Canine Feeding Behavior

Introduction

Two trends appear to have become fashionable amongst dog owners in recent years:

• Natural feeding: Feeding of diets that are based on the composition of wild wolf diets, often including raw ingredients.
• Dominance-based training methods: The use of gestures of dominance, such as feeding order or restriction of privileges, to establish control based on increased owner status as a pack leader rather than through reinforcement of desirable behaviors using food rewards.

Both trends are rooted in a popular return to a naturalistic view of dogs, but share the common weakness that they do not take into account the impact that the presence of humans has had on domestic dogs and wolves. This article will provide an overview of the feeding behavior and preferences of wolves and dogs, and provide an indication of how a better understanding of this subject can lead to fewer health and behavioral problems in domestic dogs.

The relationship between people and dogs

The history of the relationship between people and dogs is a long one. Homo sapiens is thought to have emerged in Africa approximately 250,000 years ago, after a period of increasing skull expansion in early hominid species which began 150,000 years earlier. Although there is evidence of gradual development of tool use and cultural advancement in our species throughout its history, there appears to have been a surge in cultural development which culminated in “behavioral modernity” approximately 50,000 years ago; namely the presence of symbolic culture, language and specialized technology, which contain all of the elements recognizable in subsequent civilizations, including the keeping of animals (Figure 1).

The ancestor of the domestic dog is Canis lupus (the grey wolf), which became a species separate from the coyote approximately 1-2 million years ago. The geographic origin of the domestic dog remains controversial. Genetic studies have pointed to an origin in SouthEast Asia, the Middle East or South-East China (1-3), with a possibility of genetic divergence from the wolf beginning up to 100,000 years ago. However, the most recently published analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of prehistoric canids and modern dogs suggests that domestication began 18,800-32,100 years ago (4). The earliest accepted archaeological evidence of canine domestication is the 33,000-year-old remains of a dog found in Siberia in 2010 (5), which was subsequently found to be more closely related genetically to the modern domestic dog than the wolf (6). [...]