Dog Food, Can We Survive On It ?

Yesterday, I was at the liquidation store, and they had some Health Extension dog food on sale, so I bought a bag of the lamb and rice flavor to try for our two little dogs. After I got home and looked it up on Amazon, I was impressed because I got my 35 lb bag for $19, and the same size on Amazon was almost $80.
I went to their webpage to read more about the dog food, and what it was made of, and the ingredient list looked to me like it could be eaten, and even nourishing if we needed survival food.
Dry dog food will keep well if the bag is sealed properly, so it would be simple to store it. Now that I know what a good bargain I found at Essex, I am going to go back and get 1-2 more bags if they still have some left; and so this morning, I was also pondering whether it would be okay as a survival food.
Here is the ingredient list.

 

Short answer no, when it says lamb or chicken it means what is left when everything else of value has already been removed. Pet food these days is a way of selling stuff that they would otherwise have to pay to dispose of. Tot up the percentages of the listed ingredients and you'll probably find it only accounts for 50-60% of the contents of the bag of food. The rest being made up of cocoa husks or ash.
I made the mistake of feeding my dogs on that stuff for a while and their physical condition dropped right off....they're back on raw chicken or rabbit it works out cheaper and it also saves me money on vets bills, they smell better and produce old fashioned dog poo that dries up and goes white instead of sitting there as a stinking wet mass...so much easier to pick up after!

 

The fact is that dog food is FOOD and while if you try to live on it alone you will be in trouble, it is calories and protean and generally safe to eat. If you ate nothing but rib eye steaks you would DIE eventually. People need a variety in order to maintain health. Dry dog food has its contents on the side. Read it and understand that food is food. Most of it is actually a good balance between fat, calories and protein. If I am eating raw grubs and raw grass seeds. I would be THRILLED to have a bag of gravy train. Cheap dog food is like anything that is cheap and worth less. Good brand name dog food is a good basic diet for a dog that is healthy. When they get old or sick I cook for them. Leg quarters, cooked to mush bones and all, then I add rice and mixed vegetables and then fed it warm.

The thing about a lot of foods is that you are better off just not knowing the truth about what they are made of. Understand, when they butcher an animal they let nothing go to waste. My wife used to love potted meat until she found out exactly what it is made of. Beef also includes things like udders, lips and other less favored parts but as far as the protein and fat value in it, it is nourishing. Dog food is not made with chicken breast meat, beef rib eye steaks, lamb chops or pork chops. That doesn't change the basic nourishment content. On the side of the bag there is generally a good nutritional break down telling you about the fat, carbohydrate and protein count. This is usually all that you need to know. It is government regulated and GENERALLY" accurate. Dog food is BIG, REALLY BIG, business and the last thing a big company wants is bad press because they get caught cutting corners.

I will tell you, a lot of people are going to starve to death because they are too worried about eating something that their Mama had never served them. There is a show called Naked and Afraid where they throw a couple of people out in the jungle with basically nothing but a knife and a couple of other things. I am always amazed that so many of them nearly starve to death. In a bunch of the shows there are monkeys and such all over the place. If monkeys thrive there is plenty to eat. If nothing else follow them around and learn what to eat. You can do the same to some extent with hogs or other omnivorous critters like bears. You have to open your mind to things that are not what you live like now...that is what will let the survivors thrive.

After TEOTWAWKI you can bet that I will haul off all the dog food that I can find. It is better than most of what you will find raw in the woods. LOL honestly I have eaten dog food. I will eat almost anything and well if the dogs like it so much I was willing to try it. The dry dog food is generally sort of tasteless like most things would be without any sort of spice. The soft dog food is not bad but would be a lot better cooked with some salt and pepper I'm sure. Milk Bone dog biscuits are actually pretty good if you dip them in something with some taste.

I have eaten bugs and actually like raw meat as long as I know where it came from. To me raw meat is like sushi and should be eaten FRESH as possible. I often make sushi while I am cleaning fish. What can I say, I'm a culinary adventurer. I will try anything once.

 

What TexDanm said ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ I suspect if really hungry standards would change. Currently I have not eaten dog food but if in a starvation situation. I will in a heart beat.

 

Hey, you really ought to try a dog biscuit they really are pretty good. When I was a kid my little brother would fight the dogs for those Purina one that were shaped like little bones. I finally tried one and hey it wasn't bad. It will never take the place of Cheetos or Nacho Doritos but they aren't bad.

Sadly I have actually known old people that were living on a fixed income back when inflation was making money almost worthless that used cat food for tuna fish. That was the only "meat" that they could afford. People much younger than me don't really remember what runway inflation was like. I remember almost running out of gas because the stations in Louisiana were charging 31 cents a gallon for gas and I refused to pay that much for gas that was 17 cents a gallon in Texas. I remember when I first made 2 dollars and hour. I was RICH!!! People retired and had a pension that were doing pretty good quickly became dirt poor as the prices of EVERYTHING skyrocketed and their pensions stayed the same.

There are lots of worse things than eating animal foods. People are warped. Let me tell you another story about the time a revolution was fought over the government trying to get its people to eat animal food. There was a terrible famine and people were starving death. It got so bad that the Government asked other countries for aid and so many countries but especially the US shipped them ship loads of food. When the food got there it was off loaded and they tried to pass it out to the area hardest hit. The people were gravely offended to the point of burning the offered food and revolting. They felt like it was a just unpardonable sin that even though they were starving that anyone would try to make them eat animal food!! This was the last straw of a system of government that was already failing. The leader wife made a rather famous comment. She was rather peeved about their ungrateful attitudes and said more or less that if they didn't want what was offers then, "LET THEM EAT CAKE!" The terrible food that the US and Great Britten had offered the French people was corn and potatoes...food only fit to feed to hogs!

What is fit to eat is EXTREMELY cultural. Just because something IS fed to animals does not make it just animal food. In the East they eat dogs. In France they eat horses. You have no idea how disturbing that is to the average Texan!!!!! "If you are going to eat my dogs and horses I wouldn't trust you around my kids!!" Would be a pretty common way of looking at it. We love our dogs and horses and to most the thought of eating one is sort of like cannibalism. LOL.

I'm not one of them, I'll eat anything but you still aren't ever going to eat one of my horses or dogs. When horses get old lots of people won't sell them because if they go to auction they might get bought by a French meat dealer. My animals die a natural death and get buried!!

 

Fresh food IS always the best but it doesn't store well or last long. Have you tried dehydrating things? I really like most dehydrated fruits a lot and jerky is pretty good too.

The only thing about dog food is that most people won't think of it and it will be available long after the people food is gone. It isn't my first choice but I'm open minded and that is about the cheapest thing out there.

 

I don't think that eating nothing but dry dog food is a good idea either; but there are lots of edible plants almost anywhere a person lives, if we just take the time to know which ones can be eaten and which ones can't. Back when I had horses and milk goats, it occurred to me that my horse food was basically rolled oats and barley, often with some corn or molasses added. Seemed to me that in a pinch, it could be cooked and eaten like oatmeal, and even things like beet pulp would probably be edible. Like @TexDanm mentioned, a lot of people won't even think of dry dog food or livestock feed as possibilities for them to eat, and it will be easier to come by than other food, plus it stores well.
I remember eating the small Milk Bone biscuits when I was a little kid. My mom was not impressed; but she knew they probably would not hurt me and I would get tired of eating them fairly fast (which I did).
It is interesting the different things that people find edible or inedible. I remember reading that lobsters were not considered fit for most civilized people to eat, and only slaves and servants ate them. Now, we consider them a delicacy and they are expensive.
I do not want to eat a snake either; but they are quite edible, and supposedly they taste good as well. I did try alligator, and it was pretty good; so snake meat might be fine, too.

 

I'm not saying it would poison you but dried dog food lacks nutritional value. If a dogs health drops off fast when they eat it humans certainly won't fare well on it. Compared to dried dog food I'll go for the diet of bugs and seeds that TexDanm describes. I've eaten bugs before (grasshoppers, locusts, burgers made of lake flies and they were all good) and I'm here to tell the tale. Pound for pound bugs have a better protein content then beef. The seeds would need to be milled and cooked to release their starch content or they'd just pass through your gut.

 

People have been eating dogs for thousands of years.

 

But this conversation is about dog food, not fragrant meat......
........ dogs have only been given commercial food for the last 50-70 years and it's been getting progressively nastier and more expensive over that time. I don't know about the US but in Britain it is an almost unregulated industry, not subject to DEFRA or the Food Standards Agency but an unregulated free for all.

 

But when you're eating dog......isn't that dog food?
Are you saying that the dogs won't taste good because they've been fed crappy food for so many years?

 

No, the thread started with a question about dried dog food and is it edible,

Lol! I see your logic though.......but it won't work the other way...if you're eating dog that has eaten dog food you are eating dog food but if you're eating dog food that isn't made of dog you are not eating dog, only food that had the potential to become dog.
(And in fact potential to become dog poo but let's not go there)
When I talked about the condition of my dogs I meant physical wellbeing, not taste

 

In the US, all dog food is edible. It follows many of the food safety standards that guides people food.
That said, there are no standards for taste & nutrition content varies wildly. But it's technically safe to consume.

 

Anyone that tries to live on almost ANY narrow and limited dietary intake is going to have serious problems. If you eat little but rice you will DIE. If you try to live on rabbit meat you will die. People require a variety but the fact is that animal food is an effort to make a food that has all of the dietary needs of that animal. Packaged people food is more about taste and much less about nutrition.

I have raised a lot of dogs on little more than good brand name dog food and they have all lived long healthy lives. Purina makes a "chow" for about any animal that you might have. I suspect that if you could get a bag of their primate chow it would be pretty decent for humans. I know that their pig chow is well balanced and near to the human needs. I eat pretty well myself but nonetheless take several supplements. Cheap dog food is still regulated here and the nutritional statements on the bag are going to be true or they are going to get sued into bankruptcy. That is one reason I never would feed my dogs a "generic" food. No name means no big risk for the makers. If sued they just fold up. Companies that spend hundreds of millions on advertising can't afford to produce, knowingly, an inferior product. They have to much invested for that.

I don't think that anyone has suggested that people should or would wish to live on nothing but dog food BUT as a survival measure it is an extremely viable option for calories that won't poison you and that most people won't think about. I don't regularly harvest and eat most of the eatable weeds and plants that grow around in the fields and woods around me but I am aware of them as possible emergency food supplies. THAT is what dog food is, just another possibility in an emergency.

 

Thank you, @TexDanm , you have explained what I was trying to ask much more succinctly that I was able to do ! I was not thinking of dog food being the end-all of a person's diet , but that it was also something to consider when food supplies are short, or nothing else is available. Also, I was using an expensive brand of dog food as an example, and not a cheap one made with corn and leftover body parts from roadkills.
I found this dog food at the local liquidation store, and bought a bag of it to try for the dogs, and then I looked it up online when we got back home with it, so that I could see what the ingredients were, and found that it sold for over $80 for the 35 lb. bag that I got normally.
When I was reading everything that was in this food, it seemed to me that most of it were foods that I also have in my everyday diet, lots of vegetables, meats, and healthy oils. This started me to thinking that these crunchy little nuggets might not be a bad thing to supplement whatever available wild greens and other foods were to be found , if we had some kind of a disaster that left us foraging for foods.
I also have a large bag of alfalfa pellets (horse feed) that I use as fertilizer when I plant something, and I think that this could also be used as a source of greens if it were necessary. Alfalfa is one of the healthiest foods there is, and I know that they add some to those green drink powders that are supposed to be so healthy. Probably alfalfa pellets don't taste very good; but the whole idea of survival food is to keep you alive and give you some nutrients, and not to provide an enjoyable meal.

 

I will remain unconvinced that dried dog food could serve as anything more then some revolting food substitute to fill you up without providing the necessary nutrition. From my own experience either canned dog food or dried dog food are a poor substitute for meat and a small quantity of cooked greens...even for dogs.
My dogs get cheap cuts of pork and beef, poultry such as duck, chicken wings or pheasant as well as white fish.....perhaps they eat better then most people but everything except the pork and beef is free....caught or grown by my own fair hand.

 

Surely it hasn't been suggested that eating dog food as a staple would be recommended. Although in a pure survival situation, one facing starvation, any possible nutrition that is safe to consume would be on the table for consideration.

 

Hundreds of millions of dogs live long happy lives on nothing but dog food. I wonder where they get their nutrition?? Protein and calories are the same no matter what their source my friend. Hamburg isn't made from the best cuts of steak but that in no way reduces its nutritional value. Dog food is made from less useful pieces of a lot of animals. When you slaughter there are always a lot of little pieces and NOTHING is wasted. These little pieces are one of the sources for meat that go into dog food. The same is true in the processes of canning vegetables and once again nothing is wasted.

You might not like to think about it or eat it, that is fine, but you must not tell people that it isn't eatable or able to sustain them in an emergency. THAT is wrong and could limit someones chances to survive. I try really hard to make sure that what I say is factual and as safe as possible within reasonable limits. This isn't like things in a court of law these days where NO level of risk is acceptable. Survival is all about choosing and weighing risk. You want to limit them but you are not in a perfect world or it wouldn't be called survival. Dog food while not the most palatable stuff in the world is in general nutritious and if cooked safe. It is probably safe as is but for sure if you will cook it and add some spices it will be safe and maybe taste a little better.

 

It's nothing to do with liking to think about it or not...it's about experience. I have fed my cats and dogs on expensive vet recommended pet food and their health was not as good as when they returned to a proper diet. They are physically fitter and healthier because I take the trouble to feed them well.
Comparatively dried or canned pet food is rubbish....many people can't accept the fact that they're being played by the pet food industry.
Read back TexDanm, I never said it was unsafe or toxic....what I said is that you will NOT derive sufficient nutrition because it's rubbish mixed up with off cuts.

 

I've been raising dogs and had dogs for over 60 years and primarily feed dry dog food with canned food as an occasional treat. My dogs all have lived long and healthy lives. A calorie is just that a measure of available energy in something . You get it from fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Most food items tell you about these things and it is simple chemistry.

This is like a silly fool that tried to tell people that you can't eat deer corn because it isn't intended for human consumption. The fact is your body has a hard time telling the difference between different cuts of meat as far as the nutritional value. According to you my dogs and most dogs are living via some sort of magic or maybe they have some type of animal chlorophyll so all they really need is sunshine air and water and we are just kidding ourselves thinking that the food is what keeps them alive.

I don't care if you eat it or not the nutritional FACTS are that the protein and fats in dog food are digestible by humans and in an emergency will keep you alive until better comes along. I wish that you wouldn't tell people things that are obviously opinion as if they were facts. Your observation that YOUR dogs can't eat dog food has nothing to do with the actual nutritional facts of that or any food. Some people can't eat shrimp or peanuts but you shouldn't tell people that they are poison and not nutritious for anyone. On a survival board that can hurt someone. THE END You are welcome to the last word because I am done on this subject. You can only offer someone facts but not make them partake of them.

 

Like I said, I remain unconvinced.....but you're entitled to your opinion TexDanm, just as I'm entitled to mine and if you want to feed total rubbish to your dogs that is your prerogative, if you decide to eat it yourself or give it to your grandkids that's also up to you.
Before you get stuck into it though I suggest you look into the whole host of reasons why some parts of animals don't make it into the human food chain...have you never heard of Prions or CJD for instance. Check out the the list of body parts that can't be put into Hamburger, you can retract your previous statements whenever you feel like it...friend

 

I tell.my kids all the time when they are being picky & refusing good whole foods. Im talking juicy steak, chops, lobster they are being ridiculous. They have never been hungry, truly hungry. I've had times when I had to decide if I was going to eat that day of buy gas to goto work. I put fuel in the car & went hungry so I could pay the bills and then buy food.
Before I would starve or allow my kids to starve, DAMN sure that kibble would be in a bowl like Capt'nCrunch.

 

At one time my wife and I lived on 18 dollars a week for food, gasoline, medicine and clothes after we paid the MUST bills. We did this for almost 6 months on the weeks when I didn't find some day work. I've been hungry but not my kid. Honestly we were fortunate. I knew families that were out on the street and hundreds were living at road side parks. I hunted and fished a LOT between jobs. Walked a lot, and did anything that was mostly legal for a buck. I knew a guy that had a car wash and he told me that had he wanted to do so, he could have had an entire crew with Masters degrees and PHDs! Those were tough years and a lot of people ate and did things that they wouldn't wish to do again.

It was a very enlightening time and experience. It taught me that TEOTWAWKI can just sort of sneak up on you! I survived that mostly because I was already involved in the survivalist movement and so had not allowed myself to be as deep in debt as many and had a lot of things on hand that other didn't. We also know how to eat POOR and that often involves eating a lot of things that you don't get in hamburger. If you are hungry and someone offers you hog mauls and chitterlings you take it say thanks and eat it. Sweet breads are great too cooked on a grill and served on tortillas with grilled peppers and onions. There are a lot of dirt cheap meats out there. Where I live they have a lot of Mexican cuts and soul food cuts of meat that I bet most of you have never heard of much less eaten. They are sold in big name grocery stores here and are perfectly safe and nutritious.

PS: I am part Scottish so maybe my ancestors eating Haggis and such predisposed me to not being very picky about my food. LOL...

 

Amen Brother

 

Using dammed-up creeks, make fish ponds. Use pellet-type dog food to feed the fish -- they swarm on that stuff, been there to feed such fish w/dog-food and it looked like a horror movie involving piranha. Eat the fish. Fish farming has become big business.

Me, I ain't eating dog food when bacon flavored Spam is relatively cheap. Fried spam -- yum, yum. Pour the grease on cooked-up poke weed and curly mustard.

 

Love me some Spam!

 

I can't eat spam at ALL. For me it is like eating some sort of congealed salt. I am massively salt sensitive and eat almost none. It looks good and sounds good and my Dad loved it but I just can't eat it. I'll eat Milkbone dog biscuits instead. LOL. How about sardines in Louisiana hot sauce and Monkey Dinks. (Vienna Sausages) instead. I like those a lot.

NEVER check and find out what they make Monkey Dinks and Potted meat out of. My wife used to like the potted meats until she read the labels too close. I think that they are less graphic now but used to they listed the meat sources and cattle lips were near the top of the list.

Let me tell y'all something when you butcher hogs nothing goes to waste except the squeal and cattle are pretty much the same. Do any of y'all know what Mountain Oysters are? Very common in cattle country in the late spring. Actually suprisingly good.

 

What is actually edible, & what we have been taught not to eat just cause its labeled as "gross" often makes me laugh. Any nutrition that is "safe" to eat is nutrition all the same, even when it seems gross. As soon as you get hungry enough, contemplating food possibilities takes on a whole new light.

 

This evening we had fried Spam (bacon-flavored) sandwiches (toasted whole-grain wheat bread) and squash casserole (squash from the garden, same with the zucchini bread, which I treat as a dessert, lots of butter). I like freshly-ground black pepper on casserole. The casserole was leftovers, yet still wonderful. If you think the casserole is too runny, then just heat it up in the oven a second time. Wife said it was, I sure didn't care. Yellow crooked neck squash it was. Before I saw them to pick them, some of our zucchini got too big = zucchini bread. Our plants are getting HUGE. Sweet banana peppers I had too many seedlings, so planted them near the flowers in the front of the house; who cares if they look out of place!

 

Our chicks & ducks keep us in plentiful supply of eggs. So my wife has become quite skilled in making quiche in several varieties. Diced spam, crumbled sausage or bacon, cheese & onion, etc. Soo good!

 

I love duck eggs. We had Indian Runners (Think Daffy Duck; they were so cute!!!) for a while and they were egg laying machines!! You know a lot of people won't eat duck eggs???? What people eat and don't eat is mostly cultural. I am an old country boy and have eaten and enjoyed a lot of things that most people wouldn't want to eat. Those folks in Vietnam and Korea will eat things that even a Cajun wouldn't eat.

 

I had some of those Indian Runners for a while, too, and those ducks never stopped moving. All day long, they were in a line, all 12 of them, and around the yard they went, up to the horse barn and back, out around the garden, down one driveway and back up the other one......... they almost drove ME to the Daffy Duck stage. I don't think they ever laid any eggs, but they probably never slowed down long enough to do that anyway.
I called them "soldier ducks" because that is what they reminded me of, always in proper formation, always upright, always marching along. Oh, yeah......they all quacked as they marched along, too.
We had a pair of Peking Ducks (geese), too, and I really like those guys. I think that we might have had eggs from her, I remember eating duck eggs, they were so rich and orange.

 

We had 7 hens and a pair of drakes and those girls laid about 6 eggs a DAY. The strange thing was that the drakes got killed by a coon and that was IT. They stopped laying all together. What we liked about them was that they don't fly and wouldn't climb the steps onto the porch like the chickens had and the bigger duck did. We are porch monkeys and the back porch on the girls house is 60 feet long 12 feet wide with three bump outs to 16 feet. One has the outdoor kitchen the middle one has a box wood stove and the other end is a hot tub. There is a dinning table between the kitchen and the wood stove bumps and a living room with outdoor couches and rocking chair for me between the hot tub and the stove. We hate bird poop so the Indian Runners were perfect.

The other reason for the ducks is that the girls have a border collie that needs something to "Herd". When my grandbaby was little he herded her and kept her away from the fish pond and out of things but when she got bigger he needed something new to work with.

 

Best thing about those ducks, while you have them you'll never see a slug in your garden. We used to keep them in a double fence around our veg as a kind of slug moat to keep the " slimers" out of the veg.

 

No,human should not eat dog food as dog food is manufactured with specially formulated nutrition and ingredients. Also the metabolism,activity , digestive system etc. of human varies at large when compared with dogs and hence the food should not be substituted.

 

I guess then that you will die when you can't find the appropriate human civilized food. The FDA doesn't approve bugs, non domestic birds ,snakes or most reptiles either. I'm not even sure that they would approve wild hogs, dogs or horses.

Nobody here ever said that a person should depend on dog food for a primary source of food. It was mentioned as an emergency rather than starve back up possibility. If you can't stomach dog food then I pray for you that you will never have to live without a store near by. Survival all to often requires you to do and eat things that you wouldn't normally want to do or eat. Adapt or die is the code of a true survivalist.

 

Not sure if they still do, but Purina used to "preserve" dog and cat food with straight arsenic. (Humans who eat it usually survive, though...Mithridates died old.)

 

Pet food is all food grade safe now a days.. it may not be as tasty for sensitive pallets but it's safe to consume.
For those who have experienced real hunger, a nibble of kibble & slurping up some gravy train will be no issue what so ever.

 

Arsenic is in some dog food. It is also in some people food. If there is rice or grains in it then there will be a certain amount of arsenic. The fact is that nearly all processed foods have all sorts of things in them. The only way to avoid it is to choose to starve to death. The soil in most of the world has all sorts of less than wonderful things in it then you have the stuff that gets in it in the various processing plants . There is very little food that doesn't have a certain amount of rat crap and rat hair in it. Along with this will inevitably be the various poisons that we use to try and keep the rats under control...This doesn't even include the stuff that comes from the various insecticides. The "agent orange" that was such a problem for veterans from the Vietnam era...They sprayed it on rice fields all over the place because it is a broad leaf defoliant. Dog food is not a bit more likely to have these things in it than human food.

 

True...and the glyphosate that's turning into a researchers' field day and a celiacs' nightmare. For most people the point of concern would be whether pet food still contains much more of the various contaminants than "people food."

For celiacs, pet food is non-nutritive poison just because it contains wheat. There's probably some scientific explanation of why the celiac gene exists but I don't know what that explanation might be.

 

You know, there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING anymore that isn't bad for you if you listen to the science whores. If has become big business to set up a lab and start to prove that something is bad for you and going to kill us all. Every time I look around the net something new is going to be the end of the world or make us all sick or fat or skinny or something.

If I look back at all of the ends of the world and horrifically deadly things that I live through, did and ate it is seemingly a true miracle that I or anyone of my age, is alive!! We were thrown out in the morning and told to go play. No adults supervision was included. We ate things that are now considered dangerous. We all carried pocket knives. The threats to our lives that we were totally unaware of were too many to list. I was raised in an area that by today's standards and rules was a chemical disaster!

The list of diseases that we lived with that are no more or easily treated were also many. Yellow Fever, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Polio, Small Pox, Several kinds of Measles, Mumps, Whooping cough...

You know, when you look at it, I survived the almost impossible. They have cured so many of the terrible diseases of my and my parents generations. We are so safe now I wonder sometimes why we aren't immortal and yet we are still bombarded with warnings of disaster and doom and still getting old and dying.

The truth is that even our dogs and cats eat a safer and more carefully made food than people had just a short time ago. They, at least in America, eat better than a huge multitude of people today. Would I chose dog food for my everyday meals??? NO. Will I gladly eat it rather than eating worms and partially rotted meat in a survival situation??? YOU BET!! After all I survived a lot worse than ANYTHING you might find in dog food. I drank from how water hoses and ate bologna sandwiches that had sat on a shelf in my 100 degree school room for 4 hours!

 

We survived! Even breathing second hand smoke in the back seat of the car while riding with no seat belts! **GASP**

LOL

 

The acidity of a carnivore's stomach is MUCH greater than our own, thus bacteria get wiped out in a cat or dog's stomach that might just make it past our stomach on into our intestines to royally make us sick and beyond. Human stomachs are much more acidic than that of an herbivore, however this level of acidity just isn't enough to truly protect us. The stomachs of herbivores are configured utterly different than our own = totally different topic.

One thing cheap dog food can be used for is feeding fish in a huge fish pond. I've thrown fistfuls of dog food into such fish-farming ponds. The fish come up to feed like piranha -- it is a sight to behold. The water roils with their feeding frenzy.

Feed the fish. Eat the fish. Fried fish = yum yum!

 

You can train catfish to the point that they will slide up on the bank to get fed. It really IS cool wathing them roll and pile up on each other trying to get the food. We made a feeding square out of PVC pipe that floated so the food would not get blown and lost. You could throw a handful in and the water would boil. If you wanted catfish for supper you just swung a hook with dog food on it out with a cane pole and pulled some out. It was about as sporting as killing a chicken for supper but it sure was good eating and fun to watch.

I used to have an extremely strong and acidic digestive system. I used to eat bones and even crab shells. I loved BBQ crabs and ate them like chips. I like shrimp and don't always peal them to eat them. I love that crunch you get when you fry them with the shell partially on. Never had a bit of trouble. I also am not especially picky about food and have only had food poisoning once. Never ate at another Pizza Hut EVER.

 

If your gut gets too acid, you can get into some serious trouble as a human. I've had multiple stomach ulcers at the same time and must knock-down my stomach's acidity with prescription drugs. Seems my gut has the ability to digest itself. Not good.