I've had dogs who, if they did not get a dollop of fish oil with their food, would have all kinds of health issues. Didn't matter what the food was (avoided cheap food, of course)
Dogs know. This applies to humans too, there is research showing a low omega-3 level is equivalent to smoking for health outcomes. Omega-3s are very important immunomodulators.
You're right, and I think that, other than avoiding known toxic foods (chocolate, obviously; lists can be found all over the Web), you're better off not obsessing about everything the dog eats. No dog food is going to give him 100% of his needs.
If he picks up something on the street and gobbles it down, it's probably a craving from some biological need we don't know about. At worst, he throws up later. It's not the end of the world.
You can't stop them all anyway, so save the "DROP IT!" commands for things that are really dangerous.
One of my parents’ dogs simply couldn’t be trusted with having any sort of common sense with what she ate. At one point she nearly killed herself by lapping up all the rendered fat from a joint of roast meat.
Another of their dogs absolutely loved bread, and went crazy for runner beans for some reason. He was mostly ok with not eating anything terrible (except the one time he ate a pair of stockings and needed to have some intestine removed…)
This was the vet's diagnosis. Not just any vet, he was a (now-retired) top surgeon and organ care specialist in the West Village. Actually stayed with our dog overnight to manage his IV drip; hell of a guy.
I asked him about this because I've also known and loved "garbage disposal" retrievers and it can be breed- or even individual-specific, just like some people can drink all their lives and live to their 90s while others are facing organ failure in their 40s.
As a dog owner I agree with you, with the very big caveat that it helps if you live in an area where people don’t leave poisonous stuff on the ground, some of it left there to actually kill dogs (yes, some people are evil).
About a year ago our dog started throwing blood out of its mouth, with no prior symptoms whatsoever. We got to the vet in a matter of minutes, and, thankfully, he’s fine now, but it could have been much, much worse. Me and my SO concluded (with the help of the vet) that most probably it had all been caused by rat poison left around the park grounds, which poison only has an effect after five or so days. The dog doesn’t even have to ingest it, sniffing it will do.
Since then we’ve been a little paranoid when it comes to whatever gets close to our dog’s mouth and nose.
The omega 3s are really important. Also reducing omega 6s so that the ratio of the 2 is better is important. At least in the US, people get way too much omega 6s and not nearly enough omega 3s.
We had one dog who had all kinds of problems. Hair falling out. Skin inflamed. Digestive problems. General inflamation. Vets had no clue.
So, we added fish oil based on some research, and all of those problems just went away. This is the dog where we made that discovery (for ourselves).
We've also boosted omega 3s and reduced omega 6s in our own diets, and that has had remarkable impact on health.
Not at all. Flax has alpha linoleic acid which needs conversion dependent on specific genetics, and is generally low when not outright insufficient (for some common genetics).
Walnuts are full of omega-6 too and as pointed out elsewhere here it's also the o6:o3 ratio that matters.
They contain better ratios. I don’t think there are any foods with exclusively 3 or exclusively 6. I’m skeptical about the genetic component of your comment, because genetic factors are often touted inappropriately in this domain, but if you reply with information, I’ll gladly read it.
Fish oil has been shown in meta analyses to be ineffective at improving the outcomes people care about when they talk about the ratio: ischemic heart disease, etc. In fact, the original “science” promoting fish oil was based on extremely flawed research on Inuit populations — populations who actually have high rates of fat buildup in arteries, heart disease, etc. For many, contact with the Standard American Diet actually improved their diet in that regard (quite a rarity!).
I learned a lot here, but I'm not able to restitute it accurately now: [Dr. Bill Harris on the Omega-3 Index: Increasing Omega-3 to Promote Longevity & Transform Health
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f-CFQxaUY4&t=3438s).
From this and other sources, I can summarize an answer as this: omega-3s in large enough doses, doses rarely used in studies, and especially EPA, is extremely good at reducing inflammation (see "resolvins" and EPA), is a good natural blood thinner and improves blood lipids. The doctor interviewed above thinks that the reduction of inflammation is the main benefit. This finding stuck with me: smokers with a good level of omega-3s had the same risk of death in a 10 year period than non-smokers with low omega-3s.
Re: ratios and food sources; of course there are. Seafood often has almost exclusively omega-3s as far as I'm aware, though I'm sure this doesn't apply to farm-raised salmon, for instance.
Re: conversion rate from ALA, I couldn't find good references initially, but I've found someone citing a "0.5-20%" range for conversion of ALA to EPA/DHA (and I think the conversion to DHA is even lower, or there was some additional caveat). So that's the point, there is a wide variance.
My Samoyed absolutely loves salmon, but I'm pretty sure all dogs do. She's violently allergic to (or maybe just not used to eating) tuna however.
Now, what the ancient dogs were used to eating would have little bearing on what the modern ones thrive on right? They have gone through centuries if not millennia of evolution after all.
Many breeds of modern dogs are incapable of thriving on any diet. They've gone through millennia of artificial selection, so all bets go out the window. You can't assume a modern dog is well adapted for anything other than convincing a breeder to perpetuate it.
> Most of the first dogs of the Americas died out, for unclear reasons, and were replaced by European dogs—though it's not thought colonization was to blame.
That’s quite an interesting tidbit. Has anyone read more on this?
The paragraph is imprecise, here a direct citation from a paper's abstract about The Evolutionary History of Dogs in the Americas [0]:
>Dogs were present in the Americas prior to the arrival of European
colonists, but the origin and fate of these pre-contact dogs are largely unknown. We sequenced 71
mitochondrial and seven nuclear genomes from ancient North American and Siberian dogs
spanning ~9,000 years. Our analysis indicates that American dogs were not domesticated from
North American wolves. Instead, American dogs form a monophyletic lineage that likely originated
in Siberia and dispersed into the Americas alongside people. After the arrival of Europeans, native
American dogs almost completely disappeared, leaving a minimal genetic legacy in modern dog
populations. Remarkably, the closest detectable extant lineage to pre-contact American dogs is the
canine transmissible venereal tumor, a contagious cancer clone derived from an individual dog that
lived up to 8,000 years ago.
Anybody else have to read this twice? It says dogs in the Americas were from Siberia, then proceeds to describe them as "native American", even though it just said in the previous sentence those dogs weren't native to America.
I guess it continues calling those dogs 'native' because that is what modern Americans call the people who owned them. Makes for a confusing read though. I presume Canadians might say "First Nation dogs", which would make more sense.
My understanding is that it says that Siberian dogs populated the Americas at the same time as the first humans populated the Americas. It doesn’t explicitly say whether there were any dogs in the Americas before then, but there may not have been. Regardless, those Siberian humans came from Africa — still appropriate to call them Siberian in this context. For similar reasons, after a time, it becomes appropriate to label those humans after the Americas, and similarly the dogs that came with them.
>We sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from 71 archaeological dog
remains collected in North America and Siberia (Fig. 1a; Table S1) and analyzed these with 145
mitogenomes derived from a global dataset of modern and ancient canids (3). A phylogenetic tree
constructed from the mitogenomes indicated that all sampled pre-contact dogs (spanning ~9,000
years) formed a monophyletic group within dog haplogroup A (Fig. 1b; Fig. S3; Fig. S6), which we
refer to as pre-contact dogs (PCD). This analysis indicated that the most closely related
mitochondrial lineage to the PCD clade are ~9,000 year-old dogs from Zhokhov Island in Eastern
Siberia (3) (Fig. 1b; Fig. S3; Fig. S6). In addition, molecular clock analyses suggest that all PCD
dogs shared a common ancestor ~14,600 years ago (95% high posterior density [HPD]: 16,484-
12,965; Fig. 1b; Fig. S6), which diverged from a shared ancestor with the Zhokhov Island dogs
~1,000 years earlier (95% HPD:17,646-13,739; Fig. 1b; Fig. S6). Interestingly, these time frames
are broadly coincident with early migrations into the Americas (10–12).[0]
Population genetics / migration can get quite complicated (different waves etc.) but the bottom line is all pre-contact dogs (meaning before the European colonists came) share a common ancestor @ 14,600 BC which in turn diverged from a shared ancestor with the Zhokhov Island [Siberia] dogs ~1,000 years earlier.
>The history of the global dispersal of dogs remains contentious (1). In North America, the earliest confirmed dog remains have been radiocarbon dated to ~9,900 calibrated years before present (cal BP) (Koster, Illinois; (2, 3)), approximately 6,000 years after [!] the earliest unambiguous evidence of humans arriving in North America (4). While these early dogs were most likely not domesticated in situ [i.e. from North American wolves] (5), the timing of their arrival and their geographic origins are unknown [!].
29 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadSo civilized commercial dog food includes fish oil right?
If he picks up something on the street and gobbles it down, it's probably a craving from some biological need we don't know about. At worst, he throws up later. It's not the end of the world.
You can't stop them all anyway, so save the "DROP IT!" commands for things that are really dangerous.
One of my parents’ dogs simply couldn’t be trusted with having any sort of common sense with what she ate. At one point she nearly killed herself by lapping up all the rendered fat from a joint of roast meat.
Another of their dogs absolutely loved bread, and went crazy for runner beans for some reason. He was mostly ok with not eating anything terrible (except the one time he ate a pair of stockings and needed to have some intestine removed…)
He goes crazy trying to get the fruit flavor ones.
I asked him about this because I've also known and loved "garbage disposal" retrievers and it can be breed- or even individual-specific, just like some people can drink all their lives and live to their 90s while others are facing organ failure in their 40s.
My dog's a Lab, which is pretty much "garbage disposal." My rule with stuff he finds on the ground is "not too much of that!"
But he'll refuse any fruits or veggies. A neighbor carries dried apple treats for her two Goldens, and he'll just spit them out.
About a year ago our dog started throwing blood out of its mouth, with no prior symptoms whatsoever. We got to the vet in a matter of minutes, and, thankfully, he’s fine now, but it could have been much, much worse. Me and my SO concluded (with the help of the vet) that most probably it had all been caused by rat poison left around the park grounds, which poison only has an effect after five or so days. The dog doesn’t even have to ingest it, sniffing it will do.
Since then we’ve been a little paranoid when it comes to whatever gets close to our dog’s mouth and nose.
We had one dog who had all kinds of problems. Hair falling out. Skin inflamed. Digestive problems. General inflamation. Vets had no clue.
So, we added fish oil based on some research, and all of those problems just went away. This is the dog where we made that discovery (for ourselves).
We've also boosted omega 3s and reduced omega 6s in our own diets, and that has had remarkable impact on health.
Walnuts are full of omega-6 too and as pointed out elsewhere here it's also the o6:o3 ratio that matters.
Fish oil has been shown in meta analyses to be ineffective at improving the outcomes people care about when they talk about the ratio: ischemic heart disease, etc. In fact, the original “science” promoting fish oil was based on extremely flawed research on Inuit populations — populations who actually have high rates of fat buildup in arteries, heart disease, etc. For many, contact with the Standard American Diet actually improved their diet in that regard (quite a rarity!).
From this and other sources, I can summarize an answer as this: omega-3s in large enough doses, doses rarely used in studies, and especially EPA, is extremely good at reducing inflammation (see "resolvins" and EPA), is a good natural blood thinner and improves blood lipids. The doctor interviewed above thinks that the reduction of inflammation is the main benefit. This finding stuck with me: smokers with a good level of omega-3s had the same risk of death in a 10 year period than non-smokers with low omega-3s.
Re: ratios and food sources; of course there are. Seafood often has almost exclusively omega-3s as far as I'm aware, though I'm sure this doesn't apply to farm-raised salmon, for instance.
Re: conversion rate from ALA, I couldn't find good references initially, but I've found someone citing a "0.5-20%" range for conversion of ALA to EPA/DHA (and I think the conversion to DHA is even lower, or there was some additional caveat). So that's the point, there is a wide variance.
Now, what the ancient dogs were used to eating would have little bearing on what the modern ones thrive on right? They have gone through centuries if not millennia of evolution after all.
That’s quite an interesting tidbit. Has anyone read more on this?
>Dogs were present in the Americas prior to the arrival of European colonists, but the origin and fate of these pre-contact dogs are largely unknown. We sequenced 71 mitochondrial and seven nuclear genomes from ancient North American and Siberian dogs spanning ~9,000 years. Our analysis indicates that American dogs were not domesticated from North American wolves. Instead, American dogs form a monophyletic lineage that likely originated in Siberia and dispersed into the Americas alongside people. After the arrival of Europeans, native American dogs almost completely disappeared, leaving a minimal genetic legacy in modern dog populations. Remarkably, the closest detectable extant lineage to pre-contact American dogs is the canine transmissible venereal tumor, a contagious cancer clone derived from an individual dog that lived up to 8,000 years ago.
[0]http://dro.dur.ac.uk/25675/1/25675.pdf
I guess it continues calling those dogs 'native' because that is what modern Americans call the people who owned them. Makes for a confusing read though. I presume Canadians might say "First Nation dogs", which would make more sense.
Population genetics / migration can get quite complicated (different waves etc.) but the bottom line is all pre-contact dogs (meaning before the European colonists came) share a common ancestor @ 14,600 BC which in turn diverged from a shared ancestor with the Zhokhov Island [Siberia] dogs ~1,000 years earlier.
>The history of the global dispersal of dogs remains contentious (1). In North America, the earliest confirmed dog remains have been radiocarbon dated to ~9,900 calibrated years before present (cal BP) (Koster, Illinois; (2, 3)), approximately 6,000 years after [!] the earliest unambiguous evidence of humans arriving in North America (4). While these early dogs were most likely not domesticated in situ [i.e. from North American wolves] (5), the timing of their arrival and their geographic origins are unknown [!].
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116273/figure/...