The Dog Bowl Pet Supply and BARF Raw Food Blog

Cooked food tastes and smells a whole lot better than raw food. This is true for most people and most dogs.

The question is, have we gained anything from our dogs (any nutritional value) by making their food more palatable?

The only time palatablity is useful, is when you are trying to coax a sick dog to commence eating. Apart from that one advantage, not much has been gained. The major problem is that cooked food is addictive. This leads to a number of problems:

• Loss of instinct to choose: Dogs eating a raw, whole food diet, are usually able to use instinct to make suitable choices if presented with a sufficiently wide variety of foods. Modern cooked food abolishes this natural instinct because of it's addictive effects. (Simply dogs simply will not recognize raw food as their correct food choice.)
• The creation of an unbalanced diet: Dogs fed cooked food often train their owner to feed them a narrow range of "favorites". This always leads to an unbalanced diet with health problems being the inevitable consequence.
• Difficulty in changing diets: It can be difficult but NOT IMPOSSIBLE to change the eating habits of older animals raised on cooked food.
• Obesity: Because cooked food tastes so good, over eating and hence obesity is common.
• It helps sell those awful pet foods: Pet food companies, use the addictive qualities of cooked food to help sell their product. Let's face it - people buy food which their dog likes! (Emotionally charged decision & not necessarily "smart shopping" decision.)