White Dog Poop and the Decline of Civilization

Most days I try to take our eight dogs out on ball hunting expedition around our few acres of garden/parkland. The excursions involve all eight dogs chasing a single ball, with me acting as referee. They never seem to tire of it. Recently during these excursions, two things grabbed my attention: 1) there was very little dog poop around the garden and 2) what poop there was, was white. This admittedly trivial observation nevertheless had the effect of transporting me back in time to when I was a kid in Ireland.

On many occasions back then, I can remember regularly seeing white dog poop on pavements etc. as I ran amok through the neighborhood of the town in which I grew up. Over the past 25 years or so, white dog poo seems to have been replaced in our parks and our on pavements by its brown-colored counterpart. And not only has the color changed, but white dog poo used to have little or no smell. Brown dog poo, on the other hand, tends to stink to high heaven.

Given that we have recently changed our dogs’ diets from ‘kibble’ to real meat and bones, I suspected that the food that dogs eat was the answer to my question. A quick bit of research confirmed my suspicion: white dog poo is the result of the dog eating bones or bone meal, which contain a lot of calcium. The calcium that is not digestible by the dog is passed, and such ‘calcium poo’ is white and more or less odorless. On the other hand, the mass-produced ‘kibble’ that most dogs eat today is made up largely of vegetable oils and grains i.e. food that in no way resembles the diet that dogs ate as they evolved.  For this reason, a dog that eats kibble will poo a lot and the poo will be foul-smelling because the dog’s digestive system, which is optimized for digesting meat, cannot properly digest much of the kibble.

The interesting thing (interesting to me that is!), is that this switch from feeding our ‘best friends’ more natural fare to the unnatural and largely indigestible ‘kibble’, occurred around the same time as a switch in the human diet from natural human food to what can reasonably be described as ‘human kibble’. On both counts, it seems that multinational corporations’ desire to vastly increase their profits was the motivation for the change. Humans, like dogs, evolved eating animal protein and fat. Animal protein and fat is, by far, the healthiest diet for both dog and human. Many (mostly suppressed) scientific studies attest to this fact. Most people would readily accept that a dog’s natural diet is animal protein and fat, and that dogs therefore do best, health-wise, on such diet. Try convincing someone that the same applies to humans and, for some strange reason, the same logic is not allowed to apply. Despite the fact that, for 99% of our history, we humans ate animal fat and protein and, as such, our digestive systems are optimized to metabolize and derive energy from that type of food, most people still think that eating processed grains and chemical laden food (both of which were literally invented about 50 years ag0) constitutes a healthy human diet.

Then again, government bodies like the US ‘FDA’ and the UK ‘Food Standards Agency’ actively promote the eating  of ‘plastic’ food as the epitome of healthiness. And just because the corporations that make the plastic food pay government officials $millions to promote their chemical-laden plastic delights, there’s no reason to suspect that you might be being fooled into poisoning yourself (and your dog) in the interest of mega-profits for big-business and their big-government buddies. Is there?