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FEEDING IS A CENTRAL ISSUE in the world of working sleddogs. There are many different ways to approach the job of ensuring that hard-working animals get nutritional input of sufficient quality to keep them working at their maximum potential without loss of muscle mass, health or condition. Inevitably one's feeding plan will be influenced by finances, availability of key ingredients, keeping qualities, weight and transport considerations, and a host of other factors beyond those dictated by nutritional theory. What is worse, there is significant disagreement about fundamentals of working dog nutrition. Much of the available information on that subject originates from sources that might be suspected of bias favouring their own commercial interests. So whose responsibility is it, anyway, to see to it that your hard-working sleddogs are nourished according to their needs? It's easy to leave things to the "experts" but is that really a safe option?
Taking Responsibility for Your Dogs' Nutrition
IF YOU OWN AND DRIVE SLEDDOGS, if
they work hard pulling a sled for you in all kinds of difficult weather,
you really have no easy option: you must take responsibility for your
dogs' nutrition. They are unable to go out and get what they want
and need for themselves, confined as they are in your kennel.
(If they were to get out and take responsibility for their own nutrition,
you would be up to your ears in lawsuits from sheep and poultry
farmers!) You cannot abdicate responsibility for their nutritional
needs. By that, we mean that you cannot leave it all to Mr. Purina
or Mr. Iams, who are responsible only to their shareholders, not to
you or your dogs. Believe it or not, it isn't as easy as just handing
them a dish of dry kibble!
Just how you go about taking responsibility
for your sleddogs' nutrition is up to you. Everybody's circumstances
are a little different. (If you happen to live in Australia, you may wind
up feeding them kangaroo meat!) If you feed some kind of commercial
ration, you will still have to provide additional meat, fat and
vitamins. (No matter what the analysis on the bag says, some
nutrients such as Vitamin E deteriorate significantly before the dog
food reaches its consumer.) If finally, in desperation (as we did)
you decide to provide your sleddogs with rations prepared in your
own kennel, then you must do some independent research and
observe your dogs constantly and accurately to get feedback on
how your programme works.
Ask older, experienced dog drivers who
have been in the game for
many years to tell you in detail how they feed sleddogs, and
how they have observed other experienced drivers feed their
dogs. You will find there is a lot of room for opinion on
the fine points, but you will probably quickly discover the
consensus is meat and fat, first and foremost, and plenty of
them. Remember that in the end the decision about what to
feed is yours alone, but your dogs must suffer the
consequences of that decision. If you take the easy way
out and let a multinational corporation do your thinking for
you, your dogs could wind up with toxicosis, malnutrition,
and allergies. We have seen mushers lose litters and have
adult sleddogs drop dead in training or on their stakeouts,
in a way that strongly suggested nutritional causes, while
the owners merely grumbled about 'genetic defects.'
Apparently it's easy to be unaware about canine nutrition,
but to be aware is your responsibility.
So let's start our examination of sleddog
nutrition where most people do, with commercial dog
foods.
Commercial Dog Foods
THESE COME IN FOUR COMMON FORMATS: canned wet dogfood, moist crumbled rations in plastic packets, dry kibbled or nugget dog food in paper sacks, and dry ground meal rations in paper or plastic sacks. Of these four only the latter two are really worthy of consideration for those who own more than a single pet animal, due to problems of expense, convenience and nutrition.
CANNED DOG FOOD is prepared to look and smell like meat, but in fact it is mostly cereal and moisture. Each can contains about 70 percent water, for which the buyer pays a high price in packaging, promotion, and transport costs. Most such foods are apt to be nutritionally deficient for working dogs. Anyone with a kennel can tell you that opening a stack of metal cans each evening rapidly becomes a big pain in the neck. Not a serious option for dog team owners!
MOIST CRUMBLED RATIONS in packets are subject to virtually the same drawbacks as canned foods. They can be yet more expensive, are seldom formulated for dogs with high energy requirements, and are inconvenient to use in quantity, being packaged in small quantities. Again, these foods are not a serious option for sleddog feeding.
DRY KIBBLED OR NUGGET DOG FOOD in paper sacks probably account for 90 percent or more of dog food sold to multiple dog owners. This is the common, familiar format everyone knows. This market can be divided roughly into two sectors, first the national brand names that are widely known and heavily advertised, and second the local brands or supermarket dog foods that vary from place to place and are rarely if ever advertised. Let's examine first the dry kibble or nugget format and then the two market sectors.
Dry nuggets, kibble and chunks represent the ultimate in user convenience for dog team owners, no question about that. They are easy to handle, easy to store, easy to feed. They are specifically prepared for convenience and user appeal. Manufacturers spend a lot of money to make certain that their dog food is appealing in appearance and smell, and convenient in use, knowing that these factors attract and keep a large market share for them. The average person doesn't know enough about canine nutrition to judge on any basis other than eye and nose appeal, and the dogs' appetite for the food, so there's a lot of concentration on maximising those factors.
There are, however, serious negative considerations
concerning these feeding formats. Most of these foods are
processed into their nugget form by 'extrusion', which involves
the use of high heat levels. All ingredients must be mixed and
cooked together for extrusion; this may not work well. Cereals,
a major component of all dog foods, require a lot of cooking, but
meat and vitamins suffer from the degree of cooking required by
cereals. High heat alters or destroys many essential amino acids,
enzymes, fatty acids and vitamins, resulting in lowered
bio-availability of essential nutritional elements.
Hard nuggets are difficult for dogs to eat.
If they try to gulp them down (the natural canine way of
eating) they may choke. If they are forced to chew them, (not a
natural way of eating for dogs) they experience heavy tartar
buildup on their teeth from the accumulation of sticky food
residues.
Commercial dry extruded dog foods
nearly always contain a wide variety of additives whose
nutritional value to the dog is questionable. The cheaper brands
often contain soybean meal to boost the protein analysis,
but this kind of plant protein is nutritionally useless to dogs and may
actually cause allergic or other toxic reactions. The majority contain
beet pulp as a cheap filler and a "stool former"; beet pulp
is of no proven nutritional value to dogs but absorbs up to seven
times its weight in water volume, causing increased water needs
and greatly increased stool volume. The plant saponins
contained in beet pulp and soybean meal can be toxic to dogs.
Other widely used feed additives include yucca plant fibre, wood
cellulose, bentonite and similar nutritionally useless junk
(justified as "dietary fibre" and "stool former" by manufacturers)
included merely as filler or to ensure that the dogs produce
"formed" stools despite the fact that they are excreting too much
material that they cannot assimilate.
Commercial national brands of dry dog food are formulated first
of all to make a healthy profit for the manufacturer, the
distributor, and the retailer. They are manufactured for the most
part by multinational corporations whose major responsibility is to
their shareholders. A large part of the cost of producing these foods
consists of the company's advertising budget! All of those
full-page four-colour ads you see in glossy magazines must be paid
for by the dog food you buy. The actual feed ingredients are often
low-grade, low-cost items. These companies dominate the flow of
information concerning canine nutrition, through their own
'research' departments and through grants to universities and
veterinary schools. If their formulas appear to satisfy the 'known
requirements' for canine nutrition, that just could be because
they wrote the book themselves! These companies' actual concern
for canine nutrition is open to question. Naive dog owners simply
assume that the company has their dogs' best interests at heart
and willingly pay high prices for cheap ingredients plus
advertising plus three levels of profit.
Working sleddog owners are often aware that
these dry foods are not nutritionally adequate by themselves
for their hard-working canines. Highly visible competitive dog drivers
in publicised races such as the Iditarod Trail, the Yukon Quest,
and the Fairbanks Open North American Championship are quite often
'sponsored' by national-brand dog food manufacturers, who provide
them with free dog food and other subsidies. This can amount to a
buy-off in some cases, as the driver is expected to recommend and
push the product no matter what he actually thinks of it. Those
well acquainted with highly competitive mushers are often aware
that the sponsored musher may actually feed a diet consisting of
less than twenty-five percent of the sponsor's product,
making up the nutritional deficit with heavy meat and vitamin
supplementation. It is pretty much an open secret in the upper
levels of sleddog racing that nobody who feeds just the 'complete'
dry ration can hope to keep his dogs in winning condition.
Local brands eliminate the high costs of national advertising campaigns, but may be questionable in nutritional content. They are better quality these days than they once were, by and large, but they, too, rely heavily on cheap ingredients and fillers like beet pulp. Supermarket brands frequently include soybean meal for a cheap boost to their protein analysis. Here and there in this market, bargains in reasonably good nutrition can be found, but across the board overall quality is often worse than the national brands.
DRY GROUND MEAL formulas are
frequently marketed by smaller specialist companies. Some dry
meal formulas specifically target high energy working dogs,
including sleddogs. Since all the ingredients in the formula do
not need to be cooked together, the available amino
acid, fatty acid, enzyme and vitamin content may prove to be
dramatically higher than those found in other formats.
Meals are usually mixed with water just before feeding, yielding
a soft mass that the dog can gulp down easily. The drawback to
dry meals is that they are more difficult to feed,
particularly in very cold climates, because the necessary high fat
content for working dogs causes the meal to congeal into large
blocks or lumps in freezing temperatures. Also these feeds do
not store well for long periods of time; presented in a format of
fine particles, they are highly exposed to oxidation and
spoilage can occur rapidly, especially in warm weather.
High preservative levels may be necessary to ensure that the
feed keeps well enough for transportation and warehousing,
which may not be the best thing for the ultimate consumer, the
dog.
Unfortunately there are relatively few
such formulas (compared with the bewildering and highly-advertised
variety of dry nugget foods) and they can turn out to be quite
expensive. Seppala Kennels for about a year fed all its dogs on
one such formulation manufactured in New York state by the
Robert Abady Company and found it very satisfactory nutritionally,
but difficult to handle in cold weather and extremely expensive in
use.
