Disgusting flatulence

[chrisf]

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Hi again everyone I realise that the problem above has to be diet related and up until now have lived with it for economical reasons and he is also disgustingly healthy on it, he is at present fed with Country Value Greyhound complete meal and a few charcoal cobs to try and alleviate the problem but they make little if any difference can anyone recommend a complete dried food that might help although I am loathe to change this diet as he has been on it since I got him as an 8 month old pup! he is on the large side for a whippet but also an adorable well mannered blue and white male but the stink is now forcing us after living with it for 2 1/2 years

 

[longdog]

Hi Chris,

You might've better to try Red Mills, Gain or something similar to eleviate your problem. We Feed mainly meat and vegetables and don't have a problem with wind, but past experience with Red Mills was fine.

 

[bigmac]

HI Chris yes I have found that my Ben is much better now on Gain plus I do not give him milk.

 

[6th Sense]

Does he have flatulence all the time or just now and then? Mine have it when they have eaten something out on a walk sometimes. Try James Wellbeloved too.

 

[Cash_Dolly]

My little whippet boy used to have awful flatulence!! It was horrendous! I started introducing raw meat, fish, eggs etc and now he mainly eats fresh foods or raw (with a very small amount of "dog food") and he has never been better! his wind problems have vanished and his condition has improved greatly! The RAW diet isn't for everyone and like I say I don't stick to it 100% but getting proper fresh meat and sardines, eggs etc has made all the difference! If you are sticking to kibble then a grain free variety may help?

 

[chrisf]

Thanks for all your replies, he has now been on Red Mills Racer for 4 weeks and the problem is greatly improved but not cured but he likes it and is still disgustingly healthy and much easier to love many thanks Chris

 

[leashedForLife]

moved.  

I made a new thread for some "all breeds" suggestions to prevent or reduce various gut-issues -

 

[leashedForLife]

moved.

 

[excuseme]

Maybe "Leashed for Life" can explain which teeth of a dog is designed for grinding oats or corn of any type. A dog wether it is a "wild dog" or a "Wolf" cannot grind any form of grain with the teeth it has naturally evolved with. Neither can any wild canine aquire such a food as "Grain" for 52 weeks of the year. Where ever our canine family live in the world naturally, grain is only seasonal.  If whole grain is consumed by a dog it goes straight through un digested!

And cats die from eating a vegetarian diet ??!!!

So what about the hundreds of thousands,  cats that eat poor quality complete kibbles that are based on grain (vegetarian) with little or no meat at all but just a little flavouring. They may not be very healthy but somehow cats manage to survive on poor quality foods much as our dogs do. but there are not loads of blind or even "Dead" cats lying about the countryside

 

[leashedForLife]

@excuseme  -

I don't know why U are so scornful in Ur post, as i said nothing that isn't both common knowledge & easily verified. // Dogs have trouble with FLINT CORN - the hard-kernel, high-cellulose version that is easily stored as a dry grain, is ground into gritty corn-meal for corn-bread, used in tortillas as masa harina, etc. However - dogs digest sweet corn, oats, wheat, barley, rice, millet, etc, quite nicely.
Dogs are very good at digesting cooked grains as opposed to 'raw' grains, they can eat & digest legumes & beans [also cooked, not raw], & they handle fruit & fresh veg just fine; at least 90% of U-S diets, including such common ethnic favorites as Italian, Indian, African, Carib, German, & Provencal entrees, go over very well indeed with dogs, & are digested and absorbed well.

I do not feed flint corn in any form to my dogs, nor do i suggest it to my clients - tortilla chips, polenta, etc, are for the humans in the house, & all the dog foods i recommend or feed are MEAT based, for my dogs & my cats... but my dogs' diets have also included grain Other than Hard Corn, & veg, & fruits, & various treats.   . Such as some human food tidbits, low-fat cheese, etc.

Here are some scholarly references; I hope they answer any questions.  


Re dogs as omnivores -

From the journal Nature - probly the most-prestigious science journal in biology, world-wide:


The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet


E Axelsson, A Ratnakumar, ML Arendt, K Maqbool… - Nature, 2013 - nature.com
... 11 of 14 mammals have valine at this position, whereas the omnivorous rat, & the insectivorous hedgehog & short-tailed opossum, carry isoleucine like the wolf...
(Supplementary ... Dogs showed a ~12-fold higher expression (P < 0.001, Wilcoxon, n DOG = 9, ...
Cited by 335            Related articles              All 19 versions             Cite        Save




Are Dogs Carnivores or Omnivores? Here's What New Research Says




www.vetstreet.com › Our Pet Experts › Dr. Patty Khuly
Nov 5, 2013 - 
Plant material is more difficult to break down, so herbivores have much longer intestines. And dogs, like omnivores, fall somewhere in-between, with an intestinal length just slightly longer than the cat, so it makes sense that dogs might be classified as omnivorous re this issue. 2. Wolves eat grains, too.





from archeological studies:
Studies on Amerindian dogs, 1: carbon isotopes in relation to maize in the diet of domestic dogs from early Peru and Ecuador


R Burleigh, D Brothwell - Journal of Archaeological Science, 1978 - Elsevier
... cultivated as early as 3000 BC. The 13C/11C ratio of collagen from the bones of a domestic dog from Real Alto suggests that there was a large amount (perhaps over 60 %) of maize in its diet. As an adjunct to radiocarbon dating ...
Cited by 78            Related articles           All 6 versions          Cite                 Save



from free-roaming street dogs AKA pariah dogs:



Preference for meat is not innate in dogs


A Bhadra, A Bhadra - arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.5104, 2013 - arxiv.org
... 2001).
Indian free-ranging dogs don't often encounter meat during scavenging in waste dumps and while begging for food. Instead, they live on a carbohydrate-rich omnivorous diet consisting of biscuits, breads, rice, lentil, fish bones, occasional pieces of decomposing ...
Cited by 7           Related articles                  All 10 versions .     Cite      Save





from the veterinary POV -
Dogs Are Omnivores - and Should be Fed as Such | Web DVM




web-dvm.net/dogs-are-omnivores-and-should-be-fed-as-such/
Dr. Roger writes about the troubling trend of dog owners determined to feed their dogs diets too heavy in protein, based on the false notion that dogs are "pure carnivores"...


Re cats as obligate carnivores - 
 



What Exactly is an "Obligate Carnivore?" - Feline Nutrition




feline-nutrition.org/answers/answers-what-exactly-is-an-qobligate-carnivoreq
Feb 9, 2013 - 
Cats must eat meat, it is a biological necessity. ... Because eating a meat-only diet provides some vitamins & fatty acids in their pre-formed state, cats & many other obligate carnivores have lost the ability to make these amino acids and vitamins in their own bodies, the way herbivores or omnivores do.







Cats Are Different:  How a Cat's Nutritional Needs are Different from a ...




www.petmd.com/cat/nutrition/evr_ct_cat_nutritional_needs_different
So a good way to think of it is that cats are carnivores, dogs are omnivores, but they both have evolved as hunters of other animals in keeping with their nature as ...



 




Cats: obligate carnivore (Proceedings) - Veterinary CE Center




veterinarycalendar.dvm360.com/cats-obligate-carnivore-proceedings
by AWBISLVT VTS - ‎2010 - ‎Related articles
Aug 1, 2010 - 
In their natural environment, cats are an obligate carnivore, meaning that their nutritional needs are met by eating a diet that consists of ...








Feed Your Cat - Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine




www.vet.cornell.edu/FHC/health_information/FeedYourCat.cfm
Cats are obligate carnivores, & are very different from dogs -  and people -  in their nutritional needs. What does it mean to be an obligate carnivore? It means that ...







Re cats dying on vegetarian diets -

Kitten Nearly Dies On Vegan Diet, Gets Healed With Meat | HuffPost



www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/kitten-vegan-diet-nearly-dies_n_3644213.html
Jul 24, 2013 - 
A kitten who nearly died after its owners fed it a strict vegan diet was nursed back to health with 20 CCs of meat. It turns out that a diet of potato...
 

Vegetarian diets for pets put their health at risk warn experts - Daily Mail




www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Vegetarian-diets-pets-health-risk-fatal-say-experts-sales-vega...
Dec 13, 2015 - 
... But an unsuitable vegetarian diet for cats can lead to blindness, brain damage, & even death. ... He said most people fed their pets a vegetarian diet because they ...


===========================================

I'll add for anyone considering a vegie diet for their cat, just adding some taurine to a vegie food doesn't make it "a complete diet" for cats.
Vegetarian diets for cats, let alone strict vegan diets for cats, are downright dangerous, & the cat is a helpless victim in the experiment.
 - terry

 

 

[leashedForLife]

Forgot - soybeans are a lovely high-protein legume, they can be made into many products [tempeh, tofu AKA bean-curd, soy-milk, Textured veg protein / TVP, bean threads / cellophane pasta, & more].
Asian ancestry folks have many generations of long-lost relations who ate soy in every way imaginable for centuries - they digest it & absorb it well, generally speaking. They evolved with it.

Americans of Euro descent often have a difficult time digesting soy, especially when it's consumed to excess or there's a quick change, when a [boring] meat-&-potato diet is ditched for a trendy Asian one.  My mum's close friend Anne had a mizrable time with abdominal cramps, bloating, gurgly guts, etc, after her Doc suggested less dairy & more soy-milk -- she'd begun by drinking A QUART a day!     I told her to slow down, her gut flora needed time to adjust, & the soy-specialists had to boost their numbers to digest this flood of soy proteins.
The griping gut symptoms stopped, & she slowly added 4 to 6-oz a week to her intake, which went much better.

Dogs have the same problems with soy as many Euro-ancestry Americans do: it's hard to digest, & isn't absorbed well. // Soy protein LOOKS terrific in the nutritional analysis, but the dog gets very little out of it - mostly, it just goes thru 'em.   Plus, it's a common food allergen for dogs - not on 1st exposure;  as with most stuff, it takes repeated exposure to sensitize the immune system & provoke a reaction.
Soy is a very, very complex molecule - if U do feed it, i'd suggest a good digestive enzyme be added to those meals, so that it's broken down & at least partly absorbed.     Personally, i just skip soy; there are better proteins without those hard-to-digest / hard to absorb issues.

TVP by the way, is especially-prone to cause gut upsets.
  - terry

 

[excuseme]

Can you tell me which dogs teeth are designed for grinding ANY corn and where in the world a wild canine animal can find grain as a regular food source for 52 weeks of the year ?  This was asked in my previous post and you have not answered my question.

Have you any idea why so much waste and bulky poo's are produced and excreted from our dogs bottoms ?

As you have done I have copied the following paragraphs!

Commercial diets;

In the early 20th century, food producers in the United States came up with a novel to sell the large amounts of leftover, poor-quality meat, gristle, viscera and cereal by-products that they could not hide in sausages: they put it in tins (a new invention then ) and called it "dog food". For the first time in history, people could buy food specially made for their dogs, The idea caught on, and soon people forgot that they used to simply feed their dogs raw meat and bones and vegetable scraps- a broad variety of foods which, being minimally processed retained their nutritional value.

Today we find ourselves bombarded with pet-food advertisements for "this" tinned brand or "that" dry brand or "this" sausage preparation or that super-chew. There are so many processed dog foods to choose from that we don't know where to turn. We have forgotten about the basics in our drive for convenience.  Admittedly, we all try to buy the best for our wonderful dogs, but ask yourself the following;(a) If this food is as great as they say it is, why aren't they giving it to people to eat ? - astronauts or soldiers, for example ?  And (b) Would I eat this stuff or feed it to my children?                 

Convenient disease;

So why do we feed processed food to our dogs? In a word, convenience. But how convenient is it when, because of eating processed food, your pet develops a persistent itch, eczema, dental problems, smelly breath, an inhalant allergy, colitis, food hypersensitivity, lethargy, a dull or scruffy coat, kidney disease, or rheumatoid arthritis- to name but a few ?

Our dogs are survivors but unfortunately these days not all are "healthy" !

This is the UK, not AMERICA. Just in case you are confused !. 

 

[leashedForLife]

@excuseme  -

I copied no paragraphs; if U look,  i posted  links to sources -

* the 1st three are research, published in peer-reviewed science journals
* the next 5 are from veterinary sources
* the last 2, b/c U scoffed at the idea of vegie diets killing cats, are news links:
random articles re folks who fed their cat a vegetarian diet, & said cat nearly died.

I won't argue dentition with U - apparently U want a fight.   I gave evidence from reputable sources - 3 peer-reviewed, 5 medical.

That evidence applies, no matter where U live;  domestic dogs around the globe are all the same species. UK, U-S, Europe, N America, Africa, India, Asia, C or S America, Micronesia, W Pacific...  they're all interfertile, produce fertile progeny, & all were formerly classified Canis domesticus - now, they're labeled Canis lupus familiaris, but altho the label changed, they're all domestic dogs.

Where an individual breed originally developed has relevance to which grains or which proteins suit that breed best - but all dogs can digest cooked [not raw or un-processed] grains, altho as i noted, flint-corn & soybeans are not worth feeding; the 1st is too cellulosic, & the 2nd too complex, for either to be well-digested or well-absorbed by dogs.

COMMERCIAL DOG-FOOD only began in the mid-1800s, & at the time, that 'biscuit' was meant to be the foundation, not the whole, of the dog's meal - the owner was expected to dress it up with meat scraps, broth, leftover vegies, etc.  "Whole foods" AKA "complete foods" entered the market much-later, & LONG, LONG BEFORE 1850, for all those thousands of years of co-evolution, dogs ate our scraps - animal skins, bones, gristle, & grain, human feces - all the garbage that humanity created, was the food of dogs.

When dogs lived in our huts & caves & yurts & longhouses & igloos & adobes, they were there by sufferance, & mostly in cold weather - as living hot-water bottles. Once we had villages & then towns, most dogs lived OUTSIDE the house, chained in the yard to alert the family to intruders, in the stable to guard the stock, in the foyer of the house to protect the property.
Generally only toy-breeds lived with the family, & those were rich folks' dogs - fed the same diet as their owners ate, & unlike the poor folks' dogs, NOT fed on leftovers.

From the colonial era thru the 1930s in the U-S, dogs ate leftovers in every household, so the quality of the ingredients varied by economic class, but they were ALL fed on scraps. A bowl of oatmeal with bits of veg & meat scraps was an everyday event for many dogs - it was cheap, filling, & they did fine on it.
Also into the 1930s, most dogs ran free - they came home to sleep, or for meals, but they roamed all over town or around the village or between the farms; even in densely crowded cities, i-e, NYC, Chicago, Philthy, Frisco, etc, many dogs roamed freely. They scavenged, fought, stopped the electric streetcars by mating on the tracks, stole food from market stalls, & generally did what dogs do, when unleashed & free to do as they please.
LEASH LAWS began in the U-S in cities, as did LICENSES, in the 1930s - & gradually spread to smaller towns, then villages, & finally to rural counties & townships.

The pet-food industry began to make & sell "complete diets" only after WW-2, but scraps, perhaps added to 'biscuit' foods, continued to be the popular choice clear into the 1960s, when commercial dog-foods finally became the standard, & the vast majority of pet-owners from about 1965 on, fed canned or bagged foods.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_food#Commercial_dog_food

Purpose-made dog foods are a very recent phenomenon, & dogs are still perfectly capable of digesting what they've eaten all along: dogs are scavengers, eating scraps & garbage, trash & leftovers. That we CHOOSE now to feed them tidbits from our plates, or home-cook them entire meals, does not change dogs' nature.
Even feral dogs hang around human settlements, & they survive by scavenging - they are but poor hunters as regards CATCHING & KILLING, & are far-more likely to nab a slow chicken than hunt wild game, but the ones that kill chickens don't live long.

 - terry

 

[leashedForLife]

 here's a lay-reader's version of the "DNA for digesting starch distinguishes dogs from wolves" research -

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/23/science/la-sci-how-dogs-evolved-20130124

i QOUTE,

"...dogs can break down starch into sugar,  then transport those sugars from the gut into the bloodstream, more efficiently than can wolves. Comparing dog & wolf DNA, the authors pinpointed several changes in starch & sugar-processing genes that would have made early dogs better able to digest the scraps they scavenged from dumps in early farming villages, helping them to thrive as they gave up the independent life of the pack to entwine their lives with ours.

'That food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating',  most-likely a mix of roots, porridge, & possibly bread, along with bones containing meat & marrow, said study leader Erik Axelsson, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
No one knows for sure when or where the first dogs came to be, but most evolutionary biologists agree that the wolf probably made the first move, & that the draw was the food humans discarded.

The new analysis by Axelsson & his colleagues examined a mix of DNA from 12 gray wolves & compared it with DNA collected from 60 domestic dogs, including Cocker Spaniels, Giant Schnauzers, Golden Retrievers, & 11 other breeds.
They sequenced the dog & wolf DNA, & searched for tiny differences. Because they were seeking features that cropped up early in dog evolution, they focused on genetic variations that dogs shared, but wolves lacked. They also looked for variations that all, or most, of the dogs had in common.

From this analysis, the team identified 36 places in the genome, containing 122 genes, that seemed to have been important in dog evolution. Ten of the genes are involved in starch or fat metabolism, including three that carry instructions for making a protein that is pivotal to digestion of starch.

One of them makes alpha amylase, an enzyme that breaks starch into the sugar maltose & shorter carbohydrate strands. Dogs carry many more copies of this gene than wolves, the scientists found — & the alpha amylase activity in [dogs' ] tissues is five times greater.

Another gene makes an enzyme for the next step in carb digestion: turning maltose into glucose. This gene is 12 times more active in dogs than wolves, & blood tests showed that maltose is processed into glucose twice as quickly in dogs.

The third gene makes a protein that moves glucose from the gut into the bloodstream. The scientists saw several dog-specific alterations in this gene that suggest the glucose transporter may work more efficiently in dog guts than wolf guts.

Taken together, the data fit with the fact that dogs eat more starch than wolves, Axelsson said. He added that this adaptation would have allowed the first dogs to get more goodness out of the waste food they were drawn to at early farming settlements.
'It makes perfect sense that the most efficient scavengers were the wolves that could cope with this starch-rich diet',  he said."
_____________________________________________


I know some folks will think this is petty, but dogs did not "descend from" wolves - that's not just sloppy phrasing, it's flat-out wrong.  Modern-day wolves are in no sense the ANCESTORS of dogs, but they're relatives of domestic dogs - cousins, if U will; the wolves that live around the world descend from a common ancestor, & modern-day wolves also share that common ancestor with dogs.
Approx 40K years of life in separate gene-pools separate dogs & wolves, per a study that looked at mitochondrial-DNA, which is inherited only from the maternal line, & they used mDNA's mutation rate as a clock to estimate how far-back the wolf-ancestor & dog-ancestor gene pools had been freely interchanging.

40 millennia is a long time; dogs may be interfertile with wolves, but behaviorally, they are very, very different beasts. Dogs' long co-evolution with humans hasn't only changed the foods they can digest, but pups are literally BORN hard-wired to desire interaction with humans, & all it takes to release that deeply-instinctive attachment is some handling by ppl when they are young - either still nursing mum/in the nest, or under 4-MO.
As little as 15-minutes of handling once a week for litters born in a lab, which began at 5-WO & stopped three weeks later, made those pups behaviorally indistinguishable from pups handled every day by their breeder, in video recorded at 12-WO & scored by professionals who were double-blind... after a solid month with no handling whatever, litters that had experienced a sum total of ONE HOUR of handling in their young lives, over 4-weeks, acted as friendly, greeted as eagerly, & solicited attn just as intensely, as doted-on pups from home-bred litters.

Pups as young as 5-WO can understand human gestures & follow human gaze - which surpasses even our closest primate relative, chimpanzees.
Pups & dogs readily follow a pointing finger, or even decode a gesture swinging one's jaw toward a flipped-over tumbler as a clue to investigate it - & find food.

Bottle-fed & human-reared wolves did not "ask for help" from known humans - their caregivers - when they were given an impossible problem to solve for food - they continued to struggle on their own, or gave up.
Domestic pups & dogs attempted it, realized they couldn't do it alone, & asked for help from nearby humans - complete strangers, as well as known persons.

Dogs, so far as we know, are the only other species that reads human faces 'from left to right' - which reveals micro-expressions that are clues to current emotional states.  Humans look at human faces that way; dogs do, too.
Dogs are the species that has been with us since before civilization, & before history - our closest companions, our oldest friendship.  They know us better, IMO, than we know ourselves.  They are truly remarkable, & capable of so much more than most people ever realize.

Here's to dogs - i lift my coffee-cup to them. Bless them all.  
 - terry
 

 

[JoanneF]

How did we get from flatulence, through a dozen or so external reference material links, to dogs' ability to read human microexpressions?

:huh:

 

[leashedForLife]

Most of the earliest dog-fossils date to around 10K-years old;  among  the earliest-known dog fossils yet found was 17K years old, buried with a human in the same grave, in the northern-Midwest of the U-S - Michigan, Minnesota - somewhere in there.
A 12K-YO fossil of a puppy was also buried with human remains, in what is now Israel.

This is the oldest dog-fossil yet found - 33K years old:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110819-dogs-wolves-russia-domestication-animals-science-evolution/

Found in a cave used by humans, in the Altay Mts of Siberia.

 

[leashedForLife]

How did we get from flatulence, through a dozen or so external reference material links, to dogs' ability to read human microexpressions?

:huh:

Easy.    One step at a time.
 - dogs share a common ancestor with wolves...
 - but dogs' digestive systems differ significantly from wolves'.
 - dogs' behaviors reflect just how long dogs & wolves have been separate breeding popns.

Dogs' ability to read human microexpressions are, like their ability to digest starches, a result of their long co-evolution with humans.

 

[eingana]

For the future Terry, please be aware that this area is about pedigree whippets and your first post started off dredging up an old thread to share way more information than most people can take in from one post, but also talking all about other breeds and then taking everything very much off topic.

I know that you have lots of knowledge, but can you use it more sparingly and cause less blunt force trauma with it please?  We need to both leave the nice people who are discussing whippets to do so in peace