The History of Dog Food

If you’re here from any of our social media channels, you’ve certainly heard me utter the words “kibble was made for our convenience, not necessarily with our pets nutritional needs in mind” Which, if I had to guess, is why you’re here. The history of pet food is interesting, and it validates my seemingly favorite statement from above.

So, Lets talk it back,

Way, way back…

The 1700’s

During this time period most domesticated dogs and cats served a dual purpose. They were pets and friends, but also typically provided a service. However, what they ate was hardly a priority. Given most pets slept and lived outside, their diet consisted of what they could catch and if they were lucky, some left overs from the family when they had extras to spare. Cats, luckily, are naturals and have always thrived on an “eat what you kill” lifestyle. This isn’t so true for our canine companions and after a while humans started to catch onto this. Not only did they form stronger bonds to their dogs, they needed them at their best health to work.

The 1800’s

By the mid nineteenth century the common “dog food” was more labor intensive, time consuming and more thought out than even the most hard-core raw feeders today. Enter, stew for dogs! Wealthy families spent time carefully curating stews that consisted of potatoes, bones, other vegetables, meats, bread, milk, organs and even things like sheep heads. Families spent hours creating delicious and healthy food for their dogs and it was totally worth it. This change resulted in a healthier working dog and longer life span, but there was something missing, convenience.

James Spratt, the name everyone knows - 1860’s

James Spratt is widely recognized as the “inventor” of dog food. Well, commercial dog food at least. After seeing shipmates toss pieces of hard tack to hungry, wide eyed pups waiting by the docks, it sparked an idea. If you didn’t know, Hard Tack is a shelf stable mixture of flour, water and if you were lucky, salt. It was mainly used to provide calories to sailors for long haul sea trips in a form that wouldn’t parish or spoil. Thus the “Patented Meat Fibrine Dog Cake” was born. Containing things like beetroot, various vegetables, wheat, beef blood and mystery meats. These shelf stable biscuits were one of a kind. We actually still don’t know where James sourced his meats, but this obviously didn’t negatively impact his business by too much. Considering the price of a 50 pound bag of biscuits was equivalent to about a day’s worth of work for a laborer. These were definitely not on the affordable side for most families. Spratt is also responsible for what we know today as “life stage appropriate” diets. I.e puppy, adult and senior specific diets.

The 1900’s

The convenience begins to take over. In the early 1900’s more and more consumers began realizing the convenience of commercially available pet food. In 1922 Ken – L Ration became the first canned dog food! Do you want to take a guess what the protein of choice was? Beef, pork, chicken, maybe even duck or venison. No, it was horses. However, this was carefully marketed as “lean, red meat” to not scare off any buyers. I would like to note here, personally I believe this was the start to the shady marketing and advertising we see today on pet food bags. Fast forward to 1941 and canned food was so incredibly successful that horses were being bred specifically for nothing other than slaughter for dog food. Upwards of 50,000 horses per year!

World War II

This is the point in time I usually reference when I say that kibble was created out of a human necessity, and for our convenience, not with the animals nutritional needs in mind. During World War II tin and meat were being rationed and pet food was classified as “nonessential”. So, they had to come up with a solution that didn’t include pet food that needed to be stored in a can. You guessed it, kibble is born! Around the same time, animal lovers and activists were learning about the number of horses being intentionally raised for slaughter, and needless to say were not happy. There needed to be another solution, and there was. In 1956 through a process called extrusion, the first dry pet food was created. The process of extrusion is the same used for breakfast cereals, and in case you didn’t know Purina, also the maker for Chex cereal was the company to figure this out and produce kibble as we know it today. This process basically sucks all of the nutritional value out of everything in pet food, because everything is cooked at such a high temperature. Created with a lot of the same basic ingredients we’ve seen throughout history, but now the protein and animal products are coming from leftovers classified as “not fit for human consumption” from the slaughter industry. To this day, people don’t love that. However, just because something seems disgusting to you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose great nutritional value to other animals. Things like eyes, skin, feet, beaks and more play a very important role for our pets and their nutrition. You just have to keep an eye on brands trying to use those items in place of muscle meat as their protein. Maybe we’ll get into that in a different blog post, but for now let’s get back to our timeline.

1964 - Today

It took a pretty decent amount of advertising, campaigns and generally convincing the American public that kibble was the proper way to feed their dog. It did work, within a few years, the majority of the American population was feeding their dog a kibble-based diet. Today over 57% of Americans feed kibble with nothing else. The advertising worked, and continues to work today. If you look back at the early 1800s, families who could afford to spend the time and effort were spending hours a day creating stews with nutritionally dense ingredients to make sure that their pets were eating what they should be. People realized that if you wanted your working dog to provide the best service it could, it needed to be physically fit and to do that they needed to eat an appropriate diet. The manufacturing process for kibble has essentially stayed the same, a paste is created out of your base ingredients, then cooked at an extremely high temperature. Resulting in a nutritionally lacking, difficult to digest, biologically inappropriate food source. Especially for cats, but again, we can talk about this more later!

The pet food industry is largely confusing, but a quick look into the history of pet food and kibble will show you how the industry became what it is today. Kibble was created out of our need for convenience, not with our pets nutritional needs in mind. The pet food aisle at the store is diverse, there are brands much better than others. However, in general - kibble is kibble. At the end of the day, as long as there is food in your pets belly, and they’re loved, that’s really what is important. However, if you care to learn more, or implement changes, I urge you to look into ways to improve on your pets diet, whatever pet that might be.