Written by - Menaka Gandhi ------- People, who feed animals to animals when they don’t need, make me very ill. They gush on about how much they love animals, how they have so many dogs / cats and how well they look after them. When you ask what their pets eat and the answer is: “My dog only eats meat, milk and eggs.” So the cow, buffalo, goat and hen are off their list of loved animals! If you have a heart and the discipline to keep an animal in your home, you are already a special person. How can you reduce your sensitivities by opting for food choices that feed the body-parts of one animal to another? I get that inevitable statement: “Dogs and cats in the wild eat meat. We should give them the food they are accustomed to.” There are NO dogs and cats in the “wild”. Both animals are manufactured species. New forms are being invented even as I write, to be man’s pets. They bear little or no likeness to their genetic forebears because we have tampered with their genes so much. If you consider the stray dog as the dog in its wild state, nothing could be further from the truth since there is no “wild” state. The difference between this dog and the wolf or coyote, or the alley cat and the lion is the difference between man and the gorilla in Africa. The gorilla is the forbear of man but do you consider your body and mind close to the gorilla’s? If you do, remember the gorilla is exclusively vegetarian as are all apes. A manufactured or “highly evolved” species is omnivorous. Man, dogs, cats. The stray dog and alley cat do not depend on meat for their survival. They are as much at home with vegetable and cereal or even fruit. Dogs don’t need meat. They certainly don’t need milk as they can’t digest it because of a lack of enzymes. Why do they drink it? Probably because it is a liquid. If you only give them milk and roti in the morning, that’s what they will have as they are hungry. I have16 dogs at home. None of them has ever been sick. I run a hospital and at any given time have 500 dogs or more. All of them are vegetarian and do very well. What can you feed your dog to make sure that it stays healthy, happy and long-lived. What do I give my dogs? In the morning they get rice and dal. In the early evening they get chappatis, dal, soyabean (which is soaked overnight so that it is edible and then crushed by hand at home before it is put in; you can use nutrinuggets as well but these are more expensive), two different vegetables (kadu, lauki, green beans, gobi, bandhgobi or whatever is in season). This is cooked with a base of oil, onion, garlic, dhaniya and haldi. At night, they get biscuits (made of a mixture of bajra/soya/wheat flours with a little sugar and salt ) with dal or vegetable stew. As with children, it is you, who decides whether the puppy is going to be a meat eater or not. If you start him off right, then he will never miss meat. In fact, vegetarian dogs have a much glossier coat and less diseases and parasites. But if he is used to meat and you are nervous about changing the diet, get a bit, boil it till it dissolves and put the water as “chhaunka” on the vegetarian food. He will eat the food just as well. It is more difficult to keep a cat vegetarian since they require an amino acid called taurine, the deficiency of which causes blindness and heart disease. But synthetic taurine is available in the market and a pinch can be fed to cats twice a week as a supplement. We use it in our vegetarian cat shelter and it is a marvellous alternative. For cats I would suggest tofu or soyabean as the base, made in such a way that the fragrance (for both dogs and cats, smell is more important than taste) resembles cooked meat vaguely. If food companies all over the world can produce purely vegetarian food, making it taste and look exactly like shrimp, crab and other sea creatures, I am sure the average cook can do as well with some experimentation. Vegetarianism and animal activism go hand in hand. Purnima Toolsidas of PFA Kolkata has sent me a cutting from a Toronto paper on how thousands of pet owners have turned their pets vegetarian. Here is what dogs and cats are being fed: Cats, according to the article, can make a great meal on combinations of garbanzo beans (rajma), lentils (dal), split peas (channa) and garlic, tofu (soyabean paneer) rice, potatoes, wheat, wheat gluten, flour and bean sprouts. Some owners add fruit . While dogs are easier to turn vegetarian, cats take a little time to change. The owners need to experiment with combinations to finally find what the cat likes. If they get gas (till you find the right recipe!) , anti-gas pills can be added from time to time if this problem arises. Shops selling only vegetarian dog food have a rising demand. One company alone, Pet Foods Corona, says that the sale of its vegetarian dog chow – a mixture of soyabean, barley and carrot – goes up by 24 % each year. Most pet food companies that market tinned meat, use the meat and entrails from horses, and cows that have died of disease. Pet food companies admit this but say the high temperature processes used in making and canning pet food kill the pathogens. (The process also kills every form of nutrition, leaving the meat as merely a stomach filler contributing less nutrients than mud). Few people in India buy canned dog / cat food but most people that feed their animals meat don’t buy the quality that they themselves eat. They buy cheaper meat - usually several days old or it is the entrails, all the parts that humans don’t buy. These meats are not cooked for especially long or at high temperatures. The result is a chronically sick dog with its malnutrition showing up in many different diseases. - UN Animal rights activist Menaka Gandhi -
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:47:25 +0000
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