Commoner's dogs would be fed meager diets of bread crusts, bare-bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever the dog could scrounge on its own. By the 18th century, farm and hunting dogs were being fed mixed grains and lard. These useful dogs had to be healthy to do their jobs.
Food, water and shelter
Wild dogs feed opportunistically. That is, they will eat whatever is easiest to obtain when they are hungry. They scavenge and will eat animal or vegetable matter, will hunt for live prey, or will eat road-killed animals, dead livestock, and scraps from compost heaps or rubbish tips.
“That food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating,” Axelsson explained, including root plants, porridge, meat, marrow, and possibly even bread. “All dogs studied have this change, which I'd say puts it at least a couple of thousand years back in time,” Axelsson tells NBC News.
The typical diet of an 18th and 19th century farm dog involved lots of grains and suet or lard. Dead horses were—you guessed it—a real treat for local dogs if they weren't sent to the glue factories first.
Commoner's dogs would be fed meager diets of bread crusts, bare-bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever the dog could scrounge on its own. By the 18th century, farm and hunting dogs were being fed mixed grains and lard. These useful dogs had to be healthy to do their jobs.
Bramble lived in the UK and held the Guinness World Record for being the oldest living dog at the time. What's the most amazing thing about this story is that Bramble actually lived on a vegan diet of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains (no meat, eggs, and dairy).
In common households during the middle ages and through the mid-19th centuries however, little consideration was given to feeding dogs, as a dog's diet was much like that of its owners, consisting of whatever owners could spare, such as knuckles of bone, cabbage, potatoes, onions and crusts of bread.
Dogs are in the Order Carnivora, however physiologically (in body function) they are omnivores. That means they can thrive on a wide variety of foods. This is an evolutionary advantage that they developed as they ate scraps from our ancestors. Dogs can be healthy on a plant-based diet.
From medieval times up until the mid-1800s dogs were mainly fed a steady diet of table scraps. They ate things like cabbage, potatoes, and bread crusts – whatever their owners could spare. As far as meat goes sometimes they were offered bits of knuckle bone or horse meat if they were lucky to live in a more urban area.
Chicken & Turkey Skin, Ham, & Other Fatty Cuts of Meat
These food items contain a high-fat content, which can cause acute pancreatitis, a life-threatening illness with severe complications. Avoid turkey bones too. Dogs can develop severe indigestion or vomiting after eating turkey bones.
Don't give only human food. Do you know enough about your canine's nutritional needs to be able to meet all those needs simply by sharing your food with him? It's extremely unlikely that your dog will get the right balance of nutrients by eating human food, so feeding a 100% human food diet is not recommended.
It is entirely acceptable to feed your dog a pure kibble diet. Or you can mix their diet up with some cooked or raw meat, fish, vegetables and rice. Many owners like to feed a raw meat diet to their dogs, and while this can suit some dogs very well, there are some important considerations you need to be aware of.
The staple food is bran bread, with meat from the chase, and game to be killed specially for them even out of the regular hunting season. Sick hounds may be given more fancy diets, such as goat's milk, bean broth, chopped meat, or buttered eggs.
Dogs are highly adaptable dietary generalists, so they could survive on a wide range of foods, from plants, berries and insects to small mammals and birds – and perhaps even some larger prey. Post-human dogs would eat whatever they could get their paws on.
Up to the middle of the 19th century a great many dogs, including hound packs were fed on bread or biscuit, usually soaked with milk or water, and very few had meat, or only occasionally. It was around the middle of the 19th century that commercial food manufacturers started up.
A decision not to eat dogs has nothing to do with our inherent hypocrisy, but with our relationship to different animals. Dogs were bred to be companion animals; pigs and cows are raised as food. To suggest that eating one and not the other represents a conflict of ethics is preposterous.
Eggs are not only a perfectly safe food source for dogs – they offer much in the way of nutritional benefits. Aside from being rich in protein, eggs are also a great source of linoleic acid, Vitamin B2 and B12 and water-soluble Vitamin A – all of which are wonderful for your dog's skin and coat.
Dogs love meat, but meat-only diets can be quite damaging to their health and wellbeing. Our four-legged friends are omnivores by nature so protein-rich recipes are essential if they are to grow big and remain strong.
Dog meat has been a tradition in China for thousands of years and is still eaten in many regions of the country. The best known of these regions among westerners is Yulin, which holds a dog meat festival every year.
This is Bramble, a border collie from the UK, who holds the Guinness World Record for being the oldest living dog. Bramble was fed an entirely plant-based diet for her whole life. She lived to the ripe old age of 25 - that's 189 in dog years!
Humans' oldest companion, the dog, was first domesticated at least 20,000 years ago. The ancient dogs were an essential part of life, and they were used for hunting, herding and sledding among other activities.
Integrating as little as 20% of fresh food can make a big difference - as little as small pieces of fruit and vegetables each day rather than processed treats. “It was a home-cooked diet, however, that had the greatest impact on life expectancy, adding as much as 32 months – almost 3 years – to a dog's life.”
Drs. Lippert and Sapy, the authors showed statistically that dogs fed a homemade diet, consisting of high quality foods (not fatty table scraps) versus dogs fed an industrial commercial pet food diet had a life expectancy of 32 months longer – that's almost 3 years!
The study indicated that on average, dogs given plant based food lived up to the age of 14.1 years compared to dogs eating meat diets who largely lived up to 12.6 years.