I found this link interesting:
Home Quote:
In the late 1850s, a young electrician from Cincinnati named James Spratt went to London to sell lightning rods. When his ship arrived, crew members threw the leftover “ships biscuits” onto the dock, where they were devoured by hordes of waiting dogs.
Spratt had the idea that he could make cheap, easy-to-serve biscuits and sell them to the growing number of urban dog owners. His recipe was a baked mixture of wheat, beet root and vegetables bound together with beef blood. When Spratt’s Patent Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes came on the market in 1860, the pet-food industry was born. In 1870 he took the business to New York and began the American pet food industry.
In 1908 the F.H. Bennet Biscuit company opened, making biscuits shaped like bones, and also made the first puppy food, and was the first to package different-sized kibble.
In 1922 Chappel Brothers of Rockford, IL, introduced Ken-L Ration, the first canned dog food in the United States. It was horse meat. Ken-L Ration became such a success that by the mid-1930s they were breeding horses just for dog food and slaughtering 50,000 of them a year.
In 1931 The National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) bought Bennett’s company and renamed the biscuits Milkbones. They hired 3,000 salesmen with the specific goal of getting Milkbones into food stores — and into national consciousness. For the first time, dog biscuits were part of regular grocery shopping.
By 1941 canned dog food had a 90% share of the market … until the United States entered World War II and the government started rationing tin and meat. Then dry dog food became popular again (the biscuits where considered dry dog food).
In 1950 the Ralston Purina Company started using a cooking extruder to make their Chex cereal. Ingredients were pushed through a tube, cooked under high pressure, and puffed up with air. This allowed Chex to stay crisp in milk.
At about the same time, manufacturers were getting complaints about the appearance, texture and digestibility of dry dog food. Purina’s pet food division borrowed an extruder from the cereal division and experimented with it in secret for three years. The result: Purina Dog Chow.
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I actually saw this posted on another forum and I think this is, more or less, how I am starting to feel about raw (when it comes to PMR or BARF).
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The phrase "natural diet of dogs" always makes me cringe a little anyway. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a natural diet of dogs. I've seen feral dogs eat anything they can get their mouths on from garbage to roadkill to raiding people's gardens to whatever they can catch, but they're certainly not eating the equivalent of what most people feed as a raw diet these days. Not to mention that with all our selective breeding they've become one of the most unnatural animals on the planet and I'm not sure descriptors like "natural diet" are even applicable to modern dogs.
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But then again, a dog is 99.8% genetically the same as a wolf, so technically they process foods the same way.... so I am not really sure.