteed analysis is done in g/kg
 Protein 180 min
Moisture 100 max
Fat 60 min
Fibre 50 max
Ash 90 (Again with the ash, anyone know what this is in American?)
Calcium 14
Phosphorus 11
Calcium/Phosphorus ratio 1.1-1.5:1.0

I like the Ca/P ratio on this one, no idea what the other brand is. 

But this by no means all they eat, Dora's other favorite foods are avocado, papaya and mango, when they're in season of course, can't get mango in June here.  Sometimes it's even a raw egg if I was a clutz getting home and one broke in the bag.  Yesterday Dora and the cat, Squiggles, each got a fish skeleton, complete with guts and head after I took the filets off for me.  

Not only do they do well on this diet they do darn well, she has a nice coat, good weight and condition.

And it's funny, I always looked at ingredients in the States and thought, "how does that make sense, where would a dog get avocado, or carrots, etc?) You know what, my dog loves tropical fruit.  Don't discount anything, dogs are good at getting food when and where they can.  And it's not like they eat it 24/7, mangos are only here from November through maybe early January in my area, and they only get avocados when I buy them.  I scrape off any bad parts and let the dog and cat figure out who gets it. I think papaya might be a form of self medicating, ever since she was a puppy she likes to eat the peel, papaya is an ingredient in many natural dewormers. She has had some pretty rank stuff too, I've seen her eat poop, and seen her poop out a 3ft long piece of fabric.  Don't know how that didn't get impacted. Once she even had hippo meat when the office of Parks and Wildlife gave me a few pounds after they had to put one down.

We stress a lot about dog food in the states, and that's ok. I know a lot of dogs have allergies and need a special diet, some dogs who have coats that would get better if corn wasn't in their diet, and on and on. But maybe we created the problems to begin with.  If you keep breeding for such a specialized function then maybe you lose some of the hardiness of the digestive system.  We aren't selecting for survival, we're selecting for things we like and get a bunch of problems to go with it, hip displaysia ring a bell anyone? There has been virtually no selection for a solid digestive tract in the western world.  Here, a dog with a delicate constitution would not survive.  Bloat in great danes, yeah, there is a reason neither one exist here.

Am I saying we should all be breeding for little garbage disposals on four legs? Not really, just food for thought is all, no pun intended.  One of the things about living in the western world is that we can afford (literally, and mentally) to put so much time and effort into feeding out pets that it is kind of hard to picture now after living in a country that actually has a time of year called a 'hunger season'. 
Once back in the States I kind of want to play with Dora's food for a bit, quality dog food, maybe raw when I can afford it, but I do plan on leaving in seasonal fruits, her 'breed' is, from my observations, adaped to eating them and they've got vitamins.  Besides, who doesn't love a good mango?

1 comment:

  1. From dogfoodadvisor.com: Ash is what’s left over after any food has been completely incinerated. It’s the final product of food combustion.

    In other words, if you were to completely incinerate a can of dog food, all three major nutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) would burn away, leaving just the food’s minerals behind.

    Mineral nutrients (like calcium, phosphorous, zinc, iron, etc.) make up ash, the ultimate residue of food combustion.

    Ash is also more commonly known as funeral ash. It’s simply what remains of any animal — even humans — after cremation.

    Why Ash Can Be Important

    The ash reported on a label represents the cumulative total of all the minerals found in that food.

    Although a smaller amount can come from plant-based ingredients, most ash comes from the bone content and minerals additives in a product.

    And much of those minerals include calcium and phosphorus.

    In any case, the ash number by itself is not very revealing. Knowing the actual amount of each mineral included in the total ash figure would be much more useful.

    And it can be especially important when feeding…

    Growing large breed puppies
    Dogs suffering from kidney disease

    What’s ‘Normal’ for Ash Content
    in Dog Food?

    The amount of ash varies from product to product.

    In general, the average ash content of most commercial dog foods appears to be somewhere around 5-8 percent1.

    Since most companies don’t typically report ash content on their labels, The Dog Food Advisor arbitrarily uses an 8 percent figure for all dashboard calculations.

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