Dr Conor Brady, Nick, and Brent examine whether dogs are carnivores or omnivores, arguing that textbooks oversimplify. They challenge the Axelsson genetics study, explain how dogs evolved from wolves into scavengers of human food, and contend that while dogs can eat plants, they naturally thrive on meat-rich diets with bone, organs, and fat.
Chapters
Very good.
Oh, we're back. There we go, we are back. I move an office and BeLive goes nuts.
You did move office, something's different.
He's in the closet.
I'm in the cupboard under the stairs.
I am being very nice. Yeah, good sound, I like it. Um, very good. Look guys, let's, let's get this started off here because we're 10 minutes into it. Okay, so, um, so carnivore or omnivore? And I think just to start us off, let's just help people with those definitions. And I think everybody knows what a carnivore is at this stage. And it's—
well, I'm not sure I do.
Well, I can give you— there seems to be two types of carnivore, which is a bit tricky. And I think one derives its nutritional needs from meat all the time. That's all it needs. All it needs is meat. And that would be a very simple, easy-to-go definition. Don't need to think much more about it. And an omnivore would eat meat and plants. That would be the dream, that that was the case, and then you'd have a herbivore at the end who eats just plants. So the omnivore could be eating 20% plants or 80% plants, so there's quite a range of omnivores there in the middle. The problem is that there is different types of carnivores and omnivores. So you'll learn that cats are obligate carnivores, and we're all sure about that, they're obligate carnivores. The definition of an obligate carnivore is they depend only on meat for survival. Their bodies cannot digest plants properly, which I just took from this biology book here, and yet Mars and Nestlé feed them largely plant material. They eat more plant material than meat. So what are we talking about here? Are we talking about that they can thrive on meat and meat only, or how come we're feeding them largely plant material? So I think these definitions leave a lot to be desired. We've got facultative carnivore for a dog, and facultative carnivore are those animals that eat animal food in addition to non-animal foods, which sounds very strangely like an omnivore. So the grain of the terms is a big, big problem, and people tend to throw out the term as if that helps us know what it is to feed the animal in front of us. If an alien was handed a dog and said, here, feed that, they'd go, what does he eat? And we'd say, it's an omnivore. And they go, so it eats any meat, any plant, any variety, in any amounts, you know. But that's not the case, you know. Omnivores grow up in certain niches to eat certain amounts of plants. Red foxes eat lots of animal matter and a little bit of plant material, and bears eat lots of plant material and a little bit of animal matter. And so you can feed one like the other. So I think a really classic thing was, um, somebody who just cut through all the garbage of, uh, the chat at the end, um, who was— Tara Campbell said, look, what are we talking about, survive or thrive? And so I think that's going to— I've just covered everything there. Well, people throw in the word carnivore, therefore I feed them 50% biscuits. You know, it's like, oh, okay, hang on there. So one of these plant food, you know, it's— we need more than that. I think the terms are very, very misleading and people are losing friends over because they're just arguing, barking like dogs through a fence.
So one of the problems I have with carnivore is it implies meat, but in fact dogs, given half a chance, will eat anything. But just sticking with the animal-based things, a mouse, a rat, a rabbit is not just meat. There's bone, there's cartilage, there's organ meat, there are blood vessels, there's brain material high in fat, EPA, DHA, all these amazing things. So to say carnivore, that's not strictly true. To say omnivore, they mean that every omnivore eats everything, is not strictly true. And if you think of the average horse or the average cow chomping through loads of grass, they're actually going to be eating insects as they chomp through this grassy material. Well, they definitely don't eat herbs because they eat loads of grass, in fact. So, so it's just— I just think that this terminology is insufficient to allow us to, to, to paint a picture of the whole spectrum. Of what we're dealing with.
I would love to bring in there that actually the other thing that so many people that talk about herbivores and look how healthy they are, and you know, they, they sort of compare why they should be able to survive as well, don't realize, no, they're actually bacteriovores. They actually are surviving on all of the nutrients that the bacteria produce for them in fermentation. They are not, you know, the plant material that goes in is not really the mainstay of what feeds them. It is actually what feeds the bacteria, and the bacteria then releasing the nutrients. All of those vitamins we've already talked about coming from bacteria, all of those essential fatty acids and volatile fatty acids that build up the building blocks for them come from the bacteria. A load of proteins and essential amino acids come from the bacteria. That is not coming in, in that plant.
In a way, in a way, no animal digests plant matter. No animal digests cellulose, that's for sure. Only bacteria can do that. So that's interesting. And even herbivores are highly specialized. I mean, if you think you can just, oh, he's a herbivore, feed him grass. Well, you've got deer are herbivores, and there's whatever, 20 different species of them or whatever, but they all eat different things. You've got the females that eat small, richer bits of the plants and shoots and berries and nuts, and they will browse, whereas the males are much bigger, flat faces, wide lips, and they crop. They'll eat lots of grass, so they have much bigger bellies and chest cavities to eat poorer quality forage, but they have to eat a lot more of it. You can't you can't feed one like the other for long, because if you feed a higher quality forage to the male, he'll hold on to it too long, he risks getting bloat. So you can't just feed— even cows, like goats, you know what I mean, they eat different parts from the field, they will select different parts from the whole niche that they evolved in. So if you think herbivores are specialized, can you only imagine how specialized an anteater is? I mean, you can't give an anteater a steak, it just won't fit down his— is it his nose? What is that? Is it his mouth? What's long in the anteater's mouth?
Tiny little mouth?
He doesn't have a little tongue that comes down his nose and then sucks them up his nose?
No, I wasn't thinking that was a bad mistake there. We'll have to edit that out, please Pete.
I know you've been really poorly for the last week or so, so still there, we'll give you a few inaccuracies.
Yeah, anyway, so yeah, and I think the other one is that people talk about the evolution, and when people talk about wolves and look what the wolves ate, and we say, well, this animals being its own thing for 40,000 years. So, you know, just looking at what wolves eat isn't the most useful thing to us really. You kind of want to look at something a bit closer than that, so I like looking at dingoes. I mean, they're as close to domestic dogs as you could possibly hope. They interbreed, which is one of the surest signs that they're not too far away from each other. You won't get a wolf and a dog interbreeding too easily, and so it just doesn't happen as much. But these dingoes are pure carnivores, I mean pure carnivores. Now there's a big dispute over how dog they are and that kind of thing because that's going on in Australia and I poorly understand it. But so, you know, they do come from a long line of meat eaters, but I think what changed for the dog— we— the big consideration is that we didn't take— the dog's diet was irrelevant to us for the first three-quarters of his existence with us. We— this animal, we started hanging out together because this animal is a great hunter and he helped us hunt and he alerted us when people came near our camp and he protected us. And so these animals came closer to us because they were useful. They'll pick off our scrapings, and we were largely meat eaters, you know, roaming scavengers ourselves. We weren't growing crops for the large part. It was only 6,000 years ago we decided to start doing that. So we had this kind of friendship built up, and we would have tolerated the friendlier wolves, the wolf-type proto-dogs, and we would have not been friendly with the aggressive ones. You automatically end up choosing a sweeter and softer animal that starts to live close to us and then starts to work right beside us in hunting. And it's only 6,000 years ago where the dog goes, what are you doing out in the field there? And it's just planting these seeds and growing wheat. Check this out, don't have to move, just have to eat carbs all day. And all the problems that come with that. So you become a slave to the land, and suddenly the dogs are hanging out going, okay, well, you know, we'll still go hunting because that's what humans do. And we did, uh, but they started getting a few little scraps here and there. So there's Gabriella Joy. Did someone mention dingoes? Thank God I didn't talk anymore about them. Gotta get you on, Gabriella, to talk about dingoes. And we will. Um, yeah, yeah, I think, Nick, you like this bit. Here, so I'm just going to throw the spanner to you. So we know that humans have been feeding small amounts of carbohydrates, they eat the leftovers of whatever society they're living with. And this is a big problem with diet studies, because you can pull a diet study from India, the dog's largely vegetarian, and you can pull a diet study from a group of feral dogs, never see humans, they're very, very carnivorous. So the problem is that they looked recently at the genes of the dog, didn't they, Nick? And they might have found some little changes. Would you accept that, Nick? Yeah, I would.
Okay, so I didn't know you're going to be talking about— this is the Axelsson study, which was in Nature. It was a short communication, I think, but it's in Nature, which used to be considered one of the best in the world. Won't go there. And, and, uh, so he compared about, I don't know, 30 wolves— the genes of 30 or so wolves, the figures might not be quite correct— with 30 or so domestic dogs. And he said, what, what are the similarities? What are the differences? He found that there were about 30 Genetic differences, of which maybe only 2 or 3— it looked like about 7 or 8, but when you look at the detail, I think it was only 2 or 3 which actually coded for, for example, eating carbohydrates. Okay, and the big conclusion there, and you know, the, the hills and the rural Cannons of this world were all over this saying, there you have it, there you have it, dogs, uh, require carnivores. But it's, it's a point I think that you've brought up before, Conor, where you say, um, just because you can digest something doesn't mean that it's good for you. You know, your, your, your quote is, is something like, let's have cookies for breakfast, or Mars bars and cookies, you know, does it do you any good? Or let's have vodka for breakfast because you can digest it, you know.
I can suggest ethanol.
But the thing is, you, you, you will also— the other thing to put into that, and I think we should do a whole show on the Axelsson paper, the, uh, the thing is you will evolve to metabolize toxins and those things which aren't doing you a lot of good, as well as those things which will do you a lot of good, like great proteins and great fats and what have you. So I'm not sure that Axelsson is actually saying that our dogs are carnivores. Also, dogs— how many genes has a dog got? A human's got 20 2,000 or so. How many genes in a dog, guys? I can't—
exactly, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, how many are similar across all mammals? In fact, actually all living life, you know, that this is the ridiculous thing. It's then epigenetics and it's about what your bacteria are doing and what all of the other environmental influences on your genes are about to how you end up forming. I think there were so many, um, elements to that paper on just because your genes have it, you know, doesn't make you be able to deal with that. You know, if you were left with no way of surviving, you know, other than just eating what you could come across in the wild, okay, so no human influence, there is no way on God's earth that dogs could survive on a high corn diet. You know, they just wouldn't be able to grind it, they just wouldn't be able to get it. Yeah, yeah, they'd all be dead from getting it stuck in their gut anyway. But from a point of view of, um, I think it's, it's all very well finding the genome that has it in, or the genetic material, but it's a totally other thing to be able to grind that up. Well, they don't have, you know, we've talked about the anatomy at length in the past, I'm not going to go there again. You know, they just don't have it. They don't have that, all the physiology in the gut to be able to, all the fermenting areas in the gut to be able to digest that. So there was a really interesting point earlier on, uh, which was with regards to, okay, so let's deal with, well, firstly, the descendancy. You know, actually, when we're talking about wolves, we're talking about cousins, we're not talking about their ancestors. As, okay, I think, you know, it's really important thing to, to sort of bring up because there has, you know, often we get that thrown at us that dogs are not descended from wolves because, you know, they've evolved alongside each other over millennia. And actually the predecessor to the wolf was the ancestor, type ancestor.
Yeah, yeah, type ancestor. Yeah.
Um, but then we're moving on. So there's this whole thing about, okay, so some dogs and wolves will be found to eat berries, you know, blackberries on the, you know, bush naturally themselves, you know, philosophically, or, or no reason why that might be the case to these guys. And, you know, look at, you know, what do you think they're getting there? Because they're not surviving on that plant material, so what are they gaining?
Maybe they just like them. Maybe they just like the sugar, you know. Um, it's interesting, Penny Woods says here Um, certain genes, I think. I'm not sure quite what you're talking about there, Penny. Uh, very highly conserved across the animal kingdom. Very few genes are unique. I'll tell you, here's a show we get Pennywood, uh, whose name is not actually Pennywood, but that we'll call her Pennywood. We'll get her on and we'll, we'll discuss Axelsson because she can, she can bring the, the, the genetics of Zoo animals into the equation, and we can, we can just— let's just go through that paper. I've done it once.
Yeah.
And there are flaws left, right, and center.
I think, I think I, yeah, I'm going to be interested to hear them because I have posted that paper on Facebook just now for people that want to have a look at it. You know, they can go into—
I think I'm going to be interested to hear the flaws that you notice in it because I think the problem with the paper is the— where— what what he did with the findings. And like you said, Hills and Royal Cannon say, 'Ha, this is why we've been feeding 60% carbohydrates to them since the 1940s.' It's like, 'Oh, you knew, you knew, did you? 74 years this paper was coming out.' Darwin would have killed to see this tiny little, tiny evolutionary steps that the animals taken towards carbohydrate digestion. But it's not the only one. They also produce, produce a hepatic glucanase. They do a couple little conversions that true carnivores can't that, what is it, vitamin A to something something and a couple of other bits and pieces. They're twice as good at assimilating glucose as cats, dogs are now. And so I think, in my opinion, I think I'm not quite as kind of surprised that these tiny little steps have been taken, but also this gene regression. If you stop feeding carbohydrates to dogs, those genes can regress and disappear as well, all thanks to epigenetics. So there's all this going on at the moment, a lot of nonsense about these genes, and I would say is that what you're going to focus on? This little tiny bit? It was Dr. Knudsen's quote to Gene Dahl, not mine, where he said, I can digest sucrose and ethanol. It doesn't mean 50% of my diet can be cookies and wine. So as much as you want it to be, it's not healthy. So, you know, to say that this is why dogs need carbohydrates is not— it's quite the opposite. The rest of the body is completely carnivorous. And like, from the biology, which we have done to death, so we don't really need to do too much. But some people did mention the molars, and there's people out there saying they've got grinding molars. So it's like, I like the main thing, all you need to know is the back teeth come down beside those teeth. There's no side-to-side movement, you can't, they're not locked on top of each other for grinding. The back teeth come down to carnassial tooth. So forget grinding, this is not possible. Your jaw only goes up and down. That's a carnivorous mouth, you know. It's not to say you can't pick fruit and enjoy a little bit of fruit, as Nick was saying. I mean, who doesn't like a bit of sugar and antioxidants? And I think some wolves will do it now and again. Okay, but that's not the mainstay of their diet. On the grand scheme of things, that's a blip in, in the summertime when there's plenty of meat around, uh, it's a blip. And so I wouldn't be kind of looking at a cat eating a bit of grass and going, ah, he's not a true carnivore. It's like, that's medicinal, you know. So there's many reasons why, why animals can take bits of plants. There's reasons why cows take the legs of baby birds, and red deer take all sorts of bones when they need it because they're growing these antlers. Hippos will do all sorts of weird stuff. And it's like pandas will eat a tiny few insects if they're really short on protein. So like That's because they're a carnivore at the end of the day, they're carnivora, except for complete plant eaters. It's just a big mess and people get very kind of head up with it. I'll come back to the previous girl's point, Tara Campbell, saying survive or thrive. Cats are surviving on largely plant-based pet food at the moment and they're obligate carnivores and everyone agrees. So yes, we know they can survive to a certain amount of time, but thrive? The studies that we have of thriving dogs are dogs on raw dog food, which we would all agree would be lots of meat and bone and organ, tiny bit of veg. They're the studies we have. They're the studies we have of dogs thriving. We don't have dogs thriving on vegan diets or plant-based foods. We have them compare these dogs compared to dogs eating cereal-based pet food, which is largely vegan food anyway, and they pretend that that's a good analysis for a year. So all we have is evidence of dogs eating an appropriate diet and doing really well, but we don't have anything in the middle. So the survive and thrive thing is very interesting. I think you can feed a dog 50% carbohydrates because most of the world is and you can do it. But we also have terrible obesity problems, pancreatitis, getting 10 times the cancer we are, and they can't light their own fags. You know, it's just crazy. So that's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
Okay, I've got a question for you. Why do dogs— and this is almost universal in the UK and Europe and probably in the States as well— why do dogs eat so much herbivore poo? I'm talking rabbit poo, I'm talking horse poo, even mine will, sheep poo. How come they go for that? What's that about, gentlemen?
So for me, that would— well, look, you know, we all think about probiotics. We think it's a probiotic thing, but actually, no, if they've gone through the gut, what I was saying earlier, you know, those herbivores are surviving on great nutrients. So vitamins that those bacteria are spitting out, there's going to be all of those volatile fatty acids. There's going to be essential fatty acids. There's going to be, you know, some other nutrients within that poo. You know, eventually they can't suck out every last bit of goodness from that feces before it pops out the back end. So those dogs, just as I would have thought with the berries, you know, they're massively high in certain anthocyanins, you know, that the real sort of— their medicines truly are medicines within some of those berries. You know, we're not talking farmed fat blueberries here. We're talking, you know, when they're foraging, it's bilberries on the moorland, or it's, you know, it's, um, you know, blackberries that are off a bush, not from a farm. You know, take them into the raspberry farm and I'm sure they would go down those roads, but, you know, realistically we're talking about foraging from hedgerows here. Even if they're eating some of the herbage that's on that side, I would say it's more medicinal than truly a function of being able to get nutrients out of that. Whereas when we're talking about that poo and poo eating, I would actually say, sure, I guess there's a little bit of bacterial sharing and probiotics, but actually it's the end product that those bacteria are producing that's probably going to be really attractive to dogs.
Postbiotics, isn't that what they call them now? That's the cool word. Yeah, that makes sense actually. That's where the nutrients are coming from. That's what I would have thought as well. Everything Brent said there, I thought. I never really thought about the biome bit of it. I just assumed that different poos have different kind of qualities, like different flavored Pez, and it's just like, lovely, they're coprophagic animals, they're happy to eat poo. And so unfortunately for us, so if they need something and if they see it's in there, you know, half-digested plant matter for a bit of roughage or some type of vitamin that they're low on, you know, I think it's very normal for them. There's studies of free-roaming dogs in Zimbabwe and they eat 30% human poo from village dumps. 30% of their diet is human poo, and it's just because they have no protein in their diet. And so you might as well get a bit of meat that way.
Don't tell the British veterinary profession that, they'll be in uproar about the bacterial risk to all of the people around.
Yeah, yeah, those, and you know, the problem with the diet studies is that that's where we get our diet studies from. We get them from these areas of the world where there's free-roaming dogs and they do cools. That's essentially it. We just don't have free-roaming dogs in, you know, Ireland or England that we can kind of track We just don't have that in the Wicklow Mountains. We'd rescue them and we'd put them in a pound, sadly, and they were probably happy enough walking around Wicklow Mountains. Don't put me in here. But so, but when we do look at these diet studies, the diet studies are confusing people because we know that dogs and cats can be taught in the first 5 months of life what to eat. And so you have these videos of these vegan cats trying to chew on a piece of broccoli, and we know that's pretty much bordering obscene. It's a ridiculous thing, but they do it. And the person can say, see, my cat loves broccoli. And it's not that they love it, you've taught them to eat it. And we've had studies from back in the '60s and '70s in China and Japan showing that you can actually train a dog to eat all vegetarian stuff, all meat and bone stuff, all soy stuff. So I think it's kind of, you can train the dogs to do it, and that's the confusion. So if you're growing up in India and you get a lot of plant leftovers because there's not a lot of spare meat, well then 50% of your diet is plant matter, porridge and satsa and stuff that the dog clearly didn't cook itself. And then it goes out and tries to top up its failing protein reserves is what they say. But truly feral dogs are highly carnivorous. We've only got 2 or 3 of those studies. There's one in the US. Highly carnivorous animals. They don't like humans, they don't go near them, and as a result, their diet is very largely meat. So that's the confusion with the diet studies that people need to remember. Humans get in the way. You can't have humans feeding dogs because then it's not a diet study. Yeah.
If we look at Fred Provenza, his book is Nourishment, which is a really opus tome. And if you want to— we've said this before, but I'll say it again— if you want to get a slightly shortened version, that was something like 270,000 words, which for any book is pretty, pretty big. If you go to the audiobook, it's about 140,000 words. So it's still really meaty, as it were, but it's much more condensed. And he reads it himself, and he is just— he's He's like the, the elf from Christmas or something. He's just easy, but very, very clever, very, very wise, very, very Zen. So he's lovely to listen to. And he— his major thesis is that there is innate wisdom within the foraging community, and with— and with— and therefore, by extension, to animals. If you give He does a lot of work on goats and sheep, mainly goats. And he will say that what any given goat selects in the morning will be different from what they select in the afternoon, and that it will reflect what they require at, you know, in the morning, in the afternoon. And the other really wonderful observation of his is that they will learn— goats will learn, for example, that if they want, if they need to eat toxic plant B because they require something from it— copper or magnesium or something like that. They have learned that if they eat, uh, protective plant A before they eat toxic plant B, it will then protect them from any negative, negative, nauseating, irritating effects from, from that plant. So I think that the animals have mechanisms if they're given enough variety, as you're saying, Conor. If you, you've got to get the people out the way. Yeah, you've got to give them free range, and they will have a nibble on this, have a nibble on a blackberry, eat rabbits and goats and rats and what have you, just kind of fill their bellies. But there will be other elements, other outliers where they require perhaps some, some antioxidants in the autumn before they go into winter. And so they go and graze some berries before they go in. I think this is a wonderful— it's kind of obvious, but he has done these studies. You know, he's been working in this field for about 40 years and he has done, you know, minute studies looking at exactly what they eat at any given time, for example. Yeah, they'll actually, you know, give be able to take what they eat and then analyze it in the morning, in the afternoon. It's— so I think he's a great guy to look into if you like this stuff. And I think it is very, very important fundamental nutrition.
It's a great fundamental tome, as you say. I mean, there's so many of the other books, you know, we've had Defending Beef refers back to him as well. And you've got, you know, so You Are What You Ate refers back to him. In several points, you know, it just— and so it goes on. I think there's, you know, there's so many people that view those texts and, you know, keeping goats, I absolutely, you know, I don't spray the land. I literally have, you know, been on an organic project now for the last 4 years on this piece of land of just basically pulling ragwort, you know, just to try and, you know, putting in other things to the sward. There is a bit of bracken. The goats are so interesting, as you say, you cannot keep them They are so great at, you know, getting out of a field to what they want. So there is some bracken in some areas, so they will go and browse on the bracken, you know, which is supposedly a really good way of worming yourself out if you need to, okay, and controlling parasites. But you're absolutely right, they'll be hedgerow eating, you know, one moment, they'll all of a sudden just as a little herd find their way down to eat some oak or something like that, and then they'll toddle across and they'll be eating the heads off the ragwort even, you know, if there's any little ones left behind. And you're like pulling your hair out thinking, you know, of all the plants, why are you going for that? But as you say, they've been eating so much else within the sward, you know, it's taken 4 years to stop it just being cattle grass, as I call it, you know, that green field of nothing else because they've sprayed it to an inch of its life and then reseeded it and reseeded it with just grass. But no, it's a really a nice mixed sward now, and just seeing them go through, you can sit there on the hillside just watching them go around and selectively browse for what they want. So it's really good.
So here's another little question, guys, just philosophical. So if in the UK, we'll make this, or maybe in the States, say if all the humans just disappeared off the face of the Earth, What would dogs eat? Okay, they're all let off. Yeah, the front, every front door is open and they can go out. So what would they eat? I'm going to tell you now, if there was a warehouse full of raw canned food, they would go for that. However, they would long term, and there was a long-term supply, I don't think that that would be a major part of what they chose if they had free access to, you know, lots of bunnies and lots of deer and lots of goats and what have you. Where would you go with that thought experiment?
I mean, if the Royal Cannon Factory was beside the sausage factory, I don't think many dogs would walk in the door of the Royal Cannon Factory. I'm pretty sure, like, they have loads of studies done of dogs with taste preference trials, lots of them done by Mars. They have their answer, and the first taste preference is, okay, you can have a tiny bit of meat meat or a massive pile of dry food and they work harder for the tiny bit of meat. They'll do the commands for the piece of meat, they'll eat gravy-flavored tissue over other plant items, like anything meat-flavored drives these dogs, drives these animals mad. They work for meat, we all know it's meat, meat, meat. So they definitely go for meat and then the second thing is they divide into protein, fat, and carbs and they let these dogs off the lead to feed ad-lib. In other words, you can just choose whatever you want, buddy, and if you put down meat with plant items, they always go to the meat first. Kibble, never first. I mean, you can try find me a study where they ate the kibble first. Even dry-fed dogs will take the meat first. Even the vegetarian-fed dogs took the meat first on the TV that time, that poor girl. Oh my God, I felt so sorry for her. But that was a wake-up call. But yeah, and then, but they also, the protein, fat, and carb thing is that they will pig out even when the dogs are fed high-carbohydrate diets. They go straight for the fat first of all, because fat is a high-quality commodity. It's high impact, a lot energy. And so in the wild, that's what you want because you're always short on it. So you want to top up on the fat. And then over time, when they realize there's more and more fat coming, they think, I better slow down here, I'm gonna have a heart attack. And they move more and more towards protein. But never do the dogs get above 7% carbohydrates in their diet. That study was done by Mars, and they said, this is the animal telling you, I prefer meat and I don't eat carbs when I'm given— even when these dogs are reared on dry food. So I think if you let dogs off the lead out in the wild, they would go looking for the easiest sources of meat and whatnot. The problem that we have is that they haven't been trained to hunt, so dogs like Dudley haven't a hope. I mean, he'd be the cheeseburger running around the field. So like, you know, they don't have— they have to have exposure to prey. We've got dogs getting into fields here and terrorizing lambs because they don't know how to hunt in a coordinated way. They're barking and yipping and scaring the lambs. They're not hunting in a smart kind of clever way, so they just tire them out. So it's just hours and hours until they're exhausted, and then they start to eat eat them. It's a terrible, terrible end. So they don't have the wits to bring down bigger animals. So I think that'd be tricky for them. I wonder what would happen.
That's, that's another philosophical issue, isn't it, as to, yeah, we've corrupted the, the species so much by our presence that, you know, we're preventing them often displaying natural behavior. And actually, one of the Five Freedoms that we were taught at uni Birstey, and actually has extended, I think, to 6 or 7 now. But, you know, from a point of the Five Freedoms was the ability to display natural behavior. You know, if we're gonna, you know, have an animal in captivity, that was one of the essential freedoms that we should be giving them. Now, often we looked at farm animals being given those luxuries, but there should be no reason why that shouldn't extend to our pets.
Cats.
And I, I have always held that actually forcing them to eat, uh, kibble food is far from letting them display natural behavior. Yeah, you know, so, so I think, you know, there's certainly things that we should be doing to allow them, you know. And actually, I think through training a little bit of whole prey into that diet, we've talked about the fiber benefits of doing that, you know, giving the, the skin and fur and also the sinews alongside the meat has a big part to play. But it actually does, I mean, for Artie, she now will hunt rats. She's followed our cat as to how to hunt mice and rats. She now actively does it out on the farmland. You know, we've kept the grass pretty long so that the barn owls have got lots more mice and, you know, critters to eat on. And so we've got great barn owls swooping over us all the time, which is is brilliant. You know, she literally— you see Artie going, diving into the clumps of grass and pulling out, you know, things to eat of her own volition now. You know, that's allowing her natural behavior.
Yeah.
And I think that's born from her, to some degree, being, you know, understanding this is food.
Yeah.
She'll bring back rabbits and things like that as well, but, you know, ultimately she'll get a good mix So I think, you know, it's really interesting going back to nature. I think if they've got time and a bit of training, then yes, they would be able to do it. Even Dudley, bless him.
Okay, maybe he'd just—
maybe he'd be that part of the pack that's just sort of like shouting, you know, if there's people coming up, and then when they finish, he'll just come in and eat.
Yeah, he's no walkover. If there's food around, he'll make a big scene about stealing it and then showing everybody he's got it. So he'll do things like that, but he's just not able to do anything really, you know. He's still managing the stairs. And I, you know, I saw— talking about Barnells, I love Barnells— some guys set up a lot of microphones inside a room and they flew a pigeon from A to B, and you listen to his wings, big noisy dumb pigeon. No offense to pigeons, I'm sure they're very smart. They are actually very smart, I've seen them in many trials. And then they flew some sort of falcons, say, and you know, but you can hear— and so you can hear all the wings, and then the barn owl flies and you can't hear a thing. He's flapping his wings and the mics don't pick it up. And the two guys around, they go, I cannot believe I can't hear anything. These are sensitive mics. You just get one tiny little spike at one stage. So he's just flapped his way across, nobody hears anything when he flaps. Isn't that amazing? What an amazing animal. Love that.
Oh, but in twilight, there's nothing like sitting out with the goats around you, dogs just sitting there looking over the valley, and just seeing the barn owls doing their thing across.
Lovely, lovely, lovely. Um, these fields— is this the field straight across from your house? Yeah, they're the fields. Yeah, how many fields? What sort of space have you got?
Uh, it's about 5 acres, 6 with the field opposite us. Yeah, yeah.
So you can just get a chair and just sit in your field and you can do whatever you want because it's your field? Oh, I'd love it.
Yeah, I feel really sad now. Out like that.
So yeah, no, that's what everybody wants though, man. You know, that's what everybody wants. Yeah, I'd love that.
Guys, almost 1945. I'm gonna drag you over to Patreon because I've got a philosophical— talking about expressing behavior, okay? I'm gonna, I'm gonna go a little bit deeper into that question before I disappear and continue to, to unpack the I love that. And finish the wine, put everything away.
Yeah, don't forget guys, we're on Patreon and I'm going to give everyone on Patreon a free code for my course on carnivore and the entire first section of my book comes with that course. It's all for free for people on Patreon as a little thank you. So do pop over there and catch us. Next week it's Q&A, so get your questions ready and pop up on Patreon there and I'll be posting on my page and it can be posted on his. I'm not sure of it.
And the post will be slightly early this time because we're going to be having to do a little bit of a prerecord because it's bank holiday over in the UK.
Yeah.
So there's a few things going on and we just want to still give you an episode. So we're going to do it as a prerecord. So please get your questions in early. Look out for that. And it's been great to see all of you guys talking and interacting tonight.
Yeah, I don't think there were too many of us tonight. I think they were just talking to themselves. No, they were just chatting while we did. Chat.
So, so Nick, you're— this weekend you're gonna be, um, at Edition Dog Live.
Edition Dog Live. Just a big shout out, yeah, to, to the guys there. And if anybody's going, I think, um, Doris Lowe was going. Doris Lowe was mentioning it.
Karen Reed's going. I've seen— yeah, so Sasha's going too. I think Maudie's going. So yeah, there'll be a few of us there. I'll be there on RFVS stand. So, you know, do come and give us a hello and see how things are going. So yeah, it'd be great down at Stoneleigh.
Enjoy that.
It's really not that expensive, is it? I think it's about £10 to get in.
Sounds great.
And it's really good.
The vibe is fantastic in there.
It was last year.
Yeah, yeah. It's great.
Although I think there's one or two boring speakers on this year. I think, you know, he didn't get— he's on every year.
Twice. Twice. Yeah.
Nick's on twice. Oh my God. No wonder it's only a £10.
All right, sorry.
Oh, that'd be rough.
We can do lots of questions.
Yeah, you are allowed to take your dogs in, so yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very relaxed, it's very good.
Cool. All right guys, we'll see you on Patreon.
Take care.
