Geniuses of the Week

Plus pawnofee pie and a puppy recipe for anyone bringing home a little one

Cedric caught dinner!

First off, we want to thank you all for your patience. The demand for Pup Pot Meals has been overwhelming. We’ve just transitioned from monthly production to weekly production, so this means that even on back order it shouldn’t be more than a week or so before you get your order. As we scale up production, we aim to be always in stock.

This week we added a puppy formulation to our Kitchen Exclusives if any of you bring home a little one. The guidelines for puppies are a bit tricky, but we did our best to keep it simple, using as few ingredients as possible and of course only natural ingredients instead of synthetic additives.

Onto our social media geniuses of the week!

“You aren’t a dog food EXPERT!”

No, we don’t claim to be experts. In fact, we’re wary of anyone who does claim to be one. We just have common sense and do a lot of reading. We’re LOL-ing at “certification for every meal made”. Who or what governing body would even do that? Does this commenter get her own lunch “certified” before she eats?

Clearly she doesn’t know that dogs ate regular food for 20,000 years before kibble was made. Sure, commercial dog food is certified…by the people who are selling it to you! If she’s talking about getting each meal green lighted by a Pet Nutritionist, she should look into how easy it actually is to get a title like that. In our opinion, a fancy title or certification is not reason enough to trust someone’s judgement…like our vet tech friend from last time.

“Real food made my dog sick!”

One of the challenges with the modern food supply is that people are confused about what is actually real food. We’ve cringed at so many reels showing people “spoiling” their old or dying dogs with McDonalds. They don’t think about what the dogs really want, they project their own cravings and think junk food = treat. (We definitely wouldn’t want McDonalds as our last meal.) Now, we don’t have any idea what this commenter actually fed their dog, but if you’ve been reading our posts for a while, it’s certainly NOT real food that’s causing the issues.

Vets know this too, but they don’t have the time nor the energy to explain things clearly. Many people don’t even know how to take care of their own nutritional needs, let alone their pups’. So, the protocols in the medical and veterinarian fields are made to be as simple as possible. Recommending kibble is MUCH easier than trying to explain what goes into a whole food diet…especially to a person who thinks McDonald’s is a good treat for dogs.

“Why bother cooking the food?”

This question is worth a bit of time since so many people are now obsessed with raw food for dogs. Dogs and people can eat raw meat, but should they? The answer is no! Grocery store meats are intended to be cooked. This means their handling, processing and packaging practices all assume that pathogens will be neutralized through heat when you take it home. Sushi grade fish, for example, is handled with extremely hygienic processes to make sure that you can eat it without cooking. The same fish handled in a different way will need to be cooked.

Dogs fed salmonella contaminated food can get sick, but even worse they can shed bacteria that make their human family members sick. (Some strains of salmonella are more dangerous than others.) The best commercial raw food comes with a “kill step,” a process where pathogens are eliminated without cooking, but this isn’t foolproof, as shown by repeated contamination recalls.

Cooked foods are more digestible. When heated, proteins are altered in a way that makes them more easy to break down. Cooking is just old technology that we’ve used for over 100,000 years to get more nutrition from our food AND reduce food borne illness. Since dogs have been with us for only the last 20,000 years, it’s pretty safe to assume that dogs ate cooked food during that time.

Raw food diets in humans have been associated with poorer health outcomes, including dental erosions. Is this because it’s raw or because it lacks certain nutrients? It’s hard to say because of the limits of observational studies (those that just track people and use questionnaires). But the raw movement for people went away almost as quickly as it appeared because of this. It will take longer for the raw dog food trend to die out, because whole foods, even when raw, are still better than kibble.

That’s it for now.

All the best,

Joelle and The Precious Creatures Team