Pups After There 1St Weetabix

[Giro 2,648]

I would not choose weetabix and milk...

 

If I was weaning them on to solids, I would rather go with soaked puppy complete and mash it up with some liquid...

 

 

Meat v Weetabix its a no brianer really..

[snoopdog 1,256]

what about Weetabix verse full breky giro.

[lurchergrrl 1,441]

Nowt wrong with a bit Weetabix. Goat's milk is better for their guts tho. Or even some natural yoghurt. Honey's good too.

 

Just got in from work and not had my dinner - now I'm starving lol

[Giro 2,648]

Full breaky like a full English ??

 

Be shit hot that.. Proteins from the meats and eggs - Potassium in the plum tomatoes..

 

Best coursing dogs raised on Full breakys Snoops

 

 

 

Should see the size of me pals pups.. easy 26 at eight months and not a weetabix in sight

 

[sandymere 8,263]

 

 

Lordy, fella put a pic up celebrating his pups and every holier than thou expert on puppy rearing see an opportunity to blow their own trumpet . Recon he was using Weetabix as an introduction to solids rather than a permanent diet so can’t see what the fuss was about .

 

 

But since we have so many experts I’ve one question for all you dieticians what did you feed your babies, human, for their first few meals ???????

that's exactly what i am doing mate

 

 

Just a quick reminder before you answer the digestive abilities of humans and dogs are very similar, dogs aren’t wolves any more than we are cave men .Dogs aren’t true carnivores like say a cat, basically they are adapted to a mixed diet including starches

Axelsson E. et al, The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet, Nature, 2013 Jan 23, doi: 10.1038/nature11837, Science for Life Laboratory, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University, 75237 Uppsala, Sweden

The idea of carnivores etc is a man made label system that doesn’t fit to well to reality. Think more of a continuum with obligate carnivore like cats at one end and ruminants like cows at the other. Most things fall somewhere between these two extremes, monogastrics. Even then they are not fixed at their place but able to move along the line to deal with variable food availability. Consider an Inuit living on a meat based diet in the Artic-circle compared to an arable farmer group such as the Aztecs, both are humans yet one could be called a carnivore and one a herbivore but in truth neither label fits their digestive, evolutionary abilities does it? Wolves had similar abilities which is why they made such a good partnership with ourselves in the first place. Then our pressure on their evolution has enhanced this to bring them ever closer to ourselves. The result dogs are now able to digest and do well on a very catholic diet, carbs won’t be passed through but digested and form a valuable part of balanced diet. So if someone wants to give their pups some cereal seems just fine to me.

HOWEVER dogs need meat to survive and flourish ... They couldn't live in the wild on grains and fruits alone ... Also if I put a bowl of cereal on the floor next to a bowl of fresh meat and led a hundred dogs one at a time to the bowls I know what I would put my money on to be the empty bowl every time ..........

 

Who said anything about surviving on wild fruits etc alone?? and if I gave my dog a cooked sausage or a rabbit leg they would eat the sausage 1st so choice is hardly evidence of quality.

 

The whole point of my post was that of balanced diet being inclusive of carbs rather than this idea that only meat has any value.

Nice article here

 

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/23/people-and-dogs-a-genetic-love-story/

People and Dogs: A Genetic Love Story

by Virginia Hughes

Here’s a possibly true story about the first friendly dog. It’s dusk on a human settlement some ten thousand years ago. After a long day of farming, a family gathers around a campfire. They’re kicking back with hunks of venison (a rare treat), some corn, bread, maybe even a few cups of mead. Suddenly they hear rustling coming from the shadows. They turn around and see the glowing eyes of a wolf.

The people are surprised, maybe, but not scared. For many years they’ve noticed an odd group of wolves loitering just outside the village, rummaging up food scraps from the dump pile. The animals have never caused any harm and keep to themselves. But this is the first time a wolf has dared to come so close. It slowly approaches the fire, sits down, and cocks its head. Somebody tosses out a bit of bread.

As a recent dog owner, I love this story: Dogs are the wolves that mooched. They needed us, approached us, and ultimately wooed us into being best friends forever. This is a popular scientific theory — the ‘scavenger hypothesis’ — of how dogs came to be. But it’s not the only one, not by a long shot.

Treats, do you have treats?!

Another theory says that people went out into the woods and deliberately trapped wolf pups, with the goal of training them to be sentinels or hunters. Still other scholars say the co-evolution of wolves and humans was mutually beneficial, with humans learning to hunt by watching wolves. “There are as many specific scenarios as there are people working in this field,” says Bob Wayne, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re looking back at such a long time ago, it’s a matter of speculation.”

 

Most genetic evidence says that dogs emerged in the neolithic period, just as humans were transitioning from a hunter-gather lifestyle to one of agricultural settlements. But some dog fossils are much older, dating as far back as 33,000 years ago. Where canine domestication happened is also up for grabs. It could have been in the Middle East, China, Siberia or several places at once.

Erik Axelsson and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden tried to learn more about the evolution of canines by comparing the genetic sequences of modern-day dogs and wolves. As they report today in Nature, dogs show distinct differences from wolves in genes involved in two key functions: brain development and starch digestion.

The researchers combined samples from 60 different dogs of 14 different breeds, from the shaggy bearded collie to the super-short drever to the svelte and wolf-like Swedish elkhound. They sequenced different parts of the genome in each one, and then merged them together to create a master ‘dog’ reference. They compared this to a master ‘wolf’ genome based on samples from 12 wolves in seven different countries.

Some 36 regions of the genome carry different variants in dogs and wolves, the study found. Each region is relatively large, encompassing three or four genes, but only one gene in each region is likely responsible for the difference, Axelsson says. Of the 122 candidate genes identified, many have similar biological roles. For example, eight of the genes are involved in the development of the brain and nervous system.

Brain development genes are interesting because of the well-known behavioral differences between dogs and wolves — namely that wolves turn out to be aggressive and dogs don’t.

A wolf pup in the Zürich zoo

“Wolves and dogs are actually quite similar when they’re very young: They both do the same playful behavior, run around in circles, and generally look cute. Little wolf puppies will even bark like a dog,” says Nicholas Dodman, a professor in the veterinary school at Tufts University. “But suddenly the wolf grows up and becomes aloof and lean and suspicious.”

Many animals seem to take on a more juvenile state as they are domesticated, getting bigger eyes, smaller faces and less aggressive demeanors. “One common way of achieving a domesticated form of a species might be to slow down the development of the animal,” Axelsson says. “So the finding here, that it’s the development of the nervous system that’s affected, gives some support to this theory.”

Most of his new study, though, is devoted to digestion genes. Dogs break down starch in three digestive stages, and the researchers found genetic differences related to each. Their strongest example hinges on AMY2B, a gene that in makes alpha-amylase, an enzyme in the pancreas that helps convert starch into maltose. The wolf genome carries 2 copies of AMY2B, whereas dogs carry anywhere from 4 to 30 copies. What’s more, the researchers found that alpha-amylase levels are 28 times higher in pancreatic tissue from dogs and nearly five times higher in blood.

Dogs, in other words, evolved a mechanism for digesting starches that wolves don’t have. “This was the big surprise. No one had anticipated it,” Axelsson says.

Axelsson says his findings fit well with the scavenger hypothesis. If wolves had wanted to get human food, they would have needed to evolve both trusting behaviors and mechanisms for digesting starch. “Selection pressures to change both the behavior and the digestive system may have been happening at the same time,” Axelsson says.

Other experts point out, though, that these changes could have easily come about at different times. It’s possible, even likely, that wolves started hanging around our dumps a few thousand years before we had any starches to speak of. In order to know for sure, future studies will need to compare DNA from a wider range of dog breeds as well as from dog fossils.

Amidst all the speculation, I’m taking two broader points from this study. One’s a practical tip for dog owners. Should you try that trendy (and expensive) raw-meat diet? “This suggests no,” Wayne says. “Dogs have special digestive equipment for handling carbohydrates.”

The second is that dogs can teach us about our own history and genetic evolution. Get this: Human studies suggest that we, too, picked up extra copies of the alpha-amylase gene during the agricultural revolution. “We have evolved, co-evolved, in parallel to the same environmental change, which was the development of agriculture,” Axelsson says. “It makes you realize how big a change it must’ve been.”

*

[clipo 871]

you no its serious when folk start copy and pasting........

[roybo 2,873]

Haha

[socks 32,253]

But a sausage and a rabbit leg are both meats ..........

[roybo 2,873]

God this is serious,

 

A bit of pasteing for you

By T. J. Dunn, Jr., DVM

It is common knowledge and generally agreed upon by experts that dogs (and cats) are meat eaters and have evolved through the ages primarily as meat eaters. Although now "domesticated," our pets have not evolved rumens along their digestive tracts in order to ferment cellulose and other plant material, nor have their pancreases evolved a way to secrete cellulase to split the cellulose into glucose molecules, nor have dogs and cats become efficient at digesting and assimilating and utilizing plant material as a source of high quality protein. Herbivores do those sorts of things. That’s how nature is set up at this time.

On the other hand, some plant material such as rice, soybean meal and corn have some, although limited, usefulness in the meat eater's diet. Corn, wheat, soy, rice and barley are not bad or harmful to dogs and cats. These plant sources are simply not good choices (we do get to choose what we feed our pets, don't we?) for the foundation of a diet to optimally nourish animals what are, have been, and for the foreseeable future will be meat eaters.

What is the difference between grain based and meat based foods for pet dogs and cats? If you don't believe that dogs and cats are primarily meat eaters, you might as well click away now because you certainly won't believe what follows. Most of what is presented next has been derived from two excellent references on small animal nutrition: Canine and Feline Nutrition by Case, Carey and Hirakawa and Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, IIIby Lewis, Morris, Jr., and Hand.

There are 22 different alpha amino acids that mammals need for various metabolic and energy activities. Dogs and cats are able to synthesize twelve of these internally and, therefore, are required to ingest the other ten in their diets. Because these ten amino acids are necessarily acquired only through food acquisition, they are termed essential amino acids. (Refer to the list in Table 1.)

However, the word "essential" is misleading because all of these are essential for good health. Somebody a long time ago started referring to the amino acids that are not formed internally, and need to be eaten, as the "essential amino acids". Who says science is exact?!

Amino Acids Utilized by Dogs and Cats

"Non essential" (not required in the diet)

Alanine

Asparagine

Aspartate

Cysteine

Glutamate

Hydroxylysine

Glycine

Glutamine

Proline

Serine

Hydroxyproline

"Essential" (is only obtained via the diet)

Arginine

Histidine

Isoleucine

Methionine

Phenylalanine

Tryptophan

Threonine

Valine

Leucine

Lysine

Taurine (cats)

Herbivores conveniently have amino acids produced to a great extent by billions of microorganisms along their multi-stomached and lengthy gastrointestinal tracts. Our furry friends, with their relatively short and simple gastrointestinal tracts, are unable to capitalize on microbe amino acid synthesis and require preformed (i.e., they can't make it themselves) amino acids (in the form of larger protein molecules) to be present in sufficient diversity in ingested food.

Note that cats have a few special needs that dogs to not have, such as a dietary source of a beta amino acid called taurine (to read more about this see "Cats Are Different").

What's in a 'Balanced' Diet

Fats required are easy to acquire from both plant and animal origins and are easily mixed into the diet. Everyone agrees that linoleic and (for cats) arachidonic fatty acids are necessary. (Linolenic is synthesized from linoleic both by dogs and cats). High quality fats are readily available, can be stabilized with vitamin E and vitamin C, and are fairly consistent in cost. There, that takes care of the fat in the diet. Nothing complicated to this.

[roybo 2,873]

Don't mention wetabix though

[sandymere 8,263]

But a sausage and a rabbit leg are both meats ..........

 

But a sausage and a rabbit leg are both meats ..........

feck you must buy expensive sausages, mine have weetabix in em, or at leat rusk

[socks 32,253]

 

But a sausage and a rabbit leg are both meats ..........

 

But a sausage and a rabbit leg are both meats ..........

 

feck you must buy expensive sausages, mine have weetabix in em, or at leat rusk

Mine are 100% meat from an award winning butchers ... As the lads at the fishing comp will find out when I turn up with a load for the BBQ ........

[sandymere 8,263]

God this is serious,

 

A bit of pasteing for you

By T. J. Dunn, Jr., DVM

It is common knowledge and generally agreed upon by experts that dogs (and cats) are meat eaters and have evolved through the ages primarily as meat eaters. Although now "domesticated," our pets have not evolved rumens along their digestive tracts in order to ferment cellulose and other plant material, nor have their pancreases evolved a way to secrete cellulase to split the cellulose into glucose molecules, nor have dogs and cats become efficient at digesting and assimilating and utilizing plant material as a source of high quality protein. Herbivores do those sorts of things. That’s how nature is set up at this time.

Well humans haven't developed a rumen or the ability to break down cellulose so that is all nonsensical as evidence for anything unless he is suggesting we are carnivores and shouldn't each carbs! (but thank you for trying i like it when I have something to get my teeth into)

On the other hand, some plant material such as rice, soybean meal and corn have some, although limited, usefulness in the meat eater's diet. Corn, wheat, soy, rice and barley are not bad or harmful to dogs and cats. These plant sources are simply not good choices (we do get to choose what we feed our pets, don't we?) for the foundation of a diet to optimally nourish animals what are, have been, and for the foreseeable future will be meat eaters.

But they have like ourselves evolved the ability to utilize carbs and again like ourselves they can and do form part of a balanced diet. (you have a vet I have a load of professors looking at the science )

What is the difference between grain based and meat based foods for pet dogs and cats? If you don't believe that dogs and cats are primarily meat eaters, you might as well click away now because you certainly won't believe what follows. Most of what is presented next has been derived from two excellent references on small animal nutrition: Canine and Feline Nutrition by Case, Carey and Hirakawa and Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, IIIby Lewis, Morris, Jr., and Hand.

Doesn’t give any way to examine his assumptions much so "based on" could mean anything, poor marks. ( he's not doing well so far!)

There are 22 different alpha amino acids that mammals need for various metabolic and energy activities. Dogs and cats are able to synthesize twelve of these internally and, therefore, are required to ingest the other ten in their diets. Because these ten amino acids are necessarily acquired only through food acquisition, they are termed essential amino acids. (Refer to the list in Table 1.)

However, the word "essential" is misleading because all of these are essential for good health. Somebody a long time ago started referring to the amino acids that are not formed internally, and need to be eaten, as the "essential amino acids". Who says science is exact?!

Amino Acids Utilized by Dogs and Cats

"Non essential" (not required in the diet)

Alanine

Asparagine

Aspartate

Cysteine

Glutamate

Hydroxylysine

Glycine

Glutamine

Proline

Serine

Hydroxyproline

"Essential" (is only obtained via the diet)

Arginine

Histidine

Isoleucine

Methionine

Phenylalanine

Tryptophan

Threonine

Valine

Leucine

Lysine

Taurine (cats)

Pretty standard, other than cats being obligate carnivores. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid

Herbivores conveniently have amino acids produced to a great extent by billions of microorganisms along their multi-stomached and lengthy gastrointestinal tracts. Our furry friends, with their relatively short and simple gastrointestinal tracts, are unable to capitalize on microbe amino acid synthesis and require preformed (i.e., they can't make it themselves) amino acids (in the form of larger protein molecules) to be present in sufficient diversity in ingested food.

he's on about herbivores again, who said anything about herbievores

Note that cats have a few special needs that dogs to not have, such as a dietary source of a beta amino acid called taurine (to read more about this see "Cats Are Different").

What's in a 'Balanced' Diet

 

I'm still waiting for his answer.

Fats required are easy to acquire from both plant and animal origins and are easily mixed into the diet. Everyone agrees that linoleic and (for cats) arachidonic fatty acids are necessary. (Linolenic is synthesized from linoleic both by dogs and cats). High quality fats are readily available, can be stabilized with vitamin E and vitamin C, and are fairly consistent in cost. There, that takes care of the fat in the diet. Nothing complicated to this.

Recon he's gone off here

So doesn’t tell us a lot, back to a balanced diet I expect based on inclusion rather than exclusion

Edited May 19, 2014 by sandymere

[roybo 2,873]

Just demo of quick copy and pasting nothing else sandymere lol

If you look on the net in the right place there's always something to copy to prove a point.I'm sure there's plenty more out there lol

[Moorside 642]

So is feeding weetabix for a few days going to affect the long term health wellbeing and working ability of the pups?